November 24, 2008—The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has awarded grants to several cities and states in recent weeks to empower their efforts to address local environmental issues.
EPA awarded a Community Action for a Renewed Environment (CARE) grant to the city of Trenton, New Jersey, to help the former major manufacturing center leverage its own efforts to go green. Through this $100,000 grant, Trenton will explore sources of pollutants that include air water and solid waste, and other environmental areas of concern. The CARE grant will build on the Trenton Green Initiative, which produced a “Green Plan” to reduce the city’s carbon footprint.
A project to reduce waste at hotels in Vermont has received $25,000 from EPA’s Resource Conservation Challenge program. The Northeast Recycling Council, working with the Vermont Green Hotels program, was given the money for a three-year project aimed at reducing the amount of sold waste generated, increasing recycling, increasing the rescue and composting of food, and reducing the use of toxic chemicals in hotels.
Communities in New York, Florida, and Connecticut will receive technical assistance from EPA’s Smart Growth program to help put the principles of efficient, affordable, and environmentally sensitive growth into action. Under a federal contract, each community will receive direct technical assistance valued at approximately $45,000 from a team of national experts. The projects, which were selected under a national competition that drew 47 applicants from 22 states and Puerto Rico, are as follows:
- The Capitol Regional Council of Government of Connecticut, representing 29 Hartford metropolitan area municipalities, has requested assistance in developing model zoning approaches that would use smart growth strategies to support development of affordable housing options;
- Concerned about the expansion of metropolitan Miami into areas adjacent to the Everglades National Park, Miami-Dade County, Florida has requested assistance to explore how management and oversight of a major planning tool–the Urban Development Boundary, which separates urban from non-urban development–might be changed to better support county growth goals; and
- The City of New York’s Office of Comprehensive Neighborhood Economic Development has requested assistance to identify innovative strategies to support the green design, construction, and management of affordable residential and mixed-use housing in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.
