The Leelanau County Brownfield Redevelopment Authority board will hold a special meeting next Wednesday, March 12, when board members hope to hear directly from James Varley and Gene Kelly of Leelanau County.

Varley-Kelly Properties L.L.C. is finalizing a deal with Leelanau County to purchase the old 2.4-acre courthouse campus in Leland for $2.4 million and redevelop the property for residential use. Varley and Kelly hope to take advantage of tax incentives and grant funding available through the Brownfield Redevelopment Authority to help clean up the disused and potentially contaminated site in Leland.

A consultant from an engineering firm retained by Varley-Kelly, Mac MacClelland of Otwell-Mawby, has routinely represented Varley-Kelly’s interests in person at meetings of the Brownfield Redevelopment Authority board and the Leelanau County Board of Commissioners. Now, the Brownfield board hopes to hear personally from the developers, according to Trudy Galla, head of the county’s Planning and Community Development department.

"The authority is not yet comfortable with the documents that must be forwarded to the Michigan Department of Environmental Qualtity," Galla explained. "Before the board approves a reimbursement agreement, they need to have some questions answered directly by the developers," she said.

In other business at its regular monthly meeting on Feb. 26, the authority board also heard from Jeff Hawkins of Envirologic Technoligies. Hawkins’ firm is assisting the authority in drafting a Quality Assurance Project Plan, which is required before the county can take advantage of grant funding it hopes to receive for a project to identify and clean up areas of the county potentially affected by petroleum pollution.

As part of its discussion with Hawkins, the authority board approved the expenditure of up to $750 to help pay for part of an environmental assessment of the proposed Herman Park property in Suttons Bay Township. A portion of the property once included an automobile service station; and the site may require cleanup because of the presence of petroleum products in the soil.

The Brownfield Redevelopment Authority’s next regular monthly meeting is slated for March 25. At that meeting, Galla said, the authority board expects to hear a report on how the county might establish a Land Bank Fast Track Authority – an entity similar to a Brownfield Redevelopment Authority but with additional legal "tools" that can be used to establish certain tax incentives, quiet title to certain properties, and bring additional grant funding into the county.