LEWISTON – In municipal circles, it’s called linkage.
But John Barrett III, the mayor of North Adams, Mass., has a more descriptive phrase for his practice of extracting donations from businesses interested in locating his city.
“I call it legal shakedown,” he said. When Wal-Mart wanted to open a store in North Adams, it ponied up $75,000 for a community theater project. Brooks Pharmacy contributed $50,000 for the fund.
“It’s just a way for them to be part of the community,” said Barrett, somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
Barrett expounded on his unique style of governing at a breakfast gathering at Bates College on Friday. The theme of his talk was Cultural Tourism as an Economic Development Strategy, a topic he addressed at last year’s Creative Economy Conference. As mayor of the former mill town, Barrett helped guide North Adams from its 14 percent unemployment rate and the moniker “Sorry Gateway to Anywhere” to its current status as a cultural destination in the Berkshires and a 5 percent unemployment rate.
“The first thing we had to do was clean up the city,” said Barrett, who used a technique he credited to former President Ronald Reagan. “Make everybody feel good even when there isn’t much to feel good about.”
In 1984 – Barrett’s first year in office – the city’s largest employer, Sprague Electric, began to close down. More than 2,500 jobs were lost and 20 downtown mill buildings abandoned in its wake.
Realizing that it was futile to pin its future on manufacturing, Barrett and other city leaders developed a vision that they never wavered from: Make North Adams pretty. Investing in its image would lure people to the city to live there and economic development would follow.
By getting rid of blight and improving neighborhoods, they laid the foundation to improve the city’s image. A strong site plan review ensured that future development would toe the line.
The next year, the city was approached by a professor from neighboring Williams College who suggested North Adams use its abandoned mill buildings as a home for a contemporary art museum. The notion at the time was “nutty,” said Barrett, made wackier by the unnatural pairing of a blue-collar community and what many consider elite art.
But it was based on making the most of the city’s assets and after 14 years of planning, lobbying and strong-arming opponents, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art opened. Twenty-thousand visitors toured the museum in its first two days; now it records 120,000 visitors annually.
The museum created a draw for other businesses. The city opened a downtown theater (the benefactor of the Wal-Mart and Brooks donations) and with it came eight small restaurants and other businesses.
The city’s downtown is thriving and North Adams now gets $125,000 a year just from hotel and motel taxes; the average homeowner’s property tax bill is $1,300.
The city has continued its beautification plans, buying up decrepit downtown housing stock and either demolishing it, or rehabbing it for working families.
But the battle continues. Barrett said an abandoned Kmart store and its 800-car parking lot has drawn interest from a developer who wants to put in a Big Lots, a Dollar Tree store and another discounter.
“I said no, we can do better,” he said. “It would destroy the little shops in the downtown and it creates a bad image.”
So the city is trying to purchase the property with the idea of converting it into a tri-plex cinema, a business conference center and 65 housing units with green space.
“You have to keep the big picture in mind,” he said. “Never lose sight of the big picture.”
Comments are no longer available on this story