For more than half a century, the parcel of land squeezed between the railroad tracks and Interstate-84 in southwest Hartford served as scrapyard and metal recycling facility. Before that, at various points, it was home to a coal yard, steel foundry and glass-making plant.

Since the scrapyard relocated in 2011, however, the property has sat fallow, plagued by weeds and the remnants of pollutants left over from its industrial past.

On Thursday, Gov. Ned Lamont and other state officials heralded the site as the “poster child” for a slate of recently-passed regulations that they hope will speed the process for cleaning up thousands of Connecticut’s abandoned, derelict and potentially contaminated properties.

“I’ve been doing this for a while, and people are impatient,” Lamont said. “They get impatient with government, and they just want to speed things up.”

The new rules, finalized last month, do away with a 1980s-era law known as the Transfer Act, which had widely come to be seen as an outdated and cumbersome system for remediating polluted properties.

Under the Transfer Act, properties that served as home to dry cleaners, auto repair shops, furniture strippers or any other entity that generated more than 100 kilograms of hazardous waste — about half of an industrial 55-gallon drum — in a month became subject to costly investigations and burdensome regulations whenever owners sought to sell or transfer ownership of the property.

Those requirements applied regardless of whether the property ever had a documented spill or other release of hazardous materials.

“We really created a class of establishments that were guilty until proven innocent,” said Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Katie Dykes.

“I think we could understand that in the spirit of that time where there was a lack of pressure from the private sector to ensure that contamination was was documented and investigated and cleaned up,” she continued. “But the effect of the Transfer Act was it placed this very significant burden only on certain types of businesses, or these certain types of establishments, and no requirements on properties that didn’t fit that definition.”

Under the new rules, properties that have not already fallen under the Transfer Act’s jurisdiction will be able to avoid that process so long as they have not had a documented release of hazardous materials that requires remediation.

At the same time, the rules attempt to create a more straightforward approach for cleaning up historical or newly-discovered sources of contamination. That helped the measure win the support of environmental groups.

“It actually puts in a system to respond to actual releases,” said Roger Reynolds, the senior legal director at Save the Sound. “We hadn’t had that before. We sort of relied on the Transfer Act, and then just DEEP’s general authority to, you know, stop pollution, basically, is what the statute says.”

Jane Kimball Warren, an environmental attorney with McCarter & English LLP who represents property owners on matters involving the Transfer Act, said in a recent interview that long-standing distrust among environmental advocates, developers and businesses had served as a barrier to reform efforts.

In 2020, however, state lawmakers passed legislation requiring DEEP come up with a new, released-based system similar to those in existence in most other states. Over the next four years, the state held dozens of informational meetings while drafting the new rules, which were approved by the legislature’s Regulations Review Committee on April 22.

“I think it just became a matter of just opening the doors and getting everybody’s thoughts and it was refreshing,” Warren said. “I think that once they started opening the doors and listening they got a lot of fresh exchange of opinions, and it was really nice to see that happen.”

About 2,500 properties have unfulfilled obligations under the Transfer Act, according to DEEP, and remain subject to its cleanup and investigation standards.

As part of the process of developing its new system, however, DEEP also updated some of those standards to reduce costs and streamline remediation. As a next step, Dykes said that the agency is working to create a “bridge” for those 2,500 property owners to utilize some aspects of the newer release-based rules to achieve even quicker results.

According to an estimate from economists at the Department of Economic Community Development, the new release-based rules will provide a $3.78 billion boost to the state’s economy and help create more than 2,100 construction jobs.

In prior events at other major cleanup sites around the state, DECD Commissioner Dan O’Keefe has colorfully described them as “dystopian hellscapes.”

“I don’t think that is hyperbole,” O’Keefe said Thursday. “These are sites that were built for an economic use case that has simply moved on…. When we take these sites down and remediate them and prepare them for development, not only are we removing blight, but we’re reinventing these places towards something that can be incredible, mixed use, housing, retail, et cetera.”

At the Hartford scrapyard that was the site of Thursday’s press conference, city and state officials recently announced a $5.4 million plan to begin remediating the property through funding approved by the State Bond Commission. Among the list of contaminants on the site include polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, metals, petroleum and other hazardous materials.

The city took over the site from its former owners, the Danny Corporation, in 2021 and has since touted it as a potential corridor for “residential, commercial and industrial incubator space,” according to the Hartford Courant.

As Lamont and administration officials and Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam were touting the new rules amid the weeds and graffiti-tagged structures of the former scrapyard, lawmakers in the state Capitol were giving final approval to legislation that was intended to provide a smooth transition to the new system.

The legislation, Senate Bill 1404, included several technical revisions the existing law and clarified that the Transfer Act will sunset and the new regulations take effect on March 1, 2026, according to state Rep. Steve Meskers, D-Greenwich, who serves as co-chair of the Commerce Committee.

The bill passed both the Senate and the House unanimously and now heads to Gov. Lamont, who said on Thursday that he will sign it into law.