A parcel of land in a Pittsfield business park that “looks like the surface of the moon” and has been “undevelopable and in a state of deterioration for over 20 years,” according to the city’s mayor, is receiving a $880,000 state grant to help make it ready for future development.
In an event with Gov. Charlie Baker and other officials, Pittsfield Mayor Linda Tyer said the grant will support engineering and design work at the 16.5-acre Site 9 in the William Stanley Business Park, an effort she said is “critical to initiating the site’s redevelopment, making it a more attractive open for private sector development, including industrial manufacturing, warehouse, commercial and retail and office space.”
The Pittsfield project is one of 10 awarded grants for pre-development work through the site readiness program, administered by MassDevelopment. The program was created under a 2016 economic development law and was reauthorized with $15 million as part of a $626 million jobs package Baker signed in January.
The other sites receiving grant money, which totals $3.18 million, are: Carriage Grove Power Plant in Belchertown ($804,000); Frederick Douglass Avenue in Brockton ($70,000); Burlington Mall Road ($85,000); Route 6/Route 240 in Fairhaven ($75,000); Gloucester’s waterfront redevelopment ($700,000); the Marriner Building in Lawrence ($135,000); Millbrook Industrial Park in Leicester ($50,000); Palmer’s Church Street bridge ($280,000); and Hudson Drive/Sam West Road Industrial Park in Southwick ($105,000).
“This idea of getting under-utilized parcels back into shovel-ready use is a really important economic development imperative,” Housing and Economic Development Secretary Mike Kennealy said.
Remote Work Plans Praised
Joining the call from his Pittsfield home, Sen. Adam Hinds said remote work has allowed him to shift his daily routine. Instead of waking up at 6 a.m. to commute into Boston, he said, he gets up then to exercise, look out the window, enjoy a cup of coffee and send emails before starting his day. Hinds is chairing a new special Senate committee tasked with reimagining a post-pandemic Massachusetts.
He said Baker’s plan to allow more than 20,000 state employees to operate under a hybrid of remote and in-person work “makes a lot of sense and hopefully extends state employment further afield in the process.”
In his January State of the Commonwealth speech, Baker said the future of work is “one issue we need to get right” as Massachusetts emerges from the pandemic, pointing to virtual conferences, new methods of recruiting employees and reaching customers without physical interaction, and the potential that many workers may not wish to return full-time to offices and commutes. The state will need to “lean into what this reset means” to align its community building, economic development and transportation programs to the changes, he said.
Striking a similar note on Tuesday, Baker said he believes “we are all going to need to figure out how to lean into some of the changes that have taken place over the course of the past year, because some of them, I don’t think, are going away.”
The governor, who usually participates in virtual events from his ceremonial State House office, was instead at home Tuesday after traveling to Florida because of a death in the family and then quarantining while awaiting his COVID-19 test results. His office said Tuesday morning that he had tested negative and was no longer in quarantine.
Development officials will be focused on “what the world is going to look like in the future” and how to “accentuate the positive or mitigate the negative of some of these changes” to best support communities, Baker said.
“It’s going to be an interesting challenge and in some respects a little bit of the unknown with respect to how this is going to work and what it’s going to look like, but I think it creates great opportunities for people at the state and local level to work together, and perhaps even put some federal resources to work to try to make some of this stuff happen,” he said.
