The Douglass-Sumner neighborhood in northeast Wyandotte County will receive nearly $4 million to clean up 54 vacant lots contaminated with lead and gas vapor.
The grant funding from an Environmental Protection Agency program aimed at restoring parcels of land known as “brownfields” was among the 20 largest awards made nationwide through the program this year.
The Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, received the full $3.7 million it applied for — more than 174 other communities that received funding.
Alyssa Marcy, who leads the UG’s brownfields program, said she believes the grant application was successful because it was largely a neighborhood-led effort that also included a development strategy for bringing new life back to the revitalized Land Bank properties.
The UG has been working to evaluate vacant Land Bank properties across the city to determine if they are contaminated with lead, asbestos or other harmful substances. Municipal and civic leaders want to find and clean up contamination before lots are sold. They hope the strategy will lead to new residential developments in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
When Land Bank properties are sold as is, they often end up languishing when a buyer and would-be developer can’t afford the cost of environmental mitigation. That costly process often involves removing layers of soil, carting it away and replacing it.
In the Douglass-Sumner neighborhood, near downtown Kansas City, Kansas, the city initially tested 220 vacant lots and cleared 163 as having contamination levels that comply with federal standards. The new EPA funding will be used to clean up most of the others.
Marcy said $2.7 million of the grant funding will go toward cleaning up the lots, something that will cost an estimated $50,000 per lot. The remaining $1 million from the grant will be used for additional soil testing to determine if any of the 54 lots have undetected petroleum fuel gas, and for any related remediation.
Work on the Douglass-Sumner project could begin as early as September. Although the grant was written to allow four years for the work to be completed, Marcy said she doesn’t expect it to take that long.
“Ideally, it would be great to get it done in two years,” she said.
The UG plans to continue its efforts in other nearby neighborhoods. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment is testing 100 lots in the Oak Grove neighborhood, which is near the John Garland Park, a former landfill, on North Fifth Street. Marcy said she expects contamination will be found on some of the lots. The UG will take on the task of applying for funding to fix them, she said.
Urban neighborhoods across the metropolitan area are seeing the cost of blighted, empty lots and working on similar efforts to clean them up so they will have a better chance of being developed.
Kansas City, Missouri, is in the midst of a number of projects to revitalize contaminated vacant lots or structures. That includes the city’s Housing Accelerator program, which received a $4 million EPA cleanup grant last year, and involves testing and cleaning Land Bank lots in urban neighborhoods, initially in the Washington-Wheatley neighborhood.
But Andrew Bracker, the city’s brownfields coordinator, said at a July 10 meeting of the area’s Brownfields Commission that the city’s application this year for funds to expand the effort was denied. Testing of 169 additional lots found 80 had lead levels that exceed EPA standards.
“We’re investigating other sources of funds to remediate those over a period of time,” Bracker said at the meeting.
He said the city would look for funds from the city and from outside.
“This is not just a one-time strategy to find money to clean up these properties,” Bracker said, “but to develop sustainable financial resources to remediate vacant lots on an ongoing basis.”
Testing on 379 additional vacant Land Bank properties in the East Community and Northeast Community South neighborhoods found that 23% had high levels of lead. Bracker called that result “great news.”
That is “much fewer lots to clean up,” he said, “and so we’re hopeful that as we accumulate information, we get a greater understanding of the distribution of these contaminants and develop the resources to address them over time.”
The city may apply for an EPA cleanup grant again next year, Bracker said. But he acknowledged that going forward there may be fewer available funds.
The federal government has announced that 2027 grants available for brownfields cleanup will be capped to bring them in line with amounts awarded before the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed during the Biden administration.
When that happens, Bracker said at the meeting, cleanup grants that had been as high as $4 million or $5 million could be reduced to $500,000. His office declined to offer additional details or speculate about how the grant funding changes could affect the Kansas City area.
But they don’t come in isolation, Marcy said.
She has already noticed increased red tape under the Trump administration to receive and spend EPA funding. But she was surprised to learn that brownfields grant funding might see cuts.
“We didn’t anticipate brownfields programs being affected,” she said.
The EPA could not be reached with questions about the potential changes.
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
