New Milford Tapped to Receive State Grant Money

NEW MILFORD, CT – Governor Dannel P. Malloy today announced that New Milford will be among six municipalities and organizations in Connecticut to share in a total of $1 million in state grants that will help the entities in their efforts to remediate and redevelop clusters of blighted properties – also known as “brownfields” – and put them back into productive use.

New Milford will receive a $170,000 grant to develop a master plan to assess remediation needs for a cluster of brownfields along the Housatonic River Corridor. The redevelopment project will focus on reuse of town-owned and private properties to help restore public access to the river and serve as a catalyst for economic development within walking distance of downtown.

The funds are being awarded by the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development through the recently launched Brownfield Area-Wide Revitalization Grant program. This is the second round of grants being awarded under the program. Created in 2015, the program encourages communities to consider areas such as neighborhoods, downtowns, waterfront districts, or other sections with multiple blighted properties and develop strategies to assess, clean up, and reuse the parcels for business, housing, and public amenities that will generate jobs and revenues and revitalize the entire area.

“Blighted properties are an eyesore in neighborhoods and drive down property values,” Governor Malloy said in a release. “By making investments in these scarred, abandoned, and otherwise unusable parcels of land, we can attract many more times that amount back in private investments while also making communities more attractive to business and job growth.”