|
 |
By Curt Milburn |
Spanning two and a half miles, comprising the work of more than 60 partners during a 10-year period and addressing almost every aspect of community redevelopment, the Phalen Corridor in St. Paul, Minn. may be one of America’s most comprehensive brownfield remediation projects.
They Paved Paradise and Put Up
a Parking Lot”
WIn 1957, trucks began to dump fill into a small lake on the east end of Phalen
Corridor, providing land for the auto-oriented Phalen Village Shopping Mall.
Over time, it became apparent that it’s not always wise to fool with Mother
Nature.
Soon the parking lot began to sink and the mall was often flooded. By the early 1990s, cattails had emerged from cracks in the asphalt, which was 18 inches thick in some places. The mall became, for the most part, abandoned.
In September 1994, representatives from community groups and corporations including 3M, Wells Fargo and Xcel Energy met with elected officials and formed the Phalen Corridor, a pure public-private partnership (the initiative has never incorporated, nor is it within a government agency).
The group quickly began the decade-long process to raise funds and build Phalen Boulevard, a road that would provide access to former industrial sites and link the distressed neighborhoods of the East Side to downtown St. Paul and the freeway system.
During the 1994–95 legislative session, the partnership joined church groups in a statewide coalition to identify funding sources to clean up polluted land. The unlikely collaboration was successful and over $10 million was raised to clean up brownfields statewide for the next two-year cycle.
“It takes great collaborations to get great things,” says Meredith Udoibok, director of brownfields for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. “Some of the groups were motivated by social justice issues, others by economic development. It was like doing wiring in your house except instead of matching the black wire to the black wire, we connected it to the red wire and somehow the lights went on.”
Some of these state funds helped develop Williams Hill, a six-story-tall construction fill site located on the west end of the Phalen Corridor. Completed in 1998, nine companies located at Williams Hill are providing 450 jobs.
Westminster Junction, the next business center along the corridor, is sold out, promising over 1,000 jobs and incorporating additional sustainable building techniques. A third center is planned for development in 2007–08.
State and local resources have been combined with an Enterprise Community Grant, Economic Development Administration Grant, HUD 108 loan, EPA Pilot Grant and HUD Brownfield Economic Development Initiative Grant.