RDA seeks grant to further boost development momentum

Last year, the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority (RDA) board of directors approved the Land Development Entity (LDE) to serve as a non-profit subsidiary of the RDA. This has been an act meant to help accelerate development within Northwest Indiana by supporting the assembly, acquisition, and stabilization of challenging properties. Thus far, the LDE has functioned between a $5 million commitment and $500,000 from the RDA’s Brownfields Revolving Loan Fund. Now, the RDA is seeking a grant to continue to supercharge the LDE and further empower LDE to help RDA overcome its number one challenge in improving the economy and way of life in Northwest Indiana.

The LDE supports Northwest Indiana brownfield sites, which are sites that have been previously used but experienced environmental contamination and their development. It also supports small infill sites and large-scale complex redevelopment sites in collaboration with the State of Indiana.

“The RDA has been working on this concurrence with the transit development districts and other larger economic development kind of initiatives,” said Anthony “AJ” Bitner, director of economic development for the RDA. “What became apparent over time is there wasn’t a single clearinghouse that concentrated specifically on brownfield sites that had difficulties either through remediation, the land assemblage or a combination; both finding a source of funds as well as an entity to work through a chain of title issues or environmental liabilities and things of that nature.”

When the board of directors approved the LDE in 2025, it helped to jumpstart remedies for many of the hurdles the larger redevelopment project met.

“What was needed was a conduit between the public and the private sectors as well as the financial folks and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDAM),” said Bitner. “So what was needed was to position an entity there to find properties that, in essence, have meaningful hurdles but also have large upside opportunities for large catalytic types of private investment.”

At its core, the LDE’s purpose is to provide a tool to pursue multiparcel land assembly, environmental cleanup, and eventual redevelopment of large multiparcel sites, attracting private investment and returning the land to economic vitality and taxable status.

“The goal is to assemble and remediate properties for development,” said Bitner. “The LDE will either partner with a local municipality that may own adjacent properties or it may partner with the private sector either through an RFP or some type of public procurement process working with both communities and the private sector so that it fits the community’s kind of local rules and regulations. This could be carried out through their comprehensive plan, zoning, economic development visions, and things of that nature to facilitate the adaptive reuse of these properties.”

While it is yet to be determined the amount of the grant that could potentially be secured, the funds will nevertheless be a significant asset to the RDA’s mission and its strategy for leveraging LDEs.

To learn more about the Northwest Indiana RDA, you can visit in.gov/rda.