Editorial: What can you do with an old fort? The Devens record
Nearly two decades have passed since the U.S. Army closed Fort Devens as an active military installation. Usually, when the federal government has announced base closures — or even telegraphed to the public that it's looking to do so — political leaders flip the switch to “on” and tell their constituents that they plan to protect what's there and, by extension, preserve the jobs that are there.
Sometimes it works, but Washington calls the shots since U.S. defense priorities rest in the nation's capital.
So, when Fort Devens officially closed in 1996 after 80 years of operation, and switched its mission to an Army Reserves and National Guard training center, it took thousands of jobs with it, which could have delivered a crippling economic blow to the northeast corner of Central Massachusetts.
But credit the commonwealth and local residents with making lemonade from lemons by turning Devens into an economic development zone. A recent report from the UMass Donahue Institute said businesses in Devens employ more than 4,000, a jump of nearly 11 percent from last year and more than 25 percent from 2012. Even more impressive is that nearly three-quarters of those jobs lie within the private sector, the rest with government agencies and nonprofits.
And, more than half of the jobs in Devens can be found in three industry groupings: manufacturing; professional, scientific and technical services; and transportation and warehousing. One of the latter, Quiet Logistics, opened in 2011 with less than 100 employees. Today, it has 650 and plans to add another 200 by the end of the year.
A key reason for the company's success? Devens' location near the junction of Route 2 and Interstate 495.
"That was important to us, since we knew we were going to grow the headcount very quickly," Brian Lemerise, vice president of third-party fulfillment at Quiet, told us recently.
Success rarely comes without bumps in the road, though. MassDevelopment, the quasi-public economic development and real estate agency that oversees the Devens transformation, lost $10 million it gave to Evergreen Solar before the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2011. More recently, Saint-Gobain ceased operations in space that had been occupied by Evergreen, two years after it said it would expand there and add 90 jobs for the manufacture of components used in LED lights. (The French multinational cited “difficult business conditions.”)
The Devens story is a great one to tell (and re-tell, because we've opined about it before), and it should serve as a model for how to turn around a closed military base through a long-term economic development strategy.
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