In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

SEVEN YEARS LATER: A BROWNFIELDS RESTORATION

In Business, March-April, Vol. 29, No. 2, p. 25

Providence Rhode Island's Save The Bay sets up a financial process to convert the once-contaminated shoreline into a lovely Sunshine Island.

Joan Retsinas

FOR AS LONG as Rhode Islanders can remember, Sunshine Island was a dump, literally. The dump abutted a shipyard and a sewage treatment center that, before modernization, spilled gallons of untreated sewage into Narragansett Bay. In 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency declared the entire Fields Point area of Providence a brownfields site.
Today, the former dump has grass, flowering shrubs, and soil that is cleaner than any in the rest of the city. On a clear day, the view goes as far as Aquidneck Island. The residents of this inner-city neighborhood (an Enterprise Zone because of its high unemployment, high poverty) have easy access to a glorious spot.
The tale of reclamation is a tale of money. It is also a tale of a nonprofit organization, Save The Bay, committed to turning this dump into an Eden.
Save The Bay wanted to construct a signature “green” educational facility and headquarters on the six-acre dump-site - officially, Lot 25 in Fields Point.
Johnson & Wales, a for-profit university based in Providence, with branches throughout the world, had recently bought the 100-acre Fields Point site from a private owner. Johnson & Wales planned a satellite Harborside campus, with dormitories, classrooms, and a Culinary Arts Museum.
Enter Save The Bay. If Save The Bay could lease the tip of the point - the dump-site - from Johnson & Wales, and marshal public funds for reclamation, and spur private donations, and force collaboration of disparate governmental oversight bodies, then maybe Save The Bay could build a model facility on reclaimed land, thereby demonstrating not just the feasibility of a brownfields clean-up in Providence, but, maybe, spearheading further clean-up of a once-industrial waterfront. A lot of “ifs” and “maybes.”
Step one was convincing Johnson & Wales to lease them Lot 25. John Bowen, president of Johnson & Wales University, recalls the “audacity” of Save The Bay's director and Board. “We [the University] had just bought the land, the ink wasn't even dry, when Save the Bay told us how the land was perfect for them.” After the initial shock, he went home to mull over the proposal. His wife convinced him. Why not try it? In cooperating with the venture, Johnson & Wales would be bolstering Providence. John Bowen explains: “I didn't want to be president of a university in a failing city.” So in January 2001, Johnson & Wales agreed to the audacious proposal: a $1/year lease for 50 years.
STARTING THE RECLAMATION AND FINANCIAL PROCESS
With a lease in hand, Save The Bay started the reclamation process. An EPA Targeted Site Assessment, in May 2001, gave Save The Bay a picture of the tasks involved. Save The Bay Director Curt Spaulding explains: “The ability to assess risk with someone else's money was important.” For profit-driven developers, the assessment constitutes part of the project costs - costs that they will recover when the project is operational. Save the Bay is not profit-driven, but mission-driven. It could not recoup those up-front costs.
The assessment identified the problems: lead, arsenic, and methane gas. It also estimated the costs for the reclamation. To pay for the reclamation, Save The Bay tapped into several governmental spigots.
The state's Department of Environmental Management contributed $700,000 from the Brownfields Cleanup Revolving Loan Fund. The terms were favorable: the government would forgive 30 percent of the loan; interest would be 2 percent above the federal discount rate; the term was 60 months. (Save the Bay waded through a bureaucratic morass for this money. The State's Economic Development Corporation is the “lead agency” for the Loan Fund; the Small Business Loan Fund Corporation is the fund manager. The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management is the site manager.) This was the first Brownfields Cleanup project funded through this program. Terence Gray - Assistant Director for Air, Waste, and Compliance at the Department of Environmental Management - was conscious of Save The Bay's meager coffers: “We worked to control the costs.”
Spaulding credits Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed for priming the federal spigots. Reed, supported by Representative Patrick Kennedy, Senator Lincoln Chafee and Representative James Langevin, actively promoted Save The Bay's application for funds from the National Oceanograhic and Atmospheric Administration Service (NOAA) ($2 million) , the NOAA's Restore America's Estuaries ($144,000), the United States Department of Agricultural Natural Resources Conservation Service ($156,000). The Environmental Protection Agency (through the state's Economic Development Corporation) contributed $210,000. The Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council-Corporate Wetlands Restoration Program contributed $27,000.
PRIVATE SECTOR FUNDING
Government money was necessary, but not sufficient. Save The Bay needed private-sector money.
In 1999, when Save The Bay planners plotted their fund-raising strategy, they anticipated going to the large foundations - national, environmental, and local. Many had contributed in the past. But after September 11, 2001, philanthropists focused on national recovery efforts. And after the subsequent stock market decline, philanthropic donations in general stalled. Spaulding recalls it as the worst time to launch a capital campaign. The organization lost more than a year from its initial timetable.
To prime this private-sector pump, the project needed a large contribution. Spaulding credits Citizens' Bank ($250,000) with being the first.
Other private sector donations followed: Kresge - $500,000; Prince Charitable Trust - $650,000; Car-negie Abby $500,000; and several six-figure donations from local organizations. Private donations came to $4,600,000. To bridge the timeline of pledges against the timeline of construction, Save The Bay took out $1,725,000 loans from Citizens and Sovereign Banks.
Finally, the project needed the city of Providence to invest in infrastructure: a road, utilities, water, sewers. A long-standing court case had established a claim. Originally one family had owned Sunshine Island. But after the city had dumped rubbish on the land for years, the island morphed into the peninsula that was Lot 25. The family had sued the city, charging that it had misused their land; and the judge ruled that the city had to install a road and utilities.
Save The Bay wanted the city to honor that long-ago agreement. Although a senior member of Mayor Vincent Cianci's administration acknowledged the commitment, the Mayor himself was subsequently indicted, convicted, and jailed. His successor, the city council president, was mayor only briefly, until the next election.
The newly-elected Mayor, David Cicilline, faced a staggering deficit, crumbling schools, contracts up for negotiation, and a citizenry enraged at the unavoidable tax increases. Fortunately, Mayor Cicilline pledged both money and cooperation: $500,000 later, the site had a road, water, utilities.
In colonial times, this swathe of land was a farm. Then it was a municipal park, giving residents access to a clean bay for recreation and sheer aesthetic pleasure. The island portion eventually held a children's hospital. The 1938 hurricane leveled the hospital, which the city did not rebuild. In the 1950s the city started dumping trash, thereby erasing the thin barrier between the island and the mainland.
Today the dump-site has gone back to the future - once again giving city residents access to a beautiful shoreline. Indeed, Save The Bay's success has inspired Johnson & Wales President Bowen: “They set the bar high.” The University plans to make its swathe of once-contaminated shoreline just as lovely, just as pristine, as the now aptly-named Sunshine Island.

Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Joan Retsinas, PhD, teaches health policy at Tufts' School of Occupational Therapy and writes about small businesses, health policy, and urban development. For more information on Save The Bay's reclamation, contact: John Martin, Director of Marketing & Communications, Save The Bay, 100 Save The Bay Drive, Providence, RI 02905; Phone: 401-272-3540 x 131; Fax: 401-273-7153; email: jmartin@savebay.org.