Batchelder Tour Spurs Push For Federal Grant

By Andrew Gorosko

Following a tour of the contaminated, abandoned Batchelder property at 44 Swamp Road in Botsford, US Representative Christopher Murphy said this week that he will be pursuing $1 million in federal funds that would be used toward a cleanup of the vacant industrial site, which has been unused since 1987.

On July 12, Rep Murphy visited the overgrown 34-acre site, which contains extensive industrial ruins and industrial waste piles, with First Selectman Pat Llodra and James Maloney, the president of the nonprofit Connecticut Institute for Communities, Inc.

The town is having the institute pursue the cleanup and eventual industrial redevelopment of the Batchelder site, which was used as an aluminum smelting plant in the past.

“Federal dollars are hard to come by as we look for ways to trim the budget in Washington, but clearly the Batchelder site cleanup project is worthy of support. I’m glad I was able to see it first hand so that I can continue to fight for my $1 million grant request,” Rep Murphy said.

The congressman is seeking the grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Economic Development Initiative unit.

The Batchelder site holds a variety of environmental problems caused by past industrial activity and resulting contamination. Such properties are known as “brownfields.”

The town wants to resolve the environmental problems at the property so that the land can again be put to an industrial use, providing jobs and local property tax revenue.

In 1997, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spent about $300,000 to remove certain forms of toxic waste from the site, including heavy metals and solvents.

In December 2002, a deliberately set fire occurred within a two-story office section of the complex, extensively damaging about 10,000 square feet of a 100,000-square-foot industrial building. The town demolished the section of building that was damaged in the fire.

Mr Maloney explained that the property for many years was operated by the bankrupt Charles Batchelder Company, which caused environmental problems estimated to cost more than $2 million to fully resolve.

Once the site is eventually cleaned, the institute, in cooperation with the town, would market the property for a new use that is consistent with the zoning regulations and the Town Plan of Conservation and Development, according to Mr Maloney.

“It is anticipated that the new use would be either a commercial or light-industrial facility which…would be environmentally clean and constitute substantial tax [revenue] for the town,” he said.

It is unlikely that any new use of the site would include housing because such a use would require a more extensive degree of site cleanup, which would be more costly than the cleanup work required for a new commercial or industrial use, according to Mr Maloney.

Also, housing development generally results in increased municipal service costs that are higher than the tax revenues generated by such residential development, he added.

The difficulty that is faced in industrially redeveloping the property stems from the cost of the site’s cleanup exceeding the property’s real estate market value, Mr Maloney said. That problem has deterred developers from pursuing the site’s redevelopment, he said.

The site’s nearness to Route 25 and to Interstate 95 plus the availability of a rail spur on the property are advantages from a marketing standpoint, he said.

A Batchelder site cleanup and redevelopment is the type of project that the federal government should be interested in supporting, Mr Maloney said.

“If the federal government is looking for a good bang for its brownfields [grant money] buck, this is it,” Mr Maloney said as he walked across the dusty industrial property.

Mrs Llodra said that the town has done as much as it can toward a Batchelder site redevelopment project and is seeking federal aid to spur a new use for the property.

Rep Murphy said of his site tour, “It’s hard to get a sense of [the redevelopment] potential of a site without seeing it.”

“This [tour] gives me a sense of the importance of [the site’s] remediation and redevelopment,” he said.