Lake City used funding from the SC Brownfields Cleanup Revolving Loan Fund to transform a
former landfill into Lake City Park. Photo: City of Lake City.
In Lake City, the South Carolina Brownfields Cleanup Revolving Fund helped turn an old landfill and public works storage facility into Lake City Park, which now boasts a boardwalk, fishing piers and a canoe launch.
In Rock Hill, the printing plant known as “The Bleachery” received Brownfields loan funding to help kickstart the cleanup of the site, now home to mixed-use development. Similar efforts have come to the former Wellington Leisure Products site in Jonesville, or the once-blighted Bush Recycling Center in downtown Florence, now home to a substantial medical campus.
Many South Carolina municipalities face the problems of properties contaminated by past uses from major industries to old gas stations, hurting economic prospects and community fabric. State and federal funding, however, has brought more grant and low-interest loan options for such sites. Tyler Lewis of the Catawba Regional Council of Governments, program manager for SC Brownfields Environmental Site Testing, spoke at the Municipal Association of SC 2024 Annual Meeting about both the SC BEST program and the SC Brownfields Cleanup Revolving Loan Fund.
Lewis gave his hometown of Chester as an example of the challenges and opportunities that industrial sites present, with three mill sites that were central to its economy, but which had closed by the time of his memory.
Chester, he said, had seen “many different forms of industry over the years, and it’s reinventing itself. The entire state has been reinventing itself, with new industries coming in.”
South Carolina’s Brownfields/Voluntary Cleanup Program and Loan Fund enables a party that was not responsible for the contamination at a site to acquire it with liability protection for that existing contamination by agreeing to perform an environmental assessment or remediation, overcoming the liability hurdle that had historically hindered many redevelopment projects.
The Catawba Regional Council of Governments administers the revolving loan fund, which offers below-market interest rates for cleanup and removal activities. While the list of eligible borrowers includes for-profit entities, the nonprofit and governmental borrowers who use the program are eligible to receive loan forgiveness of up to 30% of the loan, up to $200,000.
The CRCOG also administers the South Carolina Brownfields Environmental Site Testing Program, also known as SC BEST, which has $1 million available for required environmental testing. SC BEST has been used for 44 project sites across the state, Lewis said, with more than 60 environmental reports issued or underway.
“So why take this on? [It puts the properties] back on the tax rolls. These sites are sitting vacant. They haven't paid taxes in a while, they are a liability to your community. [The projects] don't always have to be something that turns into a money-making, private entity,” Lewis said. “You can do stuff such as parks and recreation resources, or, if you sell it to somebody to bring in jobs, light industry. We’ve seen that [these projects] create jobs, that keep jobs, and revitalize the communities themselves.”
Lewis cautioned that using the programs involves “a lot of front-end work.”
“It takes a long time — years in the making — to get things moving,” he said. “But once it gets moving, these projects turn into some really impactful economic developments, community development projects, revitalizing areas that may have had nothing happening for years.”
Learn more about the programs on the websites of the SC Department of Environmental Services and the Catawba Regional Council of Governments.