PRESS RELEASE

Augusta, ME – Maine Redevelopment Land Bank Authority is proud to announce its selection as one of three recipients nationwide of the Center for Community Progress’ Technical Assistance Scholarship for Land Banks with Brownfields, supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The other awardees include Build Baton Rouge in Louisiana and the City of Raton, New Mexico. This national award provides targeted, no cost technical assistance to help Maine Redevelopment build a scalable, statewide brownfields redevelopment model.

Through this scholarship, Center for Community Progress will work directly with Maine Redevelopment to refine program design, strengthen project pipeline development, and align brownfields strategy with Maine’s redevelopment needs. The work will focus on program capacity, stakeholder engagement, site prioritization, and a framework for sustainable statewide cleanup and reuse.

“We’re thrilled to receive this support from the Center for Community Progress,” said Tuck O’Brien, Executive Director of Maine Redevelopment. “This partnership will help us build Maine’s brownfields program from the ground up, ensuring we have the tools and strategy necessary to meet the significant needs across our communities.”

As Maine’s first statewide land bank, Maine Redevelopment is advancing work across Municipal Technical Assistance, Brownfields, Land Banking, and Special Projects. With brownfields as a core program area, this scholarship arrives at a pivotal time as the organization prepares for its first site cleanup and continues developing a statewide inventory and prioritization framework.

Tarik Abdelazim, Vice President of Technical Assistance, highlighted the opportunity, “We look forward to supporting the Maine Redevelopment Land Bank as it builds a thoughtful and impactful brownfields approach for the entire state.”

About Community Progress: The Center for Community Progress helps people to transform vacant spaces into vibrant places. Since 2010, their team of experts has provided urban, suburban, and rural communities looking to revitalize vacant properties with the tools and resources needed to address those properties at the policy and systems level. As the only national nonprofit dedicated to vacant property revitalization, Community Progress drives change by uncovering and disrupting systems that perpetuate entrenched vacancy and property deterioration. Community Progress has delivered customized, expert guidance to leaders in over 300 communities and provided hundreds of hours of free educational resources as well as leadership programming to help policymakers, practitioners, and community members across the country return properties to productive use. To learn more and get help for your community, visit communityprogress.org.

About Maine Redevelopment Land Bank Authority: Maine Redevelopment stabilizes and rehabilitates abandoned, environmentally hazardous, and functionally obsolete properties to create economic development opportunities and strengthen property values. Through partnerships with municipalities, public organizations, counties, and state agencies, Maine Redevelopment helps foster vibrant, prosperous, and sustainable communities across Maine. Our mission is to partner with communities to revitalize properties and reimagine their potential for Maine’s future. We are catalysts for transformation, working alongside communities to build a more vibrant and resilient future for generations to come. visit maineredevelopment.org

What is a Brownfield? A brownfield is a previously developed building or site that is vacant or underutilized due to environmental contamination from past industrial or commercial use. With appropriate assessment and cleanup, these sites can be returned to productive use.