HAMILTON — Three years ago, Hamilton was just another notch on Ohio's rust belt.

        Massive brick factories, crumbling and useless, stood on the east side of town, symbols of former glory.

        But things have changed.

        While some communities wait for the state to provide tax money to clean up their abandoned factories, Hamilton is doing the job itself.

Melissa Johnson, Hamilton downfields manager, says the cleanup is uncharted territory for everyone. (Dick Swaim photo) | ZOOM |

        The old Leshner factory on Central Avenue was torn down recently to make way for the Matandy Co.'s new steel-products plant.

        “We didn't use state or federal funds,” said Melis sa Johnson, Hamilton's brownfields manager. “We negotiated with the new owner and obtained environmental insurance to make the lenders feel comfortable. This was new to all of us, but it worked. It doesn't make sense for every project to have a grant or loan.”

        Hamilton is cleaning up its past by eliminating what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls “brownfields” — abandoned or underused industrial sites on which redevelopment is often complicated by environmental contamination.

        “Older cities like ours are transforming themselves,” Ms. Johnson said.

        Nationally, there are an estimated 500,000 brownfield sites, created when manufacturers left old factories in declining urban areas for the suburbs and foreign countries. Industrial Ohio has more than 1,600 sites, 184 of them here in the southwest.

        Possibly late this year, Ohio will offer grants and loans to help communities redevelop brownfields, said Pat Madigan of the Ohio EPA. State Issue 1, approved by voters in November, will allow local governments to apply for $200 million to clean up the sites and another $200 million to preserve green space.

The old Estate Stove factory towers over workers building the new Butler County jail. | ZOOM |

        “The program will benefit cities that have hit their limits and won't grow through annexation,” Ms. Johnson said.

        Hamilton, the Tristate's second-largest city, with 62,000 people, didn't wait for the state to act. The city formed its own advisory committee to recommend which buildings to demolish or redevelop.

        The move paid off recently when Hamilton found a tenant for the long-vacant Mosler Safe Co. factory on Grand Boulevard and tore down the old H.P. Deuscher foundry to open space for the new Butler County jail.

        Next target: Estate Stove, a gloomy brick factory on East Avenue that looks like a setting for a Dickens novel.

        Leshner's razing was a major economic — and aesthetic — improvement. Five buildings comprising the textile mill had been empty since Leshner moved to the west side in 1992. The city declared the factory functionally obsolete and a public nuisance.

        But who would want the run-down, urban site?

        Matandy Steel and Metal Products did.

        In 2000, the company started building a metal-wall factory on the 3.5-acre Leshner property. Matandy occupies a lot next door.

        To make the project financially attractive, the city offered a development agreement that blended the traditional enterprise-zone program with tax-increment financing, which diverts tax revenues from an improvement into a special fund, which can be used for such things as infrastructure improvements. The city believes such projects will reap benefits for decades.

        Work is also under way in other communities. Last fall, the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Port Authority acquired the nine-acre Green Industries plant at East Kemper Road and U.S. 42 in Sharonville. The Port Authority will spend more than $1 million, then seek a developer.

        After the electroplating plant closed in 1995, more than 350,000 gallons of toxic substances, including liquid cyanide and chromic acid sludge, had to be removed from the ground and 70 tons of contaminated soil hauled away.

        More work remains.

        “We know there's contamination under the concrete bed,” said Al Ledbetter, Sharonville's safety service director. “There are questions. Is it encapsulated enough so it won't migrate?”

        Environmental groups maintain the Ohio EPA's Voluntary Action Program, in which the government promises not to sue if companies agree to clean up brownfield sites, lets companies get away with polluting the environment.

        Mr. Ledbetter is more concerned about the present — and a cleanup.

        “What could happen to the site should somebody move in?” he said. “Some acids have eaten into the steel.”

        Randy Welker of the Port Authority is optimistic that the property will be redeveloped. He said a new advisory board will soon identify other Hamilton County sites to clean up and “create the vision and strategy and go forth.”

        Hamilton's strategy is to first clean up factories that aren't heavily polluted, then ask the state to help with worse sites.

        Soon the city will assess the 65-acre Peck's Addition, across from the Miami University-Hamilton campus. The area began as residential tracts in the 1920s, but lacked sewers and an infrastructure. And illegal dumping occurred.

        Now, the city wants to turn Peck's Addition into a new light-industrial park that would provide an anchor in southeast Hamilton.

        Ms. Johnson acknowledged that competition for state money will be intense.

        “Two hundred million dollars, that's a drop in the bucket,” she said.
       Photos by DICK SWAIM/The Cincinnati Enquirer The old Estate Stove factory towers over construction workers erecting the new Butler County jail.
       
        Melissa Johnson, Hamilton brownfields manager, says the cleanup is uncharted territory for everyone.

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