The Borough of Carlisle, Pennsylvania

Carlisle also has a history of manufacturing: Masland Carpets was founded in 1866, Frog Switch Manufacturing, a maker of railroad components and steel parts, in 1876, and the Carlisle Tire and Rubber Company in 1917. More recently, though Carlisle has experienced a severe case of corporate flight. During the period from 2008 to 2010, three of the Borough’s largest industrial facilities left town. The International Automotive Components Group (IAC), on the former Masland site, left 152 employees jobless; Tyco, a manufacturer of electronic components and connections for the computer and communications industries, closed its doors at its plant on Hamilton Street, leaving 117 unemployed; and Carlisle Tire and Wheel (CTW) relocated its operation to Jackson, Tennessee and, in turn, left 340 employees jobless. With the closing of the manufacturing plants, hundreds of jobs were gone, and the Carlisle community was faced with a cluster of contaminated brownfields that were impacting nearby neighborhoods and key economic assets. The three brownfields sites are the 48-acre IAC/ Masland factory, the 12-acre Carlisle Tire & Wheel property, and the 3-acre former Tyco Electronics plant. And while their closings have created short term hardship, the nearly 65 acres of vacant property left in their wake, created a substantial urban redevelopment opportunity that Carlisle’s many stakeholders, both public and private, have addressed with vision and determination, as encapsulated in the Borough’s Urban Redevelopment Plan. The URP integrates land use, transportation, and economic development planning to create a comprehensive, urban redevelopment strategy for the affected parts of the Borough. “This whole project really started with the closure of the plants” recounts Borough Manager, Matt Candland. “They were three pretty significant employers that closed within a few years of each other, which caused a number of challenges, one of which was: what do you do with these old sites? These were sites with old industrial buildings; all three of them had levels of contamination. So, the buildings were not really suitable for adaptive THE BOROUGH OF CARL I SLE , PENNSYLVANI A