A 3-acre site on the banks of the Connecticut River in Enfield, where a successful carpet manufacturing power plant once resided, will soon be given new life.
With a $4 million state grant, the former Bigelow Carpet Manufacturing plant on North River Street will become a 160-unit apartment complex near a future train station. Twenty percent of the apartments will be affordable.
Enfield is one of 18 towns and cities in Connecticut to receive state grant funding that will be used for brownfield remediation.
Brownfields often remain abandoned for decades, until programs like this come along, according to Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Dan O’Keefe.
“That is why programs like these, like brownfields, are so incredibly important,” O’Keefe said. “It is what gets that movement, and it allows us as a community, as a state, for our economy, to move on from the mistakes of our past."
The grant funding, which totals $20 million, will be spread among 21 blighted properties statewide.
“They become abandoned, and then they just sit there,” O’Keefe said. “They sit there because the private profit motive to remediate these things is oftentimes unknown, and it becomes a challenge to get these things to move.”
Brownfield remediation efforts involve cleaning the soil and water where former factories may have caused pollution.
The funding ranges from $4 million to about $150,000.
Stamford received one of the higher awards, with about $950,000 to excavate and remediate contaminated soil on a nearly 4-acre site on Woodland Avenue.
It will be turned into a mixed use development with new housing, parks and a walkway to the city’s transportation center.
Many of Connecticut’s nicest pieces of land are along waterfronts, previously developed to power industrial plants and transportation, according to Gov. Ned Lamont.
“When it comes to development, I don't want to take people's backyards or anything,” Lamont said. “I want to redevelop what we can right here. And that's what brownfields is all about.”
The remediation will clean about 150 acres of land and result in about 1,400 new housing units.
“We have to do everything we can to reclaim this, to make sure we get maximum value for our people here,” Lamont said.
