Patience, persistence led to South Worcester Industrial Park success
On Oct. 20, Worcester City Manager Ed Augustus made an announcement 22 years in the making.
At the groundbreaking for Table Top Pies' newest facility in Worcester, Augustus said the final parcel in the South Worcester Industrial Park (SWIP) had been sold: Worcester developer Chacharone Properties bought the remaining parcel on South Gate Street on spec for $65,000, fully confident it could find a commercial tenant for its planned 7,500-square-foot facility.
Augustus' announcement capped off decades of work by city officials – including a rotating list of city councilors who took up the mantle of the 11-acre former brownfield site year after year. For much of that time, it felt like the effort was tilting at windmills. Turning the previous metal casting and auto salvage property into a humming industrial space rarely had any momentum.
The sale of all the city-owned property in the industrial park appeared to happen quickly – the first parcel was sold back in January – and can be largely attributed to the increasing demand for industrial space. But these headlines about new leases on the site belie the decades of patient work that goes into revitalization and the recognition needed to move on the opportunity when it arises.
Much like Gardner's development of its Mill Street Corridor, the conversion of Fort Devens into a booming site, and the work the Worcester Business Development Corp. does throughout the city, a lot of planning, preparation and investment is needed before pad-ready sites appear.
Resolving ownership disputes, securing funding to put the properties in the right hands for cleanup, a strategy and the plans for potential end use, the actual remediation work, and navigating layers of local, state and federal regulations can be a big lift. The final product produces a press conference and buyer ready to invest to bring the commercial vision to life, but it's the years of setup where most of the thankless work gets done.
The downstream payoff from these projects can be enormous. Devens – which was a military base straddling Ayer, Shirley, Lancaster and Harvard until 1996 – was turned into an enterprise zone and has resulted in an attractive list of companies who today host more than 5,000 jobs with an average annual pay of $83,545, according to a UMass report. That job number marks a 55-percent increase from four years ago, and an additional 33 acres was allocated in October for new development. As Sen. James Eldridge (D-Marlborough) notes in the Viewpoint column this issue, getting one municipal government and the state to work together on anything is typically a heavy lift, so having three towns (Ayer, Shirley and Harvard) come together so cohesively is a wonder to behold.
While Worcester has a shovel in the dirt on Table Top Pies new manufacturing plant, and the Devens zone continues to ramp up, Gardner officials are at a much earlier stage of cleaning up the 10-acre Garbose metal recycling site along its Mill Street Corridor. The goal is to team up that parcel with an abutting 10-acre industrial-zoned property to take advantage of their strategic location on Route 68. It has been six years since Gardner acquired the property and about a year since Gardner received $3.2 million in grants from MassWorks, and the grunt work at this site remains ongoing.
The road to economic development is littered with detours and pitfalls, and individual projects often outlast the officials who originally started them. It can be difficult to see the forest through the trees of so many issues associated with the revitalization of blighted properties, and waiting for tenants can feel a lot like waiting for Godot. Yet endeavors like Devens, and SWIP at the early stage of its buildout, show patience and persistence still leads to success.
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