Pawtucket makes its move (continued)

IF YOU TALK to anyone in Pawtucket about the arts or new development, it will likely be Herb Weiss, the city’s economic and cultural affairs officer. Part PR cheerleader, part real estate connector, Weiss has become the unlikely leading man in the city’s redevelopment efforts. His job in the planning department started the week in 1999 when Pawtucket’s arts & entertainment district came into effect. With that, Weiss had a mandate — one he carried out with the tenacity of a really friendly pit bull.

Weiss’s hand is evident in all of the previously mentioned projects, and he makes it his business to bend over backward to help artists and arts organizations. "It’s all about customer service," he says. "What we try to do is ratchet up the quality of customer service that an artist or an art group should get. When other communities start rolling out the red carpet too, we’ll just make our carpet plusher." When the performance café Stone Soup relocated to Pawtucket from Providence, for example, Weiss sent a DPW crew to move 200 chairs from the old location. When a team of filmmakers wanted to shoot a zombie flick downtown, Weiss helped clear the streets, reroute traffic, and arranged for one of the city’s fire trucks to appear in the film. He did so much that the film crew made him their production manager. He’s just that type of guy.

When newcomers talk about what drew them to Pawtucket, Weiss and the city’s outgoing approach usually tops the list. Architect Joe Haskett (whose new home and studio were featured in an arts section-front piece in the New York Times last summer) is one of many who will testify to Weiss’s accessibility and willingness to lend a hand. "Anytime we have a problem," Haskett says, "we call Herb, or we call [planning director] Mike Cassidy." And the city is ready to help. About Pawtucket, Haskett says, "There’s this buzz going on."

Of course, price is an equally important consideration, and Pawtucket has proved a cheap and attractive option for many artists and business owners. Rick Roth moved his silk-screening business, Mirror Image, from Cambridge five years ago, and he says his mortgage on a building in Pawtucket is about the same as rent for a 10,000-square-foot space in Cambridge, which quadrupled when he left. "It was ridiculous," Roth says. "I couldn’t buy a parking space [in Boston] for what I bought a building for. Boston is all turning into lawyers’ offices or lofts."

But as Cassidy, director of Pawtucket’s Department of Planning & Redevelopment, put it, "It only took us 20 years to be an overnight success." The Parkin Yarn building on the western end of downtown is a good example of how long it can take things to come together. Over the course of 40 years, city planners raised several possibilities for the five-story, 39,000-square-foot mill building — all of which went nowhere because of financing problems or a lack of parking. Finally, in the ’90s the Pawtucket Redevelopment Agency acquired land surrounding the building and rerouted two adjacent streets to provide parking before putting the building up for sale for a dollar. A team consisting of architect Peter Gill Case and construction magnate George Potsidis purchased it, and is remaking the structure as Bayley Lofts. Five of the project’s 25 units are being subsidized through federal HOME funds, and the majority will sell for under $200,000.

But Pawtucket is still working out the kinks of attracting development. The question of what carrots should be offered to developers, and how generous they should be, has become more important with growing interest in the city. One part of the debate is over tax stabilization, and whether the city should adopt consistent criteria, rather than its current case-by-case approach, when offering the oft-used incentive to developers and rehabbers.

In January, the City Council voted, five to four, to award Bayley Street Lofts a three-year property tax stabilization. But the city awarded a 10-year tax stabilization to the Riverfront Lofts project, and there was some indication the council may have regretted its generosity. After consulting with city officials on application plan, Bayley’s Peter Case says Cassidy advised him, " ‘Look, if you go for the 10-year plan that Ranne [Warner] asked for, you’re not going to get it.’ So I submitted a five-year plan, and lo and behold, the mayor submits a three-year plan."

In a letter submitted to Council President Don Grebien the night of the tax stabilization hearings, Rich Davis of the Pawtucket Foundation urged the council to "develop a clear policy to encourage development of the so-called ‘live/work spaces’ which are a key element of an economic development strategy for our city." Grebien says he plans to set up a task force to study the issue.

The fate of Pawtucket’s historic early 20th century train station, located on the Central Falls line and closed since the late ’50s, also has important implications for the city’s future. In an attempt to plug Pawtucket into a transit network that could strengthen the city’s place in the regional economy, the Pawtucket Foundation is leading efforts to renovate and reopen the station, connecting it with the MBTA in the north, and T.F. Green Airport to the south. Last year, a study commissioned by the foundation found that a Pawtucket MBTA stop would bring 1000 daily riders into the Boston metro area.

Efforts to revive the train station, however, could be scrapped by SMPO Properties, a Memphis developer, which has an agreement with property owner Jean Vitali to purchase and redevelop the site. According to the Times of Pawtucket, plans call for demolishing the train station, doing new commercial and residential development, and reestablishing rail service later on. The Pawtucket Foundation has advised Pawtucket to seize the train station by eminent domain, saying, "The city should acquire the site, to determine what happens, how it happens, what the timeline is. You see how hard cities our size or smaller get positioned to get hooked up to this. You only get a shot like this every century or so. This is our shot."