BIG WIN for Massachusetts
By Christina O’Neill
It was Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving, and Tom Finneran, president of the Massachusetts Biotech Council, was worried. He’d just received a call from Gov. Mitt Romney and state Secretary of Economic Development Ranch Kimball, who told him an unnamed life-sciences company, cloaked by the code name Project Hummingbird, was sending a site selection team to Devens on December 1, less than a week away. They requested that he gather up as many of the state’s leading public and private higher-education leaders as possible to attend the meeting, which fell on a holiday week that’s a traditional college break.
So the rest of that morning, Finneran and his staff worked the phones. To his relief, he recalls now, every person contacted responded within 24 hours, saying that they and their provosts, chancellors and training coordinators would attend the Devens meeting. He got similar reactions from the human resource teams of four of the state’s largest biopharma manufacturing operations.Meanwhile, the state’s Business Resource Team, overseen by Rod Jané, executive director of the Massachusetts Office of Business Development (MOBD), was also busily preparing for the meeting. The resource team, which now has 23 member organizations, had been the first economic development agency among those of four states to respond to the Project Hummingbird team and they wanted to be proactive in addressing any issues the company might have about doing business in Massachusetts, from workforce concerns to cost of living.
Massachusetts: It’s not just for R&D
The result is history. The June 1 decision by New York City-based Bristol Myers Squibb Co. to build a $1.1-billion biological drug manufacturing plant in Devens, to manufacture its rheumatoid arthritis drug Orencia, has put Massachusetts on the radar screen of the life-sciences industry, which, to date, had been cautious about doing business with the state.
"We looked at the totality of the package, including the ability to construct and operate the site," BMS spokesman Jeffrey MacDonald says. "In the end, we came to the conclusion that the Devens site best aligned with all of our site-selection criteria."
Both Jané and his boss, Secretary
of Economic Development Ranch Kimball, say the BMS plant is a coup for Massachusetts. The state faced stiff competition for the plant from New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island — the latter two of which have historically drawn life science and other jobs away from Massachusetts. Kimball notes that the Bay State is known for innovative R&D, but when companies get big enough to manufacture, they’ve historically left for less expensive venues.
Now, the shoe is on the other foot. Jané reports that in the short time since BMS’ decision to locate the plant on 88 acres at Devens, his office has received "a handful" of requests for information from other big life-science companies, which cite Project Hummingbird as a reason for their interest. In the end, say Jané and Kimball, access to a highly skilled workforce and a building site with the size and infrastructure to host a 750,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, trumped less-costly proposals. "It wasn’t our intention to be the highest bidder," Jané says. "It was our intention to be competitive."
Two years of homework
The people at the heart of Massachusetts’ economic development issue say recruiting Bristol Myers Squibb was not an example of overnight success. Instead, they say, two years of internal rebuilding and restructuring have produced a team that was ready to respond when the site-selection firm for BMS picked up the phone and made the first call in October (see sidebar, previous page).
The Dec. 1 meeting stretched from the morning into the evening. Jané started with an overview of the strengths of the state and, more important, the Central Massachusetts region and its biotech cluster. The cluster includes drug maker Sepracor Inc., which developed the sleep aid Lunesta; Abbott Bioresearch Corp., which developed Humira; and Genzyme Biotherapeutics, which is developing the anticoagulant Atryn. The cluster also includes Charles River Laboratories, which is expanding into a facility in Shrewsbury that will eventually employ 800. But small contract research organizations and drug-development companies employ thousands more biotech workers in Central Mass.
The state team sought to establish that Massachusetts is a good place for biopharma manufacturing, not just R&D. Then, the human resources recruiters gathered together in a separate meeting room behind closed doors, Jané recalls, where they could have an "candid and frank" discussion among themselves about what recruitment in Massachusetts is really like. He says the established relationships between the Massachusetts Biotech Council and the big companies were essential in getting their cooperation.
In another room the college roundtable met, composed of leaders of institutions with biological manufacturing in their curricula, who showed strong evidence of coordination and cooperation between the schools, Jané says.
Infrastructure concerns were of paramount interest to the BMS site selection team. Kimball’s office addressed concerns about the state’s reputation as a difficult place to get construction permits, by laying out the facts on Devens’ unique legal structure and its 75-day permitting process.
Workforce supply was also a concern, because of census data showing that Massachusetts has lost residents over the past two years, primarily younger workers. The economic development team cited the state’s teaching hospitals, which lead the country in receiving NIH funding for medical education. Massachusetts labs also produce 9 percent of the biologic drug development done world wide, the single greatest biologic concentration in the world.
In addition, the site engineering crew at Devens has years of experience with its water plant, sewer and electrical and gas systems. Many have been at the base since its transformation from a decommissioned army base to an industrial park that now hosts 80 businesses and a combined army/private sector payroll of $220 million. MassDevelopment paid the U.S. Army $17 million for the base in 1996 and has since presided over $450 million in capital investment. "The honest truth is, we knew we could make this happen," says Robert Culver, CEO of MassDevelopment.
Completing the picture
Enabling legislation for the project was expected to be drafted last week. The plant will first start operations in 2009 with about 350 workers and an initial investment of $660 million; by 2011, the workforce is set to grow to 550 and the investment to $1.1 billion. Many of the jobs will be high-paying manufacturing positions but the company will be hiring in a wide range of positions, BMS’ MacDonald says. As its opening date draws near, BMS will review its product portfolio to see what other drugs, besides Orencia, it will manufacture there.
"Typically, people have viewed Massachusetts as not being very well coordinated," says Deborah Schufrin, director of the state’s Department of Business and Technology. "This project definitely sends the message that Massachusetts is open for business and that we’re serious about job growth." The state, she says, is known for its R&D, "but tying that in with manufacturing really completes the picture."
Christina P. O’Neill can be reached at coneill@wbjournal.com
SIDEBAR: A timeline on the Bristol Myers Squibb project
OCT. 10: The Massachusetts Office of Business Development (MOBD) receives a call from Stadtmauer, Baikin & Biggins LC, which is representing an unnamed client in a site search code-named Project Hummingbird. The company needs 80-00 usable acres to build a 750,000-square-foot facility that requires considerable infrastructure, including water treatment, eliable electricity, and ample gas. Streamlined permitting is a must. SBB needs site recommendations in seven days.
Oct. 17: The MOBD submits two sites that match the initial criteria: Devens, and the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University in Grafton. At the time, Massachusetts is believed to be one of 10 to 12 states submitting site information.
October-November: The Project Hummingbird company evaluates the site proposals and trims the list down to sites in four states – New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. As the field of candidates narrows, the Massachusetts Business Resource Team, under the direction of Ranch Kimball, state Secretary of Economic Development, and Rod Jané, executive director of MOBD, prepares for a December 1 meeting with the Project Hummingbird client.
Dec. 1: In an intensive, multi-faceted meeting at MassDevelopment’s Devens Headquarters, an engineering team from the Project Hummingbird company, New York City-based Bristol Myers Squibb Co. (BMS), meets with Devens’ site engineers. Concurrently, BMS human-resource officials meet with the heads of many of the local colleges and universities, as well as with their human-resource peers at Genzyme, Wyeth, Abbott Bioresearch and AstraZeneca, all of which have large biological manufacturing operations in Massachusetts.
Mid-December: Drawing on the resources of the University of Massachusetts school system and the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts (AICUM), the BRT supplies the Bristol Myers Squibb team with a comprehensive set of figures on the number of life-science graduates the state turns out each year, targeted to specific life-science disciplines named by BMS. Meanwhile, the BMS site-selection team continues to narrow down the site list to one site in each of the four finalist states. The BMS team requests a proposal from each state on the type of incentives they would offer. These proposals are submitted in mid-January.
Mid-January-May: BMS sends due-diligence teams to the finalist sites. At Devens, the team conducts ongoing discussions about the water, sewer and gas infrastructure, and about environmental concerns. Congressman Martin Meehan helps facilitate an intra-Devens land swap with the Army that completes the parcel that would be used for the plant.
In May, the Board of Selectmen unanimously supports the waiver of a height restriction for the plant, which would accommodate its cooling towers.
June 1: BMS CEO Paul Dolan calls Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to tell him that BMS has chosen to site its plant at Devens.
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