<p>  <br> Michael Goldstein is the Chair of Akerman's Brownfields practice. He has more than 18 years of experience exclusively in the areas of environmental law, environmental redevelopment, environmental litigation, and environmental permitting and compliance for a broad range of clients, including public and private corporations, developers, local governments, Community Redevelopment Agencies, lenders, and renewable energy companies. In the last decade, as local government infill and smart growth policies have increasingly encouraged developers and end-users to revisit urban sites, Michael's practice has focused on helping clients navigate the environmental regulatory and third party liability risk issues associated with building on or otherwise reusing properties that have been directly or indirectly impacted by contamination. This has included assisting clients identify, contract with, and manage environmental and civil engineering firms with the knowledge, expertise, and insurance to work on contaminated construction sites; design and obtain approval of risk based cleanup strategies that minimize the cost and time of assessment and remediation; define and evaluate the additional construction costs that result from properly handling contaminated media such as excavated soils and dewatering effluent; integrate cleanup and development strategies to minimize the impact of remediation on the cost, design, and schedule of construction; and ensure that worker health and safety issues are addressed. 
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Michael's practice has a strong emphasis on the remediation, redevelopment, financing, and beneficial reuse of Brownfield sites and involves a broad array of Brownfields related transactional, administrative, regulatory, legal, legislative, and policy work for clients in both the private and public sectors. Michael was the founding Chairman of the Florida Brownfields Association and served as its Chairman and President for the first five years of the organization. In 2008, he founded and funded the Goldstein Brownfields Foundation, which is dedicated to empowering individuals and communities with scholarships, programming, and resources to restore polluted land, revitalize neighborhoods, protect public health, and increase the ethnic and gender diversity of lawyers working in the environmental arena. In 2009, Michael was appointed to the Executive Committee of the National Brownfields Coalition, an affiliation of private and public sector stakeholders working in the U.S. Congress to advocate for improvements in environmental redevelopment policy and legislation.