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Warren designation among eight cleanup projects funded with U.S. grant
By Ed Runyan
VIENNA
A Warren City Council resolution asking the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to establish an urban-setting designation in a large part of the city is one of the final projects being carried out with the money from a $600,000 U.S. EPA grant.
The urban-setting designation will mean that most of the city will be exempt from having to be studied for groundwater contamination because the designated areas have a public water supply.
Consultants hired under the grant looked at all the properties in the designated area and documented that they have public water, said Sara Lown, senior economic- development manager of the Western Reserve Port Authority.
The authority secured the Brownfield Assessment grant in 2013 in a coalition that included the Trumbull County Planning Commission, city of Warren, Howland Township and Mahoning River Corridor Initiative.
The grant was used to assess former industrial properties in Trumbull County to determine what cleanup is needed to allow them to be brought back into productive use.
In addition to the Warren urban-setting project, Warren-area assessments were done at the county-owned former Wean building on North Park Avenue, the Warren community-services building on Main Avenue Southwest, the former St. Joseph Riverside Hospital site, former Trumbull Bronze site in the Golden Triangle area of Warren and Howland, former RG Steel administration building on Pine Street, and three properties along Larchmont Avenue in Howland Township. The other site is the former Leatherworks site in Girard.
Lown said she has been talking to JobsOhio about the state economic-development organization providing money to clean up a site in the Golden Triangle area, and she thinks there’s a decent chance that will happen because a company has expressed an interest in obtaining the property to create jobs there.
She’s also planning to file an additional U.S. EPA grant application this November seeking additional money to assess additional brownfields in Trumbull and Mahoning counties.