SCS Engineers announces the promotion of Eric Williams as the firm’s new National Director of Brownfields Redevelopment. Eric has over three decades of experience providing a full range of environmental services, focusing on brownfield redevelopment. His career includes experience with large environmental consulting firms, helping a specialty lender build a national footprint for brownfield funding, and running his own companies that exclusively developed environmentally challenged properties. His expertise spans various industries, including local government, commercial businesses, heavy industry, landfills, and mined land restoration.
As a thought-leader, Eric puts his expertise to work – investigation and cleanup, environmental liability management, real estate transactional functions, project entitlements, and funding. His multifaceted skill set helps our clients, from identifying environmental liabilities before buying or selling to addressing contaminants cost-consciously, and restoring the land’s health and value, states Senior Vice President and National Environmental Market Leader Michael Miller.
Eric has developed deep expertise in brownfield project funding. Currently, EPA and state brownfield grants support many projects in the U.S. The 2025 EPA brownfield grants were awarded to recipients earlier this year, and EPA will open applications for the next round of brownfield grants sometime in the next couple of weeks, but it will be even more competitive than ever as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law dollars will no longer fund these programs.
As Eric Williams put it in his 2025 National Brownfields Training Conference Workshop called “Stack & Sequence”:
Brownfield projects require multiple capital sources to succeed; the more difficult the project, the more capital sources. We must build funding strategies that include various brownfield capital sources, ranging from brownfield-specific funding to traditional redevelopment financing and more creative sources. A deeper dive shows how sources can be integrated and stacked, then used sequentially for the various stages of redevelopment to be combined with private investment.
To learn more about Brownfields, please visit the SCS Engineers’ website to find educational materials or contact the firm’s experts. You may also reach Eric Williams on LinkedIn.
A Nebraska city earned an $800,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency. The City of Lincoln plans to use the grant to assess and clean up brownfield sites, including up to 10 acres of land city officials hope to use for self-sustaining urban agriculture projects.
Officials plan to create a self-sustaining urban agricultural area in two adjacent 5-acre parcels for lease by local farmers. Lincoln can begin moving local food production into commercial use by local businesses.
In a recent Journal Star article, Tim Rinne, chairman of the Lincoln-Lancaster County Food Policy Council, said, “Rather than continuing to rely exclusively on drought-stricken and wildfire-plagued California to produce the bulk of our produce, or waiting for the next breakdown of our national food distribution network like we saw with the COVID-19 crisis, Lincoln’s city government leadership is taking the visionary and cautionary step of building a resilient local food system.”
The planned agricultural use also helps protect surrounding developments. The five-year grant will help the city assess four other sites in the area and could support cleanup plans at two more sites.
Brownfields Resources to Organize, Educate, and Implement Plans in Your Community
Corporate Headquarters
