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[music] [Mark Scheinberg, President, Goodwin College]
This campus is sitting on a beautiful piece of Connecticut River riverfront and it is
just, just, magnificent! But it didn't start this way.
[music] When I first came here, people in the state
said that in a very heavy rain you could actually see a sheen from the oil coming out of the
property onto the Connecticut river. We knew we had a property that had issues.
[Todd Andrews, Director of Development, Goodwin College] One of the initial steps was we need
to identify how contaminated the sites were, how much money it was going to take to clean
up and identify other financing to construct the first phase of the master plan which was
our riverfront campus academic center. The first funding source we identified was the
EPA Brownfields funding. I knew through my experience that the EPA funds were there at
the beginning of a project to help assess the environmental contamination on the site
but also to help you clean it up. [Scheinberg] Using EPA funds and finding out
exactly what the issues were you were able to get it to a point where it was a lot less
scary to deal with. It became very clear to us that this was a project we could actually
complete. And if you stopped and looked at this property, not in the way it was but in
the way it could possibly be, you finally saw it as this incredible resource.
[music] [Mary Ellen Kowalewski, Director of Policy
Development & Planning, Capital Region Council of Governments] Through our program we were
able to provide money to conduct phase 1, phase 2 and phase 3 environmental site assessments.
It was very hard to envision what could be here but one thing that is very unique about
this parcel is it's on the banks of the Connecticut River and so if they were able to clean it
up it would be a way that people would actually be brought back to the river.
[Bob Carr, Vice President, Zuvic, Carr and Associates] The cleanup that we did was a
combination of source removal, meaning removal of tanks, underground lines, saturated soils,
so in those areas we were able to remove that to soil disposal and recycling facilities.
Other areas of the site we used what are called in situ or in-place technologies which allows
the microbes that inhabit the soil naturally to degrade the remaining contamination.
[music] [Scheinberg] So we not only were able to use
EPA funds towards a lot of the cleanup but the fact that we had EPA involved and monitoring
what we were doing actually made us more credible to even local funders and the combination
of all that finally got the banks open to giving us lending necessary to actually build
the buildings that we started to build. Since then to now and the next couple of years we
have already set aside, already received almost 150 million dollars in development on this
campus and in the surrounding area. 150 million dollars from that initial seed. All of that
is in question if the Brownfields program wasn't there upfront to help us get just from
A to B. We were able to take it the rest of the way but it wouldn't have happened at all
without the Brownfields program. [music]
[Marcia LeClerc, Mayor, East Hartford, CT] They say without flowers there is no hope.
I believe that Goodwin College is the flower of East Hartford and the expansion of economic
development that we see happening. It's like when one neighbor takes care of their yard
it just goes three-fold. Our community has had a significant shot in the arm and a shot
of vitality. Goodwin College actually gave us back our riverfront.
[music]