Charles Town Secures $250,000 EPA Brownfields Grant to Support Development of Waterfront Park & Recreation

CHARLES TOWN – The City of Charles Town has secured a $250,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the cleanup of brownfields along the Evitts Run Creek on the west side of Charles Town, which will help the City move toward its vision of creating a grand system of waterfront parks, recreational facilities, and green infrastructure that can protect the Chesapeake Bay watershed.  The funding is from the EPA’s Brownfields Cleanup program, and its supplements a $650,000 grant from EPA that Charles Town secured in 2012 for these same Evitts Run brownfields cleanups.  

The Evitts Run Creek is bordered by the existing Evitts Run Park, and by the 12-acre Charles Washington Park that includes town founder Charles Washington and his wife’s gravesite.  Both of these parcels were donated to the City by the Perry Family of Charles Town.   

However, much of the area surround the Evitts Run Creek is blighted by former industrial sites, overgrown and inaccessible to the public, and lacking park and recreational amenities.  These properties include a former municipal dump, the Charles Town Public Works Yard, the former Dixie-Narco parking lot, and the contaminated Supertane property.  Now, Charles Town has created a vision for a connected system of parks, trails, and recreational assets on these lands that can serve the community and future generations.  Charles Town has already taken significant action to move this vision forward:

• Charles Town has formed a new municipal non-profit called the “Evitts Run Conversancy”, which is dedicated to transforming the brownfields as well as vacant, overgrown parcels along the Evitts Run Creek into a contiguous municipal park system with waterside trails, recreational amenities, and green infrastructure. 

• Charles Town has established designs and preliminary engineering for the transformation of the Public Works Yard brownfield into a community lake and recreational area, which will also serve as a major green infrastructure facility to handle stormwater from the Charles Town-Ranson urban area and prevent it from impacting the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers and the Chesapeake Bay.  This design was funded by the EPA Office of Water and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), and Charles Town is making plans now to take this project toward implementation in partnership with NFWF. 

• Charles Town is pleased that the Perry Family has donated approximately 4.5 acres of land on the eastern bank of the Evitts Run Creek to the new Conservancy, stretching from the main street/S.R. 51 to the pond beside the Sav-a-Lot store on Augustine Avenue.  This land includes the Supertane parcel, a former manufactured gas plant that shuttered in 1954 after nearly a century of operation.  The City of Charles Town has secured the $650,000 in U.S. EPA funding mentioned above, and dedicated much of that grant to the cleanup and revitalization of the Supertane parcel.     

• In early July, Charles Town joined with local community groups to cut the ribbon on a new, completed project to deploy 28 species of trees and shrubs and 15 native plants along the banks of the Evitts Run Creek, to enhance the community and eco-system along the Evitts Run Park.  
  

Now, Charles Town has secured the additional $250,000 in EPA Brownfields Cleanup funds, which will be dedicated to cleanup and site improvements on these lands, to ensure that they can be transformed into future park and recreational sites.

Click here for the official EPA Press Release.