ICSC meets with EPA officials to advocate for the expedited process of delisting sites from the National Priorities List (NPL) with a focus on risk-based clean ups and urged for the consideration of partial delisting as a best practice. This is important because this proactive initiative urges the EPA to focus on sites with the highest impact and best future public benefit to accelerate its decision-making process and contain costs. Shopping center developers use brownfield grants through different municipalities as a very valuable tool for property tax relief and liability protections.

Property environmental conditions are important to shopping center owners for a number of reasons. They are important to fully understand the past and current environment history and condition to best protect against liability of ownership. Banks require to have a complete understanding of the condition to confirm that their collateral is safe, and that they have a reduced legal and financial liability as a lending position on the property. It is extremely important to have a transparent and clean bill of health on the asset as it will reduce time and efforts during the due diligence process of a sales transaction. I recommend consulting with a qualified environmental engineer prior to the sale of a property. This helps to uncover any possible issues or REC’s aka “recognized environmental conditions” that would arrive while the buyer is under contract. If you understand any existing issues, you can hit these obstacles head on and work towards a solution to overcome any concerns a buyer or bank might have during crunch time, making it a smoother process to getting a deal done!

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