Connecticut Brownfield
Land Bank, Inc.

For more than 20 years local governments throughout the country, with grants and assistance from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state environmental agencies, have successfully redeveloped thousands of vacant, abandoned industrial properties, transforming them into economic and community centered developments. Many developers, community leaders and local government officials overlook the catalytic potential of brownfields redevelopments given the technical complexities often associated with these types of projects. With this reality in mind, a group of state and local brownfields experts, with support from U.S. EPA Region 1, Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), and Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD), coalesced around creating one of the nation’s first brownfields land banks—a one-stop shop for helping communities throughout the state facilitate brownfields redevelopment projects and more broadly supporting brownfields redevelopment policies and program as effective community and economic revitalization strategies.

The Connecticut Brownfield Land Bank, Inc. (Land Bank) is a fee-based, non-profit corporation offering brownfields support to Connecticut municipalities. This is the only non-profit Land Bank in the nation devoted to brownfields transactions. Support can include staff capacity, strategic planning, project prioritization and management, site control, and funding applications. The Land Bank is designed to help municipalities overcome brownfields challenges and make brownfields competitive to developers that often look to sites where the land value and income streams can ease or solve the cleanup and compliance issues. The Land Bank offers funding and liability relief application options that are a unique combination of tools. The Land Bank supports transactions by accepting challenged sites when the elements of a successful project are in place. It will take the site, supervise the remediation process and transfer the site to a developer for an approved reuse.