This project was completed in a Brownfield Redevelopment course. The group included a Master of Environmental Engineering student, a duel Law and Master of Natural Resources student, a duel Master of Business and Natural Resources student, a Business Masters student, and myself. For the second half of the course we were charged with creating a new tool for developing brownfield sites. (Click on the link at the bottom for the .pdf of our full report)
Description of Tool
Our Tool addressed corporations with large portfolios of brownfield sites who often hold them as idle assets, moth-balling them rather than remediating them. They do this due to cost and liability concerns, and the sheer volume of sites needing to be processed. The Triage Tool addresses these concerns by rank ordering the sites and revealing the potential of an entire portfolio of sites.
Two primary assumptions were made in developing the Triage Tool: first, that environmentally-focused government legislation has been enacted forcing organizations to liquidate or remediate all brownfield holdings over the next several decades, and second, that there is readily available information on all sites, including Phase I assessments. This level of information is a minimum requirement for initial remediation calculations.
The Triage Tool assists with preliminary sorting of brownfield sites by scoring three major aspects of the site restoration process: remediation, marketability, and partnerships. These three scores incorporate a number of sub-scores described in more detail below. A weighted total of all three major components, also described in more detail below, determines the redevelopment potential of each site. In addition, the hierarchical distribution of final weighted scores informs remediation, marketing, and partnership-building strategies for sites in the portfolio. Because the Triage Tool assesses sites at a portfolio level, site strategies can be developed that reflect the goal of restoring all sites, not just individual ones, to productive use, thereby increasing the likelihood of all sites becoming clean and valuable community assets.
Kenneth R. C. Dunn 