BusinessWest (November 21, 2024)

Joseph Bednar

Developing a Strategy

Community Development & Planning Coordinator Sean O’Donnell (left) and President and CEO Jeff Daley.

Since its inception in 1960, the role of Westmass Area Development Corp. has remained remarkably consistent in many ways.

Created by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a not-for-profit economic and real-estate development firm, its mission has long been to develop and manage properties and enhance and strengthen communities through investments that create jobs, housing, and sustainability. But the way Westmass is accomplishing those goals is evolving.

“Traditionally, we would build infrastructure, sell off individual lots, have the town adopt those as public ways, and then we would go on and do the next projects. We are the economic-development agency for Western Mass. to really advance job creation and increase the economic tax base for communities in the region,” said Sean O’Donnell, Community Development & Planning coordinator, noting that the firm’s work has helped facilitate more than 10,000 jobs in the region.

While Westmass has done some consulting work in the past, it has mostly focused on its own real-estate projects, he noted, from its business parks to Ludlow Mills, which has been its flagship project since 2012.

“But over time,” O’Donnell went on, “and with my background and with the team we have here, we increasingly see opportunity in Western Mass. where we can play a facilitator role and a consulting role.”

Specifically, he explained, Westmass can take on this role for brownfield developers and municipalities that are trying to come up with creative ways to publicly finance their infrastructure. “We can put together different financing tools to make some of these more challenging real-estate projects in Western Mass. pencil out, and build these public-private partnerships.”

One example is the Ferry Street Mills project in Easthampton, where Westmass is assisting on the pre-development side and seeking cleanup funding to facilitate some of the planned housing work there. Others include a current business-park feasibility study for the town of Northfield and work with the town of East Longmeadow on the former Carlin Combustion Technology site at 70 Maple St., coordinating with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and looking into funding resources.

“My interest and background is in planning, particularly rural economic development, and we see a lot of opportunity in underserved areas in Western Mass. that could be thinking about economic development — not necessarily in the traditional sense, but how that embeds within a community that might want to stay rural,” O’Donnell said. “In the case of Northfield, that’s a business park that aligns with a recreation-based economy, rural tourism, agritourism, that type of thing. We’re trying to find all these different niches in Western Massachusetts.

Sean O’Donnell presents at the Western Massachusetts Brownfields Roundtable hosted by the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission on Sept. 17.

“We have a lot of experience as a nonprofit developer and are very much a community-based developer,” he went on, “but I think we can play, and we have been playing, a really strong intermediary role and facilitating role with private projects and communities, while also looking out to Boston to see what new programs and financing and funding sources might be available to pull into Western Mass.”

Jeff Daley, president and CEO of Westmass, told BusinessWest that another growth area for the company is helping with or taking on projects that most developers can’t handle on their own.

“A lot of projects don’t pencil out anyways, and if you throw in the mix of outdated, dilapidated buildings that have potential contamination, brownfields, whatever, they can’t pencil financially for any developer,” Daley said. “So not only do we take on projects ourselves, but we also partner with projects to get through.”

One example is the most recent housing units to open up at Ludlow Mills, in Mill 8, a joint venture with Winn Development that allowed Westmass to retain 48,000 square feet on the first floor for commercial use.

“We invested our own money, we invested our own time, and we invested other monies that we received through grants and/or other mechanisms of financing to offset some of the cost explosion during COVID. We’re technically a joint-venture partner with Winn in that project,” Daley explained.

“So we can do projects like that to help make projects pencil, because it’s very, very hard today. In the economy we’re in, plus the cost of doing business, it’s really hard to make a lot of projects work. So by partnering with others, we certainly can bring added value to the team to make sure these things actually do pencil out at the end of the day.”

Opportunity Knocks

O’Donnell said Westmass’s expanding work in development services can benefit all types of projects, from housing to recreation to downtown revitalization.

“We’re increasingly looking on the housing side, keeping a close eye on the housing bond bill that passed in Boston a couple months back, seeing what new programs might be coming down the pipeline, and maybe finding a project that was thinking more commercial — maybe there’s an opportunity for mixed use, to have a residential component, because that can tie in new funding sources that can make the overall project more feasible.”

O’Donnell sees the client roster continuing to include both municipalities and private developers.

“It’s sometimes municipalities that maybe have a private development that’s proposed in town, but they know they need to get public infrastructure to the site. So they’re thinking about things like district improvement financing or grant writing to make that more plausible or more affordable for the community,” he explained. “But on the developer side, with us as a nonprofit partner, we might be able to help tap into some grant-funding resources that a private, for-profit developer might not otherwise be able to.”

Westmass also took over leadership of Develop Springfield late last year; one current project on that front is McCaffery Interests’ work on the Clocktower Building in Springfield’s South End, which will include market-rate housing. “We’re working with them as consultants, helping them with their capital stack, figuring out where financing can come from,” Daley said.

The Ferry Street Mills project in Easthampton is an example of the brownfield and mill properties Westmass works on.

And housing — specifically the need for more of it in most area cities and towns right now — poses significant opportunities for Westmass, O’Donnell added.

“Communities are trying to be proactive, but many communities might not have a full-time planner on staff or have the capacity to re-examine where they might want to expand public infrastructure to make a certain site or area of town viable for housing. They’re also looking at maybe recalibrating their zoning so they can allow for more mixed-use or multi-family in certain areas of the town. I think that’s where we can help, in partnership with other planning firms and the planning commissions as well.”

He noted that Westmass is uniquely situated to be a resource to municipalities and developers, especially in the case of brownfields sites, of which there are hundreds in Western Mass.

For example, in the case of the Ferry Street Mills project in Easthampton, “as a nonprofit, we’re doing a land lease of the property to have site control in order to go after cleanup dollars from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Even though the development following the cleanup will be led by the for-profit developer and the partners there, as a nonprofit, if we have site control during the EPA grant, we can receive those grant funds, clean up the site, and get it ready for projects.

“That’s a huge role that I think is increasingly needed in Western Mass.,” he added. “There’s more funding right now at the federal level, particularly for cleanup and brownfield mill redevelopment work. And I think that we can play a really great, active role with those types of projects around here.”

Community Support

O’Donnell took his current role at Westmass in 2020, the year after Daley took the reins at the company.

“I was Facilities manager over at Ludlow Mills, so I cut my teeth over there. And I was Leasing manager over there for a while,” said O’Donnell, who earned a master’s degree in regional planning from UMass Amherst and has worked at planning commissions at the municipal level. “But my interest is really in economic development and mill redevelopment.”

As for Ludlow Mills, progress continues apace at that complex, where the residential units at Mill 8 were recently completed and Westmass is finishing about $3 million worth of roads and sewer and water service to all the buildings on campus.

“All the electrical’s going in; instead of overhead wires, we put conduit underground, and every single building there will have their own meter, and it will all be underground,” Daley said, adding that Westmass is also partnering with the town through a MassWorks grant to have a $3.5 million road built. “Once that’s built and the town accepts it, then we’ll probably have about 40 acres to develop. So it’s moving; there’s a lot of stuff going on.”

Pre-development work continues on Mill 11, the largest building with about 400,000 square feet, which is awaiting some cooperative work with the National Park Service to remove a historical building on site. “But once we do that, we think it will probably generate about 220 apartments and probably 15 or 20 condominiums, and 60,000 to 100,000 square feet of commercial space,” Daley said. “That’s the big gorilla that we need to get done over there. It’s projected to be a quarter-billion-dollar project.”

Ludlow Mills is a project that clearly impacts an entire neighborhood and town, and O’Donnell sees further opportunities to make similar impacts around Western Mass. in the future.

“Ludlow is a unique case, but I don’t think it would be possible without the community support that started before even we bought it. Westmass started those conversations early, started to lay out what a plan might look like for the entire campus, and the town has been such an incredible partner all the way through,” he told BusinessWest. “And we’re seeing the same thing at Easthampton with the mill projects over there. You need that community buy-in and to have those conversations early to make these large-scale redevelopment projects successful. We want everybody paddling in the same direction, for sure.”

Among its other recent projects, Westmass has worked in a number of ways on the proposed data center in Westfield — from helping the developer through tax-financing programs to securing energy costs with Westfield Gas & Electric to working on state legislation for a personal property-tax exemption — and played a construction-management role for Baystate Health on its Mary Lane Hospital decommissioning, to name just a couple. Westmass was also recently selected also as a house doctor for MassDevelopment projects.

And it’s just getting started.

“We just want to continue expanding our impact,” O’Donnell said. “I think we’ve played a really strong role in these discrete projects, but I think we have an incredible team and the bandwidth to start thinking about potentially larger partnerships and projects throughout Western Mass.

“It’s going to be an evolutionary process on our part, and hopefully we keep bringing in enough work that we can hire some more staff and a team to keep growing this thing,” he added. “It’s incremental at this point, but we’re really trying to build those relationships and get those projects moving.”

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