AUBURN – A team of city officials will begin to look for possible environmental cleanup sites in the next 30 days.

“We have some places in mind now, but those are just what we can come up with off the top of our heads,” said Maureen Aube, community business specialist.

Auburn was one of five Maine communities to receive federal Brownfields grants Tuesday morning.

Auburn received a $200,000 assessment grant. Brownfields grants are set aside by the federal Environmental Protection Agency to clean up private or commercially owned parcels of contaminated land. The program is designed to make those parcels viable for redevelopment.

Aube said the next step is to bring officials from the city, the Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport, Community Concepts and the Androscoggin Valley Council of Governments together to identify cleanup sites. That group will schedule two public meetings over the summer and should be able to pay for engineering and environmental tests this fall.

This is the first time Auburn has received Brownfields money, and it’s the first stage of a long process, said project officer Kathleen Castagna. Assessment grants help communities find contaminated lots that could qualify for more cleanup money.

“You are really starting at the ground level,” Castagna said. “This is seed money, and if you continue with the process you could qualify for cleanup grants or even more.”

The EPA announced $70.7 million in grants Tuesday, including $18 million in New England. Auburn’s was one of 202 grants announced nationwide by the EPA.

Castagna said she drove up from the Boston office to announce the awards to four other communities.

Both the Northern Maine Development Commission in Caribou and the City of Westbrook qualified for $200,000 assessment grants as well. The Caleb Development Corporation of North Berwick received a $200,000 grant for a cleanup project and the Southern Maine Regional Planning Commission in Springvale received $1 million as part of the EPA’s revolving loan fund.

The money has been used locally since 1995. Lewiston has received $1.6 million in the environmental grants since the EPA began the program in 1995, much of it to clean up around the city’s old mill buildings.