I sat some years ago in Binghamton with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton as she told me why she brought the 200-or-more brownfield developers to the room next door.

She wanted to tell them about a new federal program or two to ease the redevelopment of brownfields — older, underused, often industrial sites that may — or may not — be contaminated.

And she wanted to show them the potential in Binghamton — potential that also appears in Fulton County.

In the early years of the 21st Century, metropolitan Binghamton was dotted by more than a dozen former tanneries, stitcheries, factories and warehouses of the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Co., which had once employed more than 25,000 people and was the metropolitan area’s largest single employer — until the shoe industry strolled overseas and left the buildings vacant.

They were a cluster of rotting hulks in an industrial core that led the New York Times to describe Binghamton as a “burned-out industrial shell.” (Don’t say that too loudly in Binghamton. They will still spit at and curse you for thinking it.)

But those hulks, and many others, were in high-profile neighborhoods with easy access to utilities and transportation networks. Were they not brownfields, any number of developers would want to turn them into something profitable, Clinton said.

The problem wasn’t that they were contaminated — although many were — it’s that developers didn’t know, so they couldn’t build the cost of remediating the sites into the cost of whatever they wanted to develop.

The hitch was a law adopted during the Reagan administration that established a chain of custody for contaminated properties — and therefore a chain of obligation to clean up any mess a prior owner had left behind. Sometimes, the polluter was a company founded in the 19th Century that went belly up when Hoover was president. There’s no way to keep the shareholders accountable — they’re long since dead.

But if the developers know what they’re dealing with, they can build the cost of remediation into the cost of the project, and it can be remarkably easy, a developer who had done several brownfield projects once told me.

In one case, he simply reconfigured the site so the buildings wouldn’t lie over a patch of contaminated soil he’d had excavated — it became a small portion of the parking lot, instead. The result was a Walmart and a newspaper production facility within site of one of the busiest interstate exchanges in Broome County. The development was worth tens of millions of dollars.

It was an example of what Clinton explained to me: that governments can set up the systems so other agents can do the work; and that in a move Alexander Hamilton would love, government can leverage a very small investment into a very large one by letting others make some money from it.

I could say Fulton County could take a hint from this, but economic developers are way ahead of me. Gloversville has landed a state Brownfield Opportunities Area designation, opening it up to funding to find and remediate brownfields.

And the Fulton County Center for Regional Growth won several grants from the federal Environmental Protection Agency to do much the same in other parts of the county, especially Johnstown. The latest grant funds brownfield assessments on seven sites, easing the way for a 75-unit senior housing complex and other developments.

What will become of it? Well that depends on who wants to make money from it, and that may take a while.

Those rotting hulks around Binghamton lay dormant for years, until Binghamton University announced a plan to build a health campus in their midst, a new nursing school and a $60 million pharmacy school that opened in 2018. A performing arts center is growing in the neighborhood, too.

And some........

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