Just a decade ago, the store fronts at the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Larch Street would have deterred most families from stopping and spending an afternoon in the area.
“It was literally adult entertainment,” said Darla Bowen, director of marketing for the Lansing Lugnuts.
But the site, formerly polluted by leaking storage tanks and visual eyesores, now houses Oldsmobile Park, 505 E. Michigan Ave., in Lansing. The park houses the Lansing Lugnuts and hosts families every summer.
Thursday President Bush signed a bipartisan five-year plan providing up to $250 million for the cleanup of contaminated industrial sites such as the once polluted Oldsmobile Park site.
Bush’s increased attention to contaminated sites, known as brownfields, is an important step forward both in environmental cleanup and economic development, said Joe Dufficy, manager of the brownfield section of the Region 5 Environmental Protection Agency.
“It’s surprising that it’s not been passed in the past because it’s pretty much a win-win situation from pretty much every political angle,” he said.
“It provides funding and assistance to communities to get industry back. Nobody could not like this.”
The EPA will head the distribution of the money allotted by the bill through a competitive grant program.
State and local agencies will be eligible for the grants.
“It’s very much a program that hasn’t had the EPA dictating what happens but organizing other agencies,” Dufficy said.
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is one agency that could have an opportunity to increase its involvement in brownfield cleanup.
The state agency surveyed the creation of 9,568 jobs and the generation of $3.5 billion in private investments from former brownfield sites.
“Michigan has the top program in the nation,” said Ken Silfven, spokesman for the DEQ. “We’ve been a leader in it. It’s been one of the greatest programs from an urban renewal standpoint.”
Regardless, the department hasn’t made plans for any additional money, Silfven said.
“We would certainly want to look into it,” he said. “We’d have to review it and make sure there aren’t any strings attached.”
But Bowen, one of the first to receive a job as a result of the Oldsmobile Park site cleanup, doesn’t have the same misgivings about the new money as Silfven does.
Bowen remembers how the cleanup process assisted the development of the community around the baseball stadium.
“The best way I’ve ever heard it described is that Oldsmobile Park was like dropping a pebble into a pond,” she said. “Everything around it is the ripples.”
The cleanup of the site required a $904,000 grant for site reclamation and $16.5 million in private investment. But the stadium has helped bring in several restaurants, including Rum Runners at 601 E. Michigan Ave., Nuthouse Sports Grill at 420 E. Michigan Ave., and, until recently, Blue Coyote Brewing Co. formerly at 113 Pere Marquette Drive, all located in Lansing.
The neighborhood has become a destination for tourists adding consumer dollars to the tax dollars created by the site development, Bowen said.
“I remember sitting on Washington Square when (the site) was being developed,” she said.
“People would come up and say ‘we haven’t been downtown in 20 years,’ and that was not an uncommon response.”
