Industrial Lands Conditions and Infrastructure Assessment

The City of Spokane and the Northeast Public Development Authority are leading an effort to revitalize an approximately 500-acre industrial area in the Hillyard neighborhood. The city is examining approaches to improving public infrastructure as an element of its work on increasing economic opportunity for existing and new businesses in the region. The city is facing challenges to redevelopment, including historical heavy-industrial operations that have left a legacy of environmental impacts that create both actual remediation needs and a perceived stigma.

As part of the city’s initial effort to evaluate the Hillyard neighborhood, we assisted with field verification of all properties in the neighborhood to confirm their condition. With mobile tools that allowed us to streamline fieldwork via live feeds to maps, photos, documents, and field forms, we could record our observations on the fly and greatly improve the efficiency of data collection and reporting. We also developed a number of custom Web maps, putting the necessary tools and datasets directly in front of the city’s decision-makers for improved sharing and collaboration.

Reforms to the Washington State cleanup law have created new tools for promoting the cleanup and redevelopment of brownfields, and this work has been crucial to the city’s efforts to improve the Hillyard neighborhood.