Gowanus Whole Foods' $12.7 Million Tax Break Shows It Pays To Be Green

GOWANUS, BROOKLYN — Whole Foods received a $12.7 million tax refund from New York State last year in exchange for cleaning up and building its Gowanus location on a Brownfields site. The tidy sum was first reported by DNAinfo.

The rebate came as part of the state's Brownfields Redevelopment Tax Credit program, which is designed to incentivize businesses to redevelop contaminated Brownfield areas — defined by the EPA as places where development "may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant."

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Whole Foods received two tax refunds from the state — one for $7,012,089, the other for $5,731,853, according to a database put online by the state's Department of Environmental Conservation. The company received the refunds in 2016, but they applied to its 2013 tax bill, the database shows.

Whole Foods began its environmental remediation work at the site in 2005, as reported by The Brooklyn Paper.

At the time, the paper said, there was concern that Whole Foods would sell its Gowanus lot rather than build a supermarket there. But consultant John Bogdanski reportedly told Community Board 6 that it was in the business' economic interest to maintain ownership of the property, so that it could hang on to the tax credits it would receive from the cleanup effort.

According to the paper, by February 2010, Whole Foods still had to dig up contaminated dirt 14 feet down in the ground, and remove buried oil tanks from an earlier era. The supermarket finally opened in December 2013.

Meanwhile, the effort to restore the Gowanus Canal itself continues. To that end, last October, dredgers finally began removing trash and muck from the waterway's notorious floor.

Pictured at top: Whole Foods in Gowanus. Image via Google Maps.