Posted on May 23, 2018
By: Bill Mosher and Ann Sperling
Long-term planning and collaboration among various partners across multiple jurisdictions have been key to creating a new industrial park in Denver’s Globeville neighborhood.
More than a century ago, the Asarco Globe Plant was operating as a metal smelting facility, employing nearly 3,000 Coloradans in Denver’s culturally rich Globeville neighborhood. Over the years, an array of industrial processes and uncontrolled disposal on-site contaminated the groundwater and soil with heavy metals. This contamination resulted in the property being identified as a brownfield site, and decades of investigation and remediation began.
When Asarco finally closed the plant entirely in 2006, the community was left with a blighted, abandoned and fenced 77.5-acre site. Land developer EnviroFinance Group LLC (EFG), working closely with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Adams and Denver counties, managed the site’s environmental cleanup, achieving regulatory closure in June 2015. (Ongoing monitoring will continue for several more quarterly testing periods.)