The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), a nonprofit research and strategy organization and the leading authority on U.S. inner city economies and businesses that thrive there, recently cited Waterbury’s state-of-the-art industrial park – the Waterbury Industrial Commons – as a prime example of how to remediate an urban brownfield site.

As part of its What Works For Cities case study, the ICIC cited Waterbury’s success in cleaning the polluted industrial site that was once the Chase Brass & Copper Company and turning the mile-long plant into the Waterbury Industrial Commons, home to several successful businesses.

The study highlights how partnerships among multiple levels of government and the private sector led to the remediation and redevelopment of the site, creating needed tax revenue and jobs.

Waterbury, under the Administration of Mayor Neil M. O’Leary, remains the state’s leader in brownfield identification and redevelopment.  Last fall, our Workforce Investment Board’s Brownfield Job Training Program was featured as another case study in a federal EPA publication on the Waterbury Industrial Commons and another project for job placement. The publication was released at the EPA’s Brownfield Conference in September 2015 in Chicago. Mayor O’Leary led a team from Waterbury that presented a program at the National Conference on the success Waterbury has had in remediating brownfields and putting them back on the city tax rolls.

The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City was founded in 1994 by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter. The organization seeks to strengthen inner city economies by providing businesses, governments and investors with the most comprehensive and actionable information in the field about urban market opportunities.

To view the ICIC case study on the Waterbury Industrial Commons, CLICK HERE