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Date: 12/6/2022
WARE – Being one of several municipalities to apply for an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Brownfield Cleanup Grant, the town of Ware must wait a few months before finding out if it was accepted.
Director of Planning and Community Development Rob Watchilla said every year, the EPA issues around $1 million to municipalities across the country to apply for site cleanup.
On Nov. 18, the town of Ware applied for a $500,000 EPA Brownfield Cleanup Grant to clean up a site located at 31 Monroe St. The property, which was the former Ware Manufactured Gas Plant, is adjacent to Memorial Field.
“There are contaminants that are still in the ground that have to be removed before we can reuse the site for anything,” said Watchilla. “In this case, the town was thinking of cleaning up the site and maybe making a use that compliments the baseball field.” This includes a parking lot or a multipurpose blacktop court.
Watchilla noted that the EPA usually starts announcing grant awards in the spring. With many applications to filter through, he said the town of Ware is “playing the waiting game.” However, Watchilla shared, they did receive confirmation that the grant application was received. “We followed all the necessary rules and procedures. For example, we [hosted] a public outreach meeting on Nov. 10, which we were required to do,” he added.
At the public outreach meeting, about 10 people – town residents and abutters – attended to hear an overview of the project, what needs to be done to the site and so on. Watchilla shared that the consultant gave a presentation on the cleanup process.
He went on to say that an abutter to the property expressed concerns about how the site cleanup process would be done. The consultant noted that they take necessary precautions and put up wind screens during the process.
Some of the other questions pertained to what the proposed use of the site would be after the cleanup. Watchilla said there is still an open public discussion about this, as the parking lot and black top are not the final options.
With the $500,000 that was applied for, Watchilla said that would not clean up the site 100 percent, but it would remove the contaminants which are close to the surface, and it would dismantle some of the holding tanks beneath the ground.
“The consultants told us if we were to do it this way with the $500,000, the site could get site closure,” he explained. Essentially, Watchilla said this means the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection would be “OK” with the site being used for something else and it would no longer be considered a brownfield. “[However], there would be contaminants that still exist deep in the ground, but they wouldn’t pose any threat to drinking water or the inhabitants of the land above,” he added.
Looking at the grant process, Watchilla said, “It’s going to be competitive, but there have been other towns that have been pretty successful with this.”
He continued, “It’s just the amount of money you can get for the program is pretty high, but in our case, the $500,000 was enough to get this project going.”
Watchilla noted that the town applied for the same project with a previous grant but was not successful. The brownfield grant application was a “second attempt” to obtain the funding for this project, he said.