Why is the EPA spending money on an old Colorado theater, auditorium and grocery?

CENTRAL CITY — When gambling came to town in 1991, almost every historic building in this old mining town in Gilpin County transformed into a casino.

Except one.

“There was one building left out and that was the Belvidere Theater. When gaming came in we really lacked a place for the community to gather. Seeing it falling apart and fully boarded up, I was heartbroken,” said Peter Droege, president of the Belvidere Foundation.

Today, Droege can overlook the crumbling brick walls and the dulled woodwork inside the old Belvidere Theater and imagine a day when town residents arrive for parties, theater performances, concerts and maybe even watch a classic movie on a silver screen while eating a burger as the film rolls.

“Now to see it coming back is amazing,” he said recently while standing near the theater’s second-floor stage where workers were installing wooden support beams in the ceiling and walls.

The theater is being renovated, in part, because of a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency and its Brownfields program, which provides funding to local governments and nonprofits to clean up contaminated and blighted properties.

The Brownfields program began in 1995 and has distributed more than $2.7 billion in the past 29 years. But the agency received more than $230 million to distribute in 2024 through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a federal bill passed in 2021 to provide money to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, environment and broadband service.

Colorado this year received $6.9 million for projects in Greeley, Kersey, Lakewood, Monte Vista, Northglenn and Pueblo along with another $1 million for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Brownfields program.

“Normally we don’t have this kind of funding,” said KC Becker, administrator for the EPA’s Region 8, which includes Colorado. “It’s the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and it’s accelerating projects like this.”

The federal agency does not grant the money to private developers.

The money can be used to clean up property that is contaminated by lead or asbestos or where old storage tanks may be underground environmental hazards, Becker said. The grants also can be used to study sites where contamination is suspected.

“It’s expensive work because there are strict rules on disposal,” Becker said. “It’s spending money on pollution cleanup. Otherwise, the properties get abandoned.”

In the case of the Belvidere Theater, asbestos was in the ceiling and walls. No renovation work could start until the asbestos was removed, said Betty Mahaffey, the Belvidere Foundation treasurer.

Without the EPA’s $200,000 grant, the project start would have been delayed, she said.

“We would have spent our own construction money on it,” Mahaffey said.

The asbestos removal was tricky because part of the Belvidere’s back wall is the mountainside where Central City was built. It made the building drafty so it was difficult to seal off the building and contain the asbestos, said Brady Wilson, project manager for Palace Construction, which is the lead contractor on the renovations.

The two-story theater opened in 1875 and for decades was the center point of life in Central City. Over the years, it hosted dances, plays, music and movies for miners and their families. For a while, it was a woman’s home. And it survived a fire that burned in the ceiling in the 1970s.

Goldie Hawn and George Segal filmed the 1976 movie The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox at the theater before it fell into disrepair, said Mahaffey, who brought her children to the Belvidere for Friday night movies in the 1970s.

The Belvidere Foundation also is renovating a building that shares a wall with the theater — the former Shoofly Saloon, which survived the Great Fire of 1874. Bricks charred in the fire still remain and will be preserved as part of the renovation, Droege said.

In Northglenn, a $2.75 million Brownfields grant is being used to remove contaminated soil on 6.85 acres that once was the site of a city recreation center. The land has been vacant since a new recreation center was built in 2021.

When the city tore down the old recreation center workers discovered the site had been a retention pond and the dirt contained arsenic and lead from agriculture fertilizer that settled there in the early 1900s, said Brook Svoboda, Northglenn’s director of planning and development.

“That’s a large amount of money for a local government to come up with as far as remediation,” Svoboda said. “That site would have remained vacant for many, many years if we didn’t receive that grant.”

Work to clear the land should start in 2025 and Northglenn City Council is envisioning what it wants to do with it once it is cleaned up. The idea is to work with a private developer to build housing, commercial and retail space.

“The big thing here is from a higher level perspective this project has been about creating community. We don’t have a downtown in Northglenn and what we’re trying to do is create sense of place,” Svoboda said. “And this grant is key to us carrying out this vision. We are so grateful for this grant. It helps us clear the last hurdle to carry on with our vision.”

In addition to sending nearly $7 million from the EPA directly to local governments and non-profits in Colorado, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act also delivered another $1 million to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to dole out.

Tracie White, director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s hazardous materials and waste management division, said the cash infusion boosted her budget to $1.76 million this fiscal year, which is almost 1.5 times more than the division typically has for Brownfields grants.

“It’s been fantastic. We’ve been able to make a lot of good work happen,” White said. “These sites are unable to be used because of either real or perceived contamination, especially in these smaller towns. You can picture the eye sore on the corner of main streets that are just boarded up.”

The state funded the Belvidere asbestos removal along with asbestos removal at the Collbran Auditorium in Collbran in Mesa County, White said.

State and federal officials also recently celebrated a cleanup at the San Luis People’s Market where asbestos, lead-based paint and mold were ruining the only grocery in town, White said.

The Acequia Institute, a community non-profit focused on food and environmental justice, had purchased the old R+R Market in 2022 with plans to open a co-op grocery, White said. The nearest food market was 50 miles away.

The Acequia Institute received about $200,000 to help with asbestos abatement, she said. The market is expected to open in November.

“That’s a huge win for a disproportionately impacted community,” she said.

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