Looking for a reason to take our country further in debt to China? How about, “a $200,000 petroleum grant for identifying, assessing and supporting community outreach activities at sites with potential petroleum contamination.”?

These brownfields grants were kind of funny. At the Asheville City Council meeting at which Land of Sky Regional Council applied for them, it was not permissible to divulge which sites were being targeted, lest they be stigmatized. Further, the grant moneys were not necessarily for cleaning up toxins, but rather for identifying and studying sites. The need to “investigate” whether or not brownfields might exist appears to have been around for some time.