We help clients deal with the environmental risks inherent in real estate ownership and management. Those risks can arise anywhere along the spectrum of owning, developing, and operating property and can affect owners, developers, lenders, sellers, buyers and tenants. Our clients range from international commercial developers to local neighborhood shopping center owners.

Brownfields Redevelopment
We have established a particular expertise in redevelopment projects, working with clients to bring contaminated property back into productive use. Our attorneys were working with clients' contaminated sites long before these properties were given the name "brownfields". As a result, we are intimately familiar with the federal, state and local programs used to address brownfields.

A significant portion of our work focuses on creating strategies that combine site remediation with site redevelopment. We also advise clients on a regular basis regarding the use of private environmental insurance and other contractual risk allocation mechanisms for liability protection in connection with brownfield properties.

Redevelopment of contaminated property requires regulatory corrective action. In working through the regulatory process, clients need professional expertise and experience. Our firm can interface with the regulatory authorities and with the technical consultants and remediation contractors working on the in-the-field issues presented by a contaminated site.

Redevelopment also presents various issues that extend beyond the legal and regulatory counseling provided by our firm. Our firm also coordinates with professionals from various disciplines to deal with the full range of expertise needed to deal with all phases of projects for redeveloping, repositioning, and reusing impacted properties. Those services may include:

• Environmental assessment and other technical and scientific expertise
• Site remediation
• Risk management and transfer
• Real estate positioning and transactions
• Entitlements and implementation of economic development incentives
• Public/private development partnerships
• Media and public relations

Municipal Setting Designations
While there is no way around the increased transactional costs and time involved with deals involving contaminated properties, a Municipal Setting Designation (“MSD”) for a contaminated site has the potential for both lowering the cost of site assessment and remediation and also speeding up the timeline to get a closure determination from the State of Texas, so deals can be completed. MSDs provide an important tool for property owners needing an exit strategy for environmentally-impacted properties, and for purchasers and developers dealing with the challenges of redeveloping contaminated property. As a result MSDs are impacting, in a very positive way, the market for urban infill properties in Texas.

The Municipal Setting Designation statute was adopted by the Texas Legislature in 2003. It created a new remediation tool that is changing strategies for cleaning up and redeveloping contaminated sites. The MSD is of particular use for properties that have been stuck in the Voluntary Cleanup Program or other State of Texas corrective action programs with no resolution in sight.

In 2007, the Texas Legislature amended the MSD statute to remove the requirement that a municipality have a minimum population of 20,000 in order to utilize an MSD. That legislative change makes MSDs available to small cities across Texas.

GSF had the good fortune to get significant early experience with the MSD process. In October of 2004 we obtained MSD 001 (and later the first VCP final certificate of completion based upon an MSD) for the Goodwill site in West Dallas. We represented a client on the buy side in the transaction for a site on Motor Street in Dallas that received MSD 002. In 2005 we successfully obtained the first Fort Worth MSD ordinance (MSD 004) for the Montgomery Plaza development. We have participated in the development of MSD programs for the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, Grapevine, Plano, Mesquite, Terrell, Longview, and Abilene and obtained the first TCEQ-certified multi-siteowner MSD.

Our firm has been involved with a significant number of the MSDs certified to date by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Those MSDs have made possible hundreds of millions of dollars in new real estate development. Two of the firm’s MSD projects are described below.

Wood Partners. Wood Partners is a regional developer known for tackling projects on environmentally-challenged sites in major metropolitan markets. Our firm represented Wood Partners with environmental aspects of the redevelopment of an abandoned site across the highway from the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas. The 15 acre tract was part of a river bottom area utilized as a landfill in the late nineteenth and early twentieth that extended to the east, south, and west of the site. Numerous petroleum, pesticide, metal, and chlorinated groundwater and soil contaminants were noted during early investigation activities, which, along with subsurface methane concentrations, presented a substantial barrier to redevelopment. After analyzing the engineering challenges of building on top of the existing landfill, the client chose to remove the waste from the site, rather than developing over it. The waste removed aggregated over 110,000 cubic yards. Our firm assisted the client in obtaining a Municipal Setting Designation to address regional groundwater concerns. The site subsequently received regulatory closure under the VCP in August 2008 with TCEQ’s issuance of a Certificate of Completion. The total costs of investigation, remediation and regulatory closure totaled approximately $3.8 million. Construction of the Alta Design District apartments is anticipated to be completed in December, 2009. The project will bring 309 new residences to a redeveloping section of the city and significantly increase downtown Dallas’ tax base on a site previously considered as undevelopable. Urban landfills have long been seen as the last major hurdle to Brownfield redevelopment. This project serves as a great example of working with state and local municipalities to accomplish redevelopment goals. The end result created jobs, uses existing infrastructure, and eliminated environmental contamination previously left unaddressed.

Balcones Realty Partners. Our firm represented Balcones Realty Partners in connection with a redevelopment project involving a 37 acre assemblage of nine properties in Dallas. The properties had various known or suspected environmental issues related to commercial and industrial uses conducted at the various properties. GSF advised structuring the transaction to enable Balcones to resolve the major areas of uncertainty before taking title to the various properties. The firm coordinated the remediation and closure strategy for the site using a Municipal Setting Designation for the entire site, which the firm was able to obtain for the client from the City of Dallas and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. By aggregating the sites in to a single MSD, Balcones was able to resolve long-standing conflicts among adjacent property owners regarding migration of contaminated groundwater. The client received a Voluntary Cleanup Program Certificate of Completion from the TCEQ in June 2008 for the site, which is awaiting redevelopment. The site is located in a revitalizing area near the campus of University of Texas Southwestern Medical School where commercial and industrial uses are being replaced by residential development and the redevelopment will bring retail shopping into a traditionally underserved area of the city. Developers had previously avoided the area due to the history of regulatory problems and litigation associated with two of the keys tracts in the assemblage. GSF was effective in educating Balcones’ out-of-state investors and its banker that an MSD strategy was politically feasible and that it would be effective in resolving the most worrisome environmental issues at the site, thus allowing financing to be put in place before final resolution of the regulatory process.

Please feel free to contact any of us to discuss how we might assist you.