NJ.com
July 7, 2013
By Sue Epstein
PERTH AMBOY — Two contaminated industrial sites earmarked for redevelopment for the past decade are finally being cleaned up and readied for use.
The old National Lead site on High Street near the Outerbridge Crossing will become a 1.2 million-square-foot distribution center with warehouses, commercial offices and possibly light manufacturing. The old Chevron property located between Route 35 and Amboy Avenue is also being redeveloped, Mayor Wilda Diaz said.
“We’re starting to see companies making huge investments in our city, bringing these old sites back to life,” Diaz said, adding the new projects will also bring jobs to the city.
Late last month, the Perth Amboy Redevelopment Agency (PARA) and Viridian Partners, a brownfields redevelopment company, held a groundbreaking at the old National Lead site which will become the ePort Logistics Center.
Tate Goss, president of Viridian Partners, said the property is already approved for warehouses and light industrial use.
Goss said his company purchases contaminated sites and, working with the state Department of Environmental Protection and federal Environmental Protection Agency, cleans them up so they can be reused.
He said the first phase of the 25-acre site, much of which was never developed, is the cleanup. Phase two will be the construction.
Goss said the property has deep-water port access along the Arthur Kill, rail and major highway access, making it “an excellent location” for warehouses storing goods brought for distribution along the eastern United States.
“When goods are brought to this country on the west coast, they make their way east by train with their destination being Kearny where the products are unloaded and put on trucks,” he said, adding that the trucks would deliver them to the warehouses in Perth Amboy for distribution to stores in New York and New Jersey.
Goss said once the site is cleaned up and approved for use by the DEP and EPA, his firm will sell the property to a second developer for development of three buildings for warehouse or other use.
Viridian is investing about $90 million in the purchase and cleanup of the property — a project expected to take 18 months to complete.
Goss said it will cost another $65 million for the “vertical construction” of the buildings.
The property was originally going to be redeveloped in 2004 as I-Port 440 International Trade and Logistics Center, but Goss said the original developer, Panattone Development Corp., backed out and Perth Amboy officials contacted his company which has done five or six other projects in the state.
Diaz said she would like to see a “top 500 company” come to the new center, one that would “be here for the long term and have a positive impact on our city.”
The mayor said the old Chevron site is now being cleaned up by Buckeye Partners and will be used for liquid pertroleum storage when the $250 million project is completed. The 250-acre tract was supposed to be cleaned up and redeveloped as an office and warehouse complex in 2005, but the original developer backed out.
“Both of those properties were dormant for more than two decades, Diaz said. “We have to be realistic. They need strong remediation, so it’s exciting to see interest in redeveloping them.”
For Viridian Partners, a firm that specializes in acquiring, remediating and repositioning contaminated land into new development sites, New Jersey has always checked all of the boxes.
“The nexus that we needed to make it work was a very land-constrained market with a lot of population and a lot of demand, but just not enough dirt,” said Tate Goss, the firm’s president. “We also had to have brownfields that were sufficiently sized so that you could do something meaningful with them.”
It’s why Viridian’s first project more than a decade ago was in New Jersey, despite being based in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. And the Garden State has continued to be a major piece of its business, especially with the shortage of sizable, well-located development sites that could support the state’s booming market for industrial construction.
With major projects in a half-dozen New Jersey municipalities, Viridian has remediated enough land to make way for 6.5 million square feet of industrial space, Goss said. Its entrance came in 2005 through Burlington Township, where it acquired a 130-acre property that housed an active chemical plant from 1947 to 1992.
Over the next several years after Viridian’s acquisition, the firm carried out a remediation plan that included treating and removing hazardous materials in the ground, while bringing in more than 300,000 cubic yards of fill to the site along the Delaware River.
“That’s a scary proposition to deal with if you don’t know what you’re doing,” Goss said. “We had the best science in the country working on that, and we basically turned a lagoon into a big green rock.”
The result was a site that was approved for nearly 1.7 million square feet of industrial space, which was sold as shovel-ready and is now seeing active construction.
The firm, which was founded by Goss and CEO William Lynott, also has done projects in Woodbridge, Elizabeth, Cranbury and Perth Amboy. What it hasn’t done is vertical development, even with the wealth of experience that both founders brought to the venture.
“That’s more of a strategic move on our part,” said Goss, who spent some 45 years in development before Viridian. “You’ve got some of the best developers — local, national, and regional — in the country in your market, so why compete with guys that we could be working with?”
Tate said its model works better here than a place such as Connecticut, which has brownfields but not ones that are large enough to support major development. That’s not the case in New Jersey, thanks to its manufacturing heritage.
Viridian has since found opportunities in other markets, including California and Florida. But it’s also looking for more opportunities in New Jersey, even amid growing competition for sites.
In its pipeline, the firm has enough projects to produce about 2.5 million square feet of developable space, Goss said.
And while New Jersey’s layers of regulation are usually the source of angst for many businesses, that type of framework is a positive in Viridian’s case.
“We do like doing business there,” Goss said. “At lot of states just don’t have that level of sophistication.”
