By Chris Gray
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Something about river towns has always attracted developer J. Brian O'Neill.

As a teenager busing tables in his father's West Conshohocken restaurant, he admired the industrial architecture of the factories and warehouses strung along the Schuylkill. Then when the borough's manufacturing economy bottomed out in the late 1970s, he sympathized as former steelworkers begged for kitchen jobs.

Now O'Neill, 42, is being credited as one of the people responsible for revamping Conshohocken from smokestack borough to white-collar suburb. His $350 million, 707,000-square-foot Millennium work-live-play complex on Washington Street, on the banks of the Schuylkill, has been cited by the Bush administration as a national model for redeveloping old industrial sites known as brownfields.

President Bush will sign legislation there this morning promoting such endeavors. The measure will increase spending for brownfield cleanups and will exempt small businesses from liability if they did not contribute a significant amount of pollution.

The way O'Neill sees it, everyone wins when urban redevelopment becomes more attractive to investors.

"You can reclaim industrial sites close to where everyone is, or you can pave over paradise with a parking lot," he said yesterday as he walked around Millennium 3, a three-story building designed to evoke an iron foundry.

The place swarmed with window-washers and suited Secret Service agents prepping the partially rented building for Bush's arrival. Dressed in khakis and a sweater, O'Neill remained genial, yet eagle-eyed for flaws. "Why isn't there any heat?" he barked at harried maintenance workers. "Why does the elevator make that noise?"

O'Neill grew up in Merion and attended Main Line high schools before dropping out his senior year. He later earned a high school equivalency diploma. "I was in a hurry to make money," he said.

But not in the restaurant business. O'Neill spent too many nights and weekends waiting tables for that. He bought his first property, a rental house in Manayunk, when he was 17, and by 22, he had started his first major project: turning a Norristown paint factory into an industrial park.

He returned to the Conshohocken area in 1984, when he tried to turn his father's business, the Inn of the Four Falls, into a seven-story high-rise. But even with the help of the Redevelopment Authority of Montgomery County, he was unable to get funding. That property eventually was developed by another firm.

In 1989, O'Neill and his brother, Michael, converted the former Lee Tire factory in Conshohocken into Lee Park, an office and light industrial complex.

Authority director Jerry Nugent remembered O'Neill's early enthusiasm for reclaiming the area, then considered a wasteland of dilapidated warehouses and factories.

"No one believed it was possible to turn the town around," Nugent said. "He clearly had a pioneer's vision."

O'Neill went on to other projects. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's environmental laws governing industrial sites changed.

Previously, businesses that bought former factories and warehouses were responsible for restoring the site to near-pristine conditions by cleaning up solvents, oils and other hazardous chemicals. In 1995, the state limited the liability for buyers of contaminated sites and allowed developers to submit less-stringent cleanup plans for approval by state environmental regulators.

Without such legislation, O'Neill said it would have been nearly impossible for his firm to clean up the one-mile stretch where Millennium is. The soil under the three completed buildings contained old oil tanks, metals, asbestos-lined pipe, "things that cost millions of dollars to clean up," he said.

Other government programs aimed at encouraging brownfield development helped. O'Neill received about $5 million in grants and loans for the Millennium site from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development through the Redevelopment Authority of Montgomery County, Nugent said. The state has also committed $2.5 million in capital improvement funds for O'Neill's plan to create public open space along the riverfront.

Bush's legislation would make even more money available for other Montgomery County towns such as Pottstown and Ambler. The Redevelopment Authority has enrolled in a $200,000 pilot program that identifies feasible brownfield sites and is hoping for an additional $1 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Nugent said.

"Our philosophy is to prevent sprawl and put investment where you have infrastructure, so you don't have to go out and build new sewer systems, cut down trees and chew up farms," he said.

Certainly Conshohocken has reaped the benefits. Even though its population has decreased slightly, from about 8,000 in 1990 to 7,600 today, the borough's 2002 budget is projected at $5 million - 12 percent higher than the year before, borough manager Jack Heleniak said. Half of that money comes from a 1 percent earned income tax on people who live or work in the borough.

Brownfield redevelopment "has turned the borough around," Heleniak said. Property taxes haven't been raised in 18 years, and his office is expecting a budget surplus from new businesses. "The growth we're going through is extraordinary."

O'Neill has at least three more Millennium buildings on tap, including office towers.

Current economic conditions may slow the pace of Millennium, which had been scheduled for completion this March. While early reports categorized Millennium as a paradise for flush dot-commers, O'Neill stressed that his technology-oriented construction is meant to appeal to a larger audience than Internet start-ups.

Nugent believes the location's proximity to Philadelphia, the Schuylkill Expressway and the Blue Route will keep Millennium viable.

"The build-out may take a little longer or be on a less intensive scale than occurred in the 1990s," he said. "We're confident that the fundamentals are there."