Help could be coming to polluted areas in North Birmingham in the form of an EPA grant. Local politicians and environmentalists say it can’t come quickly enough.

Last year the Regional Planning Commission of Greater Birmingham (RPC) was awarded half a million dollars by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to redevelop vacant and unusable lands in and surrounding the city.

The money came in the form of an EPA Brownfields Assessment Grant which is given after the EPA selects recipients from a pool of applications.

According to the EPA brownfields are “real property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant.

“These properties are often abandoned land and/or structures once utilized in the energy exploration, steel production, and manufacturing industries. Brownfields can also be former gasoline stations, dry cleaners, vehicle repair shops, foundries, rail yards, or even households,” according to the EPA.

Using money from the grant the RPC was instructed to “identify and assess known or potential sites contaminated with hazardous substances or petroleum.”

The RPC said the goal of these assessments is to work with communities to redevelop properties that were left vacant or underutilized as a result of contamination or other disasters.

RPC’s Director of Economic Development Jesslan Wilson said the RPC is working with Jefferson County officials to “get the word out” about the program but added that they don’t yet have a designated project area they plan to pursue.

According to a map on the RPC website, several of their target assessment areas are located in North Birmingham and the Ensley area.

These neighborhoods were classified as Superfund sites by the EPA over a decade ago, meaning they suffered contamination that will require a long-term cleanup response.

Much of this contamination can be traced back to Birmingham’s history of iron and steel production. Decades ago, when environmental regulations were less strict, North Birmingham factories such as Bluestone Coke engaged in practices that caused immense amounts of air and soil pollution.

J.T. Moore, Birmingham councilman for District 4 and Ensley native, said he has not yet been contacted by the RPC for planning but looks forward to working with them to help the many people in his district affected by pollution.

“I definitely would be open to having conversations with them [the RPC],” said Moore. “Because we definitely need to collaborate to figure out what’s the best way to serve the residents in those areas.”

Although many early North Birmingham factories eventually shut down, Bluestone Coke remained in operation until 2021 when they ceased operations following several citations from the Jefferson County Department of Health regarding air pollution permit violations.

Following this shutdown, the JCDH, the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), and the Greater-Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution (GASP), entered into a legal battle with Bluestone to obtain reparations for nearby residents who had suffered from the pollution and to ensure Bluestone would comply with environmental standards if they were to reopen.

“These measures follow years of citations from the Jefferson County Department of Health for serious violations of Bluestone’s permit — including hazardous emissions from leaking coke ovens at the plant,” said a previous SELC press release. “In 2019 and 2020, ambient air samples GASP and SELC collected around the Bluestone Coke plant showed elevated levels of benzene and naphthalene, two toxic air pollutants associated with coking.”

As The Lede previously reported, Bluestone signed a consent decree in December 2022 and agreed to pay $925,000 to JCDH to be disseminated throughout the impacted community.

This fine was the largest in JCDH history and half will be spent on the construction of “green spaces, the removal of blighted property, and other environmental improvement projects in the communities adjacent to Bluestone’s plant” according to a previous statement by the JCDH.

North Birmingham resident Charlie Powell, founder of Birmingham environmental nonprofit People Against Neighborhood Industrial Contamination (PANIC), previously said that the $500,000 dedicated to North Birmingham was nothing more than a “pat on the back.”

“That’s nice but even if you doubled that $500,000 and made it a million, it would take more than that to move these people,” said Powell. “..That ain’t no money. You could get hurt in an accident and get more than that. These people [Bluestone] done killed millions of people around here. They done killed a whole lot of people around here. Centuries of people.”

Representatives from Bluestone did not respond to requests for comment.

Moore took the opposite stance however and said that any money, whether it be from the EPA program or the legal suit, is helpful in the pursuit of redevelopment.

“I think any and every amount towards helping to improve the quality of life of those residents is pivotal,” said Moore. “The conversation right now is, as far as residents are concerned is either are you going to help me to move out? Or how are you going to help me to improve my neighborhood so I can take pride in the neighborhood that I live in? So, I think any amount that could go towards addressing those two main concerns is, like I said, pivotal.”

Moore said growing up in Ensley the pollution was something that was always talked about but continued that paying attention to the issue was no longer enough. He said now is the time for action.

“People, like I said, have said ‘Hey we want one of two things. We either want to have our neighborhood cleaned up or we want to be relocated.’ I think that’s what we should focus on,” Moore said.

“I think the mayor and his team are focusing on and developing plans. Myself and my team, we’re developing plans. And we’re all trying to collaborate and figure out what would be the best option for the community with community input as well. We’re just trying to figure it out. But I do know that action needs to be the top priority. We need to make sure that whatever it is we come up with we do it quickly so that people see that it’s not just a conversation. They know that people are actively getting things done on their behalf.”

In his comment Moore referred to Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin’s “The Big Ask.”

This 60-page document was drafted by the city’s Planning, Engineering and Permits division sometime between 2019-2020 with the goal of relocating and improving the living conditions of over a thousand residents of the Collegeville neighborhood and other areas of North Birmingham.

The plan proposed a $37 million budget, $19 million to purchase property from owners in the North Birmingham area and the rest split between relocating renters and making the area safer for people who choose to stay. However, no action has been taken on the plan since it was first drafted, and the city’s office of public information previously said that it was still in early stages and required further “vetting” from the mayor and other city departments.

Powell previously said that while “most” North Birmingham residents would like to be bought out of their homes, in discussions about this plan some homeowners had been offered as little as $10,000 for their properties. Powell said that “no one” would leave their homes for this amount.

Like council member Moore, Powell previously said help needs to be coming to these areas sooner rather than later.

Wilson said that while no projects were yet planned for Birmingham, the RPC is currently using part of the funding to assess parts of downtown Cordova in Walker County for redevelopment following damage left by the 2011 tornadoes that ravaged a large portion of the state.

The tornado that touched down in Cordova on Apr. 27, 2011, killed 10 people and cut a 123-mile path of damage going across the city.

Representatives for the city of Cordova did not respond to requests for comment on their work with the RPC.

Participation in the Brownfields program comes at no cost to property owners. If you think you have a site that may qualify, the RPC said to contact Wilson at [email protected].

After a site is approved RPC staff will reach out to schedule a visit to assess the site and from there planning and consultation with RPC and the EPA can begin.