YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – A former gas station property on the South Side is among seven sites that Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. is seeking funds to remediate, the city’s community planning and economic development director said.
YNDC is applying for a $1 million multipurpose grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said Ian Beniston, YNDCs executive director. The program allows recipients to do remediation work as well as Phase 1 and Phase 2 site assessments, as well as post-cleanup planning.
The Board of Control will consider Thursday whether to approve the federal grant application by YNDC, according to the meeting agenda that was distributed Wednesday morning.
“Some of these we have an idea of what we’re walking into, and others we have more limited information,” Beniston said.
YNDC has identified more than 300 properties in the city that are potentially contaminated from past use as gas stations, dry cleaners and other operations. The application to the U.S. EPA will include seven sites, more sites than it likely will end up completing, Beniston said.
“As you might expect, going into this without having the Phase 2s and the full scopes of work, we don’t necessarily know how much investment will be needed to clean up each particular site,” he remarked.
Among the seven sites in YNDC’s application is a former gas station on Glenwood Avenue, between Breaden and Carroll streets.
“This particular piece is land that we own, and essentially we’re just giving [YNDC] permission to do the work,” said DeMaine Kitchen, director of the city’s department of community planning and economic development. “We’re giving them permission to go after the money.”
The seven sites in the application also include a property owned by YNDC – 1842 Glenwood – that was used last as a corner store and likely was a gas station at some point, Beniston said. The others are privately owned.
No end use for the city-owned property has been identified, but the work would prepare the site for new use, Kitchen said. He did not know when YNDC might hear about the funds.
“We’re just trying to be proactive,” he said.
Beniston said there were “no imminent development plans” for the sites once they are remediated but acknowledged “longer-term plans and intent” with some of them.
“This project is kind of a broader characterization of the challenges a lot of our corridors face where we have perhaps what looks to be vacant land, but there are issues in the ground, given what was there before,” he said.
“Even though the building might be gone, there still might be issues with tanks or contamination of the soil or even the groundwater on the site,” he continued. “So those are the types of issues that we’re first determining the extent of and then figuring out how to remedy, so we have a clean site that can actually have a productive purpose.