The 2018 Brownfields Utilization, Investment, and Local Development (BUILD) Act may make it easier to access EPA funding for your projects!
The omnibus spending bill signed into law earlier this year included the BUILD Act. Advocates worked for years to address some of the more problematic issues with accessing and using EPA brownfield grant funding. Some of the provisions of the BUILD Act include:
- Wider Eligibility for Local Government Owned Sites: Your municipality purchased a property prior to 2002? As long as you didn’t cause or exacerbate the contamination, no need to have met pre-acquisition due diligence criteria in order to use EPA brownfield grant funding.
- Funding for Non-profits: You’re a non-profit that wants to assess a site? Previously, non-profit organizations were only eligible to apply for brownfield cleanup and job training grant funding. Qualifying non-profits can now apply for EPA brownfield assessment and revolving loan fund grants.
- Petroleum Eligibility: The BUILD Act tweaks eligibility criteria for petroleum sites. While nuanced, the language no longer requires a site to be of ‘low risk’ and may now make it easier for EPA grant recipients to get to ‘yes’ for using petroleum funds on sites.
- Remediation Funding Limit: Previous legislation capped EPA brownfields grant funding at $200,000 (or $350,000 with a waiver) for each site to be remediated. This cap is now raised to $500,000 (or $650,000 with a waiver) per site.
- Multipurpose Grants: The BUILD Act calls for formally establishing multi-purpose grants capped at no more than $1 million each for doing the things that individual EPA Brownfields grant awards do. In other words, this is a catch all grant that can be used for planning, assessing, and remediating brownfield sites.
To learn more about the legislation, go here. On Wednesday May 9th, the National TAB program is hosting a webinar to hear about how the BUILD Act will improve the national brownfields program. Click here to register and visit the event webpage to get more information.
