Chattanooga’s Southside will soon have two large commercially viable tracts of land, following the city council’s approval of an agreement with Brightbridge Inc. to manage the cleanup of two brownfield sites in the South Broad and St. Elmo areas for a combined $34,980.
“Chattanooga has been fairly well recognized for its work in brownfields over the last few years, but there’s still work to be done,” said Joe Guthrie, president of Brightbridge, which was hired by the city to manage the paperwork and oversee the contractors for the two sites.
The project includes property on Tennessee Avenue located behind the old Blockbuster between the railroad and Bi-Lo, as well as the 36th Street landfill site bounded by Central Avenue and 37th Street.
“A brownfield normally is characterized as any site that had industry or commercial buildings on it or had a process that left some sort of waste material on the site,” said Steve Leach, administrator of public works.
Guthrie said the 36th Street landfill is an industrial waste site for foundry sand, which was not considered hazardous waste at the time it was dumped. The landfill was partially capped, but now Guthrie said they will complete the capping to make sure there is an adequate barrier between the foundry sand and people walking over it.
“The Tennessee Avenue site was a transfer station for household waste back in the 1920s and was originally part of the town of St. Elmo and Alton Park,” Guthrie said. “It will have some soil contamination that will be cleaned up and then it will move into some sort of commercial usage. It’s a pretty straightforward cleanup.”
Now that all permission is in place, Brightbridge can contract out the work to other companies for tackling the project later this spring or early summer. Guthrie said the whole process usually takes three years to make it through the complicated trail of paper work for environmental evaluations, applications for federal grants and obtaining permission from the Environmental Protection Agency to begin a project.
Once the land is clean, it can be passed to new owners, whom Leach said are provided warrantees and guarantees in their deeds regarding brownfield materials safely removed or contained on the property.
Most recently the company managed the cleanup of the Ohls Avenue glass field, which is now property of Erlanger Health Systems and will be the site of the relocated Southside Community Health Center.
“A lot of these things we can pay for through grants because there’s a lot of government interest in us cleaning these up,” said City Councilwoman Pam Ladd, who made the motion to accept Brightbridge’s offer. “These are pretty typical and we do it through a third party because they have the expertise and to these folks it’s their specialty.”