A half-million dollar federal grant will help Dubuque to redevelop industrial sites along the Mississippi River.
The northeastern Iowa city is among the latest recipients of an EPA Brownfields Cleanup Grant and agency administrators will visit Dubuque on Wednesday.
Mayor Brad Cavanagh says the EPA has partnered with the city since the early 2000s.
“What happened around that time was, Dubuque just sort of realized that we’ve got this river along our eastern edge, and because it was a former industrial site, a lot of it had some sort of cleanup that was required,” Cavanagh says. “So, the partnership with the EPA really started around that time to start doing some development.”
The mayor says that partnership helped to revitalize the city’s historic Mill District and its North Port.
The funds will help Dubuque to redevelop sites along the river, including a shuttered Alliant Energy coal plant and a former coffin factory. Cavanagh says the program has helped the city to pivot from its industrial past.
“If there wasn’t such a thing as Brownfield funding at the federal government level, we would not be in the same situation that we’re in in Dubuque. We would be figuring out how to deal with all of these contaminated areas,” he says. “And the fact that we have that partnership with the federal government is a game-changer for industrial cities along the river like ours.”
The Brownfields Grant program aims to spur redevelopment and cleanup at contaminated industrial sites nationwide.
Five grantees in Iowa received a combined $3.5-million in the latest round of funding. Others include the city of Burlington and a wetland preserve in Davenport.
