Palmetto’s Connor Park wins EPA Phoenix Award for Brownfield Transformation
By Lisa Neff
Palmetto’s community redevelopment agency transformed a brownfield into a greenspace, an eco-park populated with birds, adorned with art and attracting people.
Now, for the creation of Connor Park, the CRA is earning recognition, inspiring other communities and working to tackle more projects to promote sustainability and improve the quality of life in Palmetto.
Connor Park, 505 Fifth St. W., opened in 2023. The site, acquired by the city in 1998 and transferred to the CRA in 1999, was a brownfield, defined as a property where reuse is complicated by the presence of pollutants or contaminants. The federal Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are more than 450,000 brownfields in the United States, including more than 600 in Florida.
“We have a mandate. We are mandated to eliminate slum and blight,” said Rowena Young-Gopie, executive director of the Palmetto CRA
In Florida, a local CRA’s purpose is to revitalize specific areas by improving infrastructure, promoting private investment and enhancing public spaces to remove blight.
In Connor Park, blight became beauty.
“It’s a long road to where we’ve come with the park,” Young-Gopie assessed.
The city’s website, palmettofl.org, contains a history of the property prior to redevelopment under the title “From Spur to Spurned: History and Contamination of Connor Park.”
It’s not an unusual history for a property that, beginning in the 1920s, was key to a railroad operation. When the depot and spur was decommissioned in the 1980s, the soil was left contaminated by arsenic and petroleum.
With the cleanup that followed, a park was created that contains walking trails, native landscaping, open greenspace, “solar trees” and a 500,000-gallon stormwater retention system that reduces flooding and pre-cleans water flowing into the Manatee River, where 76 oyster reefs further filter water and provide aquatic habitat. The park’s water treatment removes an estimated 172 pounds of nitrogen and 56 pounds of phosphorus a year.
Palmetto’s effort involved support at every level of government, with funding for environmental assessments, brownfield reuse planning and environmental remediation, including hauling away 928 tons of impacted soil in 2018.
The design team that worked with the CRA consisted of architecture, engineering, project management and general contracting firms, as well as sculptor and graphic artist Ron Berman.
Last August, when the EPA presented the CRA with the Phoenix honor, a statement on a website for the award read, “Once a site marred by decades of contamination from railroad operations and industrial activity, Connor Park has now been transformed into a beacon of environmental stewardship. The project team removed thousands of tons of contaminated soil, restoring wetlands and creek habitats, and deploying innovative solutions such as phytoremediation, artificial reef balls and coral plugs to restore the health of the Manatee River and its delicate ecosystems.”
Stewardship and sustainability factored into every aspect of Connor Park’s creation. Parking and walkways are made with low-impact, porous pavers, bioswales filter water, e-trees increase energy efficiency and more than 600 trees and plants reduce noise pollution, cool the park and provide habitat.
Young-Gopie said she once toured the park with several birding enthusiasts who identified at least 20 species. Cornell Lab’s eBird app indicates more than 100 species have been recorded in the area.
“We’re known as a bird sanctuary,” Young-Gopie said of Palmetto, adding that trail plans and additional efforts will help connect Connor Park to other nature hotspots.
The CRA head hopes other small communities can replicate Palmetto’s success.
“It’s a tedious process, but it can be done,” she said. “And for a very small city like Palmetto, to see how far we’ve come and the work that we’ve put in and the partnerships that we’ve developed through this whole process, it’s a really big thing for us. … We try to partner with other communities to help get to this place.”
For more information
For more information about Connor Park and the Palmetto CRA, go to www.palmettocra.org/cra.