FAIRMONT — The FOCUS West Virginia Brownfields program, which has gone statewide, is inspiring communities to work toward economic development and revitalization.

Sera Zegre, project manager for the FOCUS West Virginia Brownfields program, said the two West Virginia brownfields assistance centers were set up by the Legislature in 2005 to help communities throughout the state. A brownfield is any property that would normally be reused or redeveloped but is hindered by either an environmental perception or a real environmental problem.

Zegre is involved in the Northern West Virginia Brownfields Assistance Center, which is located within the West Virginia Water Research Institute at West Virginia University’s National Research Center for Coal and Energy. It serves the state’s northern 33 counties.

The Brownfields Assistance Center at Marshall University concentrates on the 22 counties in the southern part of West Virginia. It is one program within the university’s Center for Environmental, Geotechnical and Applied Sciences, program coordinator George Carico said.

2009 was the first year that the FOCUS West Virginia Brownfields program, funded through the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, was available. FOCUS stands for the Foundation for Overcoming Challenges and Utilizing Strengths.

“The purpose of the program is to provide financial and technical assistance throughout communities in West Virginia to revitalize their brownfields,” Zegre said.

She said the grant originally focused on assisting communities in Northern West Virginia, but the program was so successful that WVU is partnering with Marshall to take it statewide in 2010. Now, any unit of local government or nonprofit organization in the state is eligible to apply for a $5,000 mini-grant for brownfields work.

“I think that the northern and southern brownfields assistance centers have already proven a strong partnership,” Zegre said. “This just takes it to another level of trying to provide assistance statewide and reach very different parts of the state.”

Carico said the program is a wonderful opportunity for communities to redevelop sites that may have environmental issues associated with them. The funding can help stalled projects move forward or start brand new endeavors. Communities could take an old abandoned site and turn that dilapidated building into something positive, useful and worthwhile.

Carico’s job is to get people in the southern part of the state interested in the program, and to help communities that have limited resources put together a quality grant application, he said.

The program has real potential for economic development, Carico said.

“We’re very appreciative of the Benedum Foundation and their partnership, and to make this a statewide initiative is wonderful as well,” he said. “The Benedum Foundation folks are just great to work with.”

Zegre said because the program is privately funded, it has a lot more flexibility than state and federal grants.

The Benedum Foundation is interested in supporting activities within West Virginia that revolve around capacity building, education and entrepreneurship, and the FOCUS grant feeds into those interests, she said.

This site-specific grant program is aimed at redevelopment in two stages, Zegre said. The first phase is planning and assessment, and working within the community to envision the future of a site. The second stage of the program narrows down the original recipients, provides additional funding, and goes into actually trying to implement their strategies.

The 15 grantees that are chosen in the first round will not only receive $5,000 in financial assistance, but will also get technical support from the brownfields centers and help with their visioning efforts, Zegre said.

She said the application instructions were just released, and applications are due Dec. 18. The brownfields assistance centers are hosting an online conference call training on Dec. 1 and 3 for interested participants.

“They’re pretty powerful means to spurring revitalization efforts throughout West Virginia,” Zegre said of the FOCUS grants. “There’s a lot of ripple effects that take place because of this community-based revitalization work.”

Grantees from the past year included former glass factories, gas stations and other types of abandoned and underutilized properties, she said.

In 2009, the 15 original grant recipients from Northern West Virginia, which included the former Fairmont Box Factory and the Owens-Illinois Glass Factory in Fairmont, were announced in May and each got a $5,000 FOCUS West Virginia Brownfields mini-grant. They presented their projects in August at the Showcase West Virginia event in Morgantown.

During the West Virginia Brownfields Conference, held in Morgantown in September, five of the 15 initial winners went on to receive an additional $12,000 in Phase Two of the grant program. In addition to Marion Regional Development Corp.’s Owens-Illinois project, the following entities received funding: Brooke-Hancock Regional Planning and Development Council, Friends of the Cheat, Friends of Deckers Creek, and Rowlesburg Revitalization Committee.

MRDC will use a significant portion of its new FOCUS grant to investigate underground storage tanks that could potentially be on the 25-acre Owens-Illinois property, which is on Speedway Avenue. The money will also go toward further marketing and community outreach efforts. The site could potentially be redeveloped into an office space, a mixed-use property with retail, or another industrial application.

For more information, visit www.wvbrownfields.org.

E-mail Jessica Legge Borders at jlegge@timeswv.com.