By Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

Sometimes in my job I get handed a giant cardboard check while someone snaps a picture. Those are good moments. Usually it means we have some money coming from the federal or state government which enables us to do something good.

Our Shape Up Somerville program, which now serves as a model to the rest of the nation for how to foster a healthier lifestyle for our children, got rolling thanks to a giant cardboard check from the Centers for Disease Control. Federal stimulus money paid for much of the work being done on Somerville Avenue this summer.

Yesterday I was handed another giant cardboard check, this one for $400,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency for urban renewal projects inside of Somerville. Our plan is to loan this money out to spur development on older industrial sites, which are often referred to as brownfields. I joked that they could add another zero to it if they liked, but, in all honesty, given the positive economic and societal impact this money will have, they could add two or three zeroes to it and it would be money well spent.

In an older, thickly-settled city like Somerville, we don’t have a lot of greenfields, and the green spaces we have we’d like to keep green. That means the “new” development that happens here will be built on top of older development.  These sites frequently need to be cleaned up before they can be redeveloped. So, our progress relies upon our ability to reclaim discarded pieces of our past.

Many of you know that I take turns writing in this space with William Shelton, who has been running an excellent series on breathing new life into Somerville’s squares. Well, this money goes directly to the kinds of renewal efforts he’s been writing about. We have been taking the best of Somerville, the squares and neighborhoods that made this city so special in the first place, and rebuilding around them. New homes, new businesses, updated (and well-kept) public spaces, improved roads, mass transit, community events – we’re pursuing all of those things in an effort to make Somerville a model for 21^st urban living. And it takes money to make that happen.

Banks frequently are reluctant to put up the financing to spur urban redevelopment. It isn’t as easy as throwing up a building on a vacant lot. Yet investors will enter the picture when the city can furnish funds to facilitate the cleanup. That is exactly what happened at the MaxPak project on Clyde St. The city, using EPA brownfields funding, acted as a seed investor and now we have a 199-unit condo development underway. That’s new homes and good construction jobs. Even a small bit of federal money allows us to create incentives in an economy that has no incentives.

Fortunately we’ve got leadership at the state and federal level that understands the importance of these sorts of programs. I can tell you that in the recent past we were forced to go it alone. The attitude in Washington and Beacon Hill toward urban renewal has changed and we now find ourselves in a position to build upon our successes.

In particular we’re looking to upgrade Somerville’s older industrial zones in the eastern portion of the city. That area is being cleaned up, rezoned and reclaimed. It’s the gateway to our city for people coming in from Boston and we intend to have it send the unmistakable message that Somerville is a first class City in which to live, work, play, raise a family and start a business.

We are making sure those giant cardboard checks make a real and visible difference in this community.