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The City of Concord yesterday announced a deal to build an athletic complex with 20 indoor basketball and volleyball courts in historic downtown. The announcement is part of a decade-long focus on abandoned lots that hinder revitalization in the city's center.
In city planning lingo, there are "greenfields" - virgin land that's never been developed - and there are "brownfields" like the one where this new athletic complex will be built.
"A polluted hole in the ground," as Concord Mayor Scott Padgett called it. That was a giddy Concord Mayor Scott Padgett announcing the deal that took a decade to hatch. A "brownfield" is any site where some kind of contamination may have occurred - an abandoned gas station or dry cleaner, for example.
City planning director Steve Osborne says Concord has some 175 brownfield sites in about 10 square miles at the heart of Concord. Concord has a particularly large number in the downtown area because of the old textile mills that used all kinds of chemicals and heavy metals. The problem with developing these sites says Osborne, is that "no financial institution's gonna loan you money and probably no tenants are gonna come" unless you get a special assessment to determine if there is any contamination on the site.
The assessment - called a "phase one" - an expensive process with enough uncertainty that developers - especially in this economy - are rarely able to stomach. So, in 2000, Concord officials started to aggressively pursue federal grants to do pollution assessments for its most troublesome brownfield sites.
One of the first the city tackled was that "polluted hole in the ground" that will soon become a $3.9 million sports complex. It used to house the city's public works operation and needed about $100,000 in clean-up funds. The project could have been built more easily on any number of clean "greenfield" sites on the outskirts of town, but Mayor Padgett says downtown Concord is crucial. "If the core of the apple's rotten the apple's gonna be rotten," says Padgett. "So, if the core of our city is not vibrant, the rest of the city's not gonna be vibrant."
Over the last ten years the city of Concord has received more than half a million dollars in federal grants to make sure the shuttered textile mills, gas stations and industrial sites of its past don't stand in the way of downtown development.
"Carolina Courts" is the company that will own and operate the athletic complex. Company officials expect to host tournaments that will draw as many as 1,000 young athletes and their families to downtown Concord on weekends. About half of the $3.9 million cost to develop the athletics complex is coming from federal loans and grants for urban revitalization. Concord essentially donated the land to Carolina Courts and helped secure the federal funding, but is not giving the developer financial assistance or tax incentives.