From Polluted to Patented

By John Sutherlin

When the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) started looking to expand, their options seemed limited. Available development space in Washington, D.C., for something this massive was insufficient. They were left with few viable choices. The solution: brownfield redevelopment.

For more than 30 years, the USPTO had been issuing patents and trademarks at its current location in Crystal City, Virginia. As the agency’s initial needs grew, the USPTO leased space incrementally. The result was a sprawling complex of 18 separate buildings with staff, who rely on close interaction and cross-research among patent technology groups, unable to operate at optimal levels of efficiency.

According to the USPTO, a patent is granted every three minutes and a new patent is filed every five minutes. But the average patent takes almost two years for approval!
Plans to consolidate the USPTO headquarters and all its buildings under a single roof had been discussed since 1989. In 1995, Congressional approval was granted to lease approximately two million square feet of space in northern Virginia for a period of 20 years.

One year later, the General Services Administration (GSA) issued a solicitation for offers for the future home of the USPTO. Thus, the “United States Patent and Trademark Office Headquarters Consolidation Project” was born.

A Site Is Found

“The site had a history and it needed remediation,” stated Chris Evans, Virginia Department of Environmental Quality Brownfields Coordinator. “With D.C. space at a premium, this was the perfect fit.”

As far as historical importance, the property in northern Virginia is like many others on the East Coast. It was developed before the American Revolution, was expanded to include a rail line before the Civil War and was modified over the decades to meet local industrial demands.

It attracted other industries that catered to the railroad, including an ice storage warehouse, a car icing platform and station, and a refrigerator car service and maintenance facility. In 1944, the Southern Railroad added a diesel locomotive repair shop that was in service until the 1970s.

Development plans for the project consist of approximately 2.4 million square feet of office and special use spaces, housed in a five-building office complex, two townhouse-style office buildings and two structured parking garages with 3,561 parking spaces. The project serves to consolidate approximately 7,100 employees from 18 different buildings currently in Arlington, Virginia. Construction began on December 21, 2001.

But this project is not limited to office space for those working on patents, trademarks or intellectual property. Community interests were a strong factor. Also, when one considers the strong historic preservation ordinances of Alexandria, this project had to deliver within a very specific set of guidelines.

The two townhouse-style office buildings were constructed to blend with the aesthetics of the area and conceal the structured parking garages. Containing a total of 77,000 square feet, 800 feet of one of the buildings is reserved for an Alexandria Police Department substation to provide increased police presence in the community.

Remediation Risks

With any brownfield project, risks associated with remediation must be considered. In Virginia, risk assessment is included in the site characterization report and includes an evaluation of the risks to both human health and the environment posed by any release. If the risk assessment shows that remedial action is necessary, a proposed set of remediation levels as described in state regulations would also be included.

The purpose of the Voluntary Remediation Program (VRP) is to encourage hazardous substance cleanups that might not otherwise take place. The program has been streamlined for site owners or operators to voluntarily address contamination at sites with concurrence from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ).

When the remediation is satisfactorily completed, DEQ issues a “certification of satisfactory completion of remediation” letter to the contractor. This certification provides assurance that the remediated site will not become the subject of a DEQ enforcement action unless new issues are discovered.

With a public need, a regulatory infrastructure, funding and the Virginia DEQ ready to assist, the project now required a private partner with experience in brownfield remediation and redevelopment. That partner was found in LCOR-Alexandria, a national real estate development, investment, operations and asset management company.
Several of those interviewed mentioned the champion of the project —- Bill Hard, principal-in-charge of LCOR-Alexandria, whose efforts were invaluable from conception to reality.

Jim Thornhill, an attorney with McGuire Woods and legal counsel on the project, said, “The VRP was used to ensure that the risks associated with residual contamination and landfill material were properly addressed to allow the safe reuse of the site that will include a day care center. A detailed soil characterization and management plan was developed to assure compliance with the Virginia Solid Waste Management Regulations and to allow the buyer and seller to allocate costs and liabilities.”

The remediation work included the removal of contaminated soils from scrap metal and waste disposal activities, especially fly ash. More than 450,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and landfill material were removed in the initial phase of site development. According to LCOR, this waste disposal, coupled with other industrial activity, probably destroyed any archeological value of the site.

The City of Alexandria (another important player in the project) insisted that because the site had been used for waste disposal there must be gas monitoring.

“In any voluntary program, tracking can be an issue of concern. Here, all parties, public and private, remained actively engaged throughout the process,” said Evans. “All parties had tons of brownfields experience. And our role was to facilitate the process … not to micromanage the stakeholders. It could not have worked out better.”

Ahmet Bulbulkaya, remediation project officer for the project at DEQ, concluded, “The remediation process went smoothly. This was due to a sound pre-characterization process that minimized any surprises.”

This project’s impact will be felt directly by those working, living and traveling on or near the site. But the indirect effect of this brownfield project could be the synergy of staffers now working more closely and under the same roof. It will be interesting to see if this synergy translates into more patents being granted more quickly.

John W. Sutherlin, PhD, is producer & director of the documentary series “Brownfields: Reclaiming Our Urban Environment” (available at www.films.com). He is also a professor at the University of Louisiana in Monroe.

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