The City of Guelph, Ontario, Canada has new guidelines that will clarify exactly what needs be done on the environmental engineering side when redeveloping contaminated or potentially contaminated land.
Terry Gayman, the city’s manager of infrastructure, development and environmental engineering, says that updating the process should make brownfield redevelopment more efficient.
“In the past there hasn’t really been a documented or formalized process that was transparent outward,” he said. “The city certainly did do that type of work, but the process in the past was maybe a little less flexible and a little more rigorous than maybe it needed to be in all situations.”
The new guidelines, he added, attempt to address those kinds of issues, and provide an easier way for applicants to prepare themselves for the environmental engineering – environmental site assessment – requirement.
They also set out the ways in which screening for contamination is to be carried out.
Information gathered from screening can then guide decisions about what kinds of redevelopment should take place.
The guidelines will make it possible to expedite the approval process for some types of redevelopment, depending on what the end use will be, Gayman added.