NADO Regional Development Digest - 07/20/2005  (Plain Text Version)

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In this issue:
•  Communities Prepare for BRAC
•  Why RDOs Matter
•  RDOs Give Angel Networks Wings
•  From Gas Station to Java Jackpot
•  Retirees Working to Protect the Environment
•  RDOs Help Make Walking Safer
•  Around the Regions
•  Digestibles
•  NADO Events and Conferences

From Gas Station to Java Jackpot

By Kelly Novak, Research Manager
Learn how an abandoned gas station has been redeveloped into a coffee house and is generating an economic revival in Wisconsin.

“I’ll have a decaf, skim latte with extra foam.”  That’s the typical order that customers now place when they walk through the doors of the Copeland family gas station, instead of the long standing order of “Give me $10 on pump one, unleaded.” Why?  The Copeland gas station in the Sherman Park area of Milwaukee, WI, like many abandoned gas stations in America, has been redeveloped. It has gone from being a blighted, idle and tax delinquent property in the heart of a community, to the historically registered 1930s streamlined, Moderne Architectural-Style Sherman Perk Coffee Shop, which also offers live music and poetry readings.
 
The Sherman Perk Coffee shop, with the assistance of a neighborhood community development group, secured a variety of financing tools to make the redevelopment happen, including a state tax delinquency foreclosure statute, a $100,000 Wisconsin Department of Commerce brownfields grant, a $30,000 Milwaukee County brownfields grant, and a $52,000 site assessment grant from the City of Milwaukee via the state Department of Natural Resources. They were also able to secure institutional controls and the appropriate land reuse restrictions to enable the conversion of the gas station to a coffee shop. 

One source of funding the Sherman Perk did not use, because petroleum-contaminated sites were ineligible at the time, is the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) brownfields program.  But now, with the enactment of the 2002 Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act ("Brownfields Law"), the EPA brownfields program can support relatively low-risk petroleum sites such as gas stations, with assessment and cleanup grant funding.  By law, EPA now makes available 25 percent of the total Brownfields grant funds each year for the assessment and/or cleanup of relatively low-risk petroleum-contaminated sites.  According to the EPA, this means that the nation’s estimated 200,000 abandoned or idled gas stations are eligible for EPA brownfields assessment and cleanup funding.  In 2005 alone EPA awarded $22 million to low-risk petroleum sites.

Regardless of whether the end reuse for a gas station is a coffee shop or other businesses, both urban and rural communities are innovatively making redevelopment happen. Using a combination of funding from federal, state and local sources, communities can turn their stagnate gas stations into an economic success and bring life back to their community.

For more information visit EPA brownfields at www.epa.gov/brownfields; the Sherman Perk Coffee Shop at www.shermanperk.com or www.temco-llc.com/sherman_perk.html; and the National Park Service’s Historic Landmark Program at www.cr.nps.gov.

Historic Gas Station Fact: According to the National Register of Historic Places, there are 218 gas, filling and service stations listed and many more unaccounted for that are within the 1,000 historic districts listed.  The only gas station ever designed and built by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is a 1958 building in Cloquet, Minnesota.  In 2003, the station's owners put it up for sale for $725,000.  The gas station was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.

This article is funded under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

For more information about the NADO Research Foundation's Rural Brownfields Awareness Project, visit http://www.nado.org/nadorf/index.html.