Oregon Mulls Land Bank Initiative
A recent article released by Brownfield renewal discusses Oregon HB 2734, a bill that would allow local governments to create land banks.
Oregon Mulls Land Bank Initiative
State legislators are considering a Metro-backed bill that could make it easier to clean up contaminated land across Oregon.
House Bill 2734 would address brownfield remediation in two key ways – by allowing local governments to create limited liability organizations, called “land banks,” that could take on cleanup; and by offering limited property tax cuts to property owners that clean up brownfields.
Those brownfields are plentiful – more than 5,000 of them across Oregon, said Seth Otto, an analyst at Maul Foster Alongi. In the Portland region, officials have identified more than 2,000 sites.
They range from shuttered gas stations to long-departed dry cleaners to bankrupt factories, places where, over time, hazardous chemicals leaked into the ground. Without remediation – cleaning the toxins that leaked into the soil over the years – these sites often sit idle, too expensive to clean and thus impossible to redevelop.
Please click here to view the article online.
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