Blighted Private Properties at various addresses which have been turned around in the City of Gardner. How the progress occurred in the last 5 years. Improvements which have been made. ARPA Funding used for Sign and Facade Grants. Vacant Storefront Revitalization Districts. Vacant Storefront program continues to this day. Listen on any device, CLICK PLAY
About Blighted Properties from a 2023 Interview
Real Estate Services and Commonwealth Places Grant Award.
Blighted Private Properties
Question: There weren’t just city-owned properties, there were a lot of private-owned properties that were really in trouble. We’re talking about that Stewart Street factory, we’re talking about 25 Main Street, we’re talking about the Garbos building, 42 to 52 Main Street, Bank of America, etc. So what did you do? Take a list and reach out, or how did it come to be that all this progress happened in the last five years when it didn’t happen before? What was different?
Answer: You know, it was kind of similar to the same process we did with getting businesses in here too. I remember I had actually sat down with a developer, who is now very settled in the city, about wanting to buy their first property in Gardner, and it was actually the Stewart Street property. And I remember being like, that’s great, have you looked at any of the other properties in Gardner? And I actually gave them a list. And what happened was, when I first took office, there was a day that myself, the building commissioner, and Colin Smith, who used to work in my office, just took a drive around the city and we just looked at every building that we thought had problems with it, or was vacant, or was being underutilized. So we had that list ready, and that’s how, you know, kind of what started the wheel. So you made a list and worked the list. Yeah, exactly. Kind of, yeah. Kind of. Now there were some properties here that people had already been looking at, and are local. And I got to give Empire Management and Empire Properties a big shout out on the renovations they did for their own building, and then carrying that across the street to the old Bank of America building, and some of the other properties in the city. But other than that, when we were talking to outside people, it was honestly just working the list, like you said, and figuring out how we can best get that to happen. Now there was a couple things we did to help incentivize that. We utilized a lot of our ARPA funding to do sign and facade grants. So if a new business came in, we matched up to a certain percentage of the new signage that they bought for their business that was put on the building. None of our grants, I want to say, too, were 100% funded, because we wanted to make sure people had their own stake in the game, too. So we, you know, provided some funding for the new signage for the businesses. We provided some funding for new facades for the building to spruce them up so they looked like they had life in it, so that when someone was looking, do I want to put my business here? The question was, yeah, that looks nice, not like, I think I’m going to look somewhere else because that doesn’t look like the nicest place for me to put my business. So we utilized a lot of our funds for that. And then lastly, we have our vacant storefront revitalization districts that we’ve approved with the state, where there’s certain financial incentives from the state. If a business opens up in a storefront that’s been vacant for more than 12 months, the state just changed that last year to more than six months to incentivize more people coming in because they’ve seen the success of this program in places like Gardner. So we’re looking forward to continuing some of those programs here, too. We don’t have any money appropriated right now for the sign-of-the-facade program, but we are still continuing with the vacant storefront program and finding new creative ways to help incentivize buildings being spruced up so that they come in, track businesses a lot better.
Question: When a city like Gardner has success in revitalizing private buildings, do other developers hear about that and say, hey, I heard that so-and-so had success in Gardner. Does that prompt people to check you out?
Answer: Absolutely. I was shocked when we had the first couple buildings happen, how many people then reached out after that. It was like a frenzy in the office for like a month. So it definitely has brought increased attention to us here in Gardner. One of the things that we’re looking to do right now, then, is how do we make it easier for them to come in? Now that we’ve had people come in for the last five years, working with them and talking with them and seeing like, what could we do better? And that’s brought about some of the changes you’ve seen recently in terms of some of the ordinance proposals that we’ve put forward, some of the ways that we operate with our online permitting system, and just making things so we can be as open for business as possible.
Question: Now, you have something set up in the city so if someone reaches out, there’s a group of people that they talk to first before they spend a lot of money doing different things. Can you tell us about that?
Answer: Yeah, it’s set up in the city’s ordinance. It’s called the Development Review Committee. So if someone wants to come in and do some type of big development, be it a housing development or a new business opportunity or an expansion, there’s public meetings that are held and posted and the Development Review Committee sits down and is made up of various city staff from the various different oversight departments that have permits or oversight regarding the different projects that people are overseeing so that they can get all of their questions answered all at once. And it’s not like, oh, well, I’m going to start here but I don’t know where to go next and I don’t know what’s going to ask this and I don’t know how to oversee that. We lay everything out for you right up front so you know your full process A to B to C to all the way to the end of the alphabet right at the get-go so it’s as easy as possible and as transparent as possible.
Question: And that way, it’s a positive takeaway and they’re more apt to follow through.
Answer: Exactly. Thank you for that.
Blight to Promise – from the 2023 Accomplished Interview
Question: Let’s talk about Blight to Promise. This is an area in which you have really put a lot of work in. The Chair City has recently had success in turning Blight into Promise. And what has Gardner specifically accomplished?
Answer: I think the biggest thing we’ve been able to accomplish in terms of transitioning Blight into Promise is with our downtown. If you look, 22 buildings have been purchased by new owners within the last 12 months. And that’s saying something. And that’s not even – I’m only using 12 months of data on this. If you want to add another year onto that, you can add the Rome building that the city purchased over on the corner of Main Street and Willow. You can add other different properties that are there. But now these buildings have money being invested in them for the first time in decades. I think the last time some of these buildings saw money put towards them was when their deeds were filed in the 80s by an absentee landlord. So the fact that we’re able to turn that around now and have this positive future not only helps our visual appeal in Gardner, not only helps our tax base by improving the image of these – the valuations of these properties, but it also actually helps the city financially in the long term. One of the questions that gets asked every year by Standard & Poor and Moody’s when they issue our bond rating is what work is being done in the city and how are you revitalizing your rundown areas? And if that is a factor that determines our bond rating, that determines how our city’s finances go moving forward, it’s something that should always be one of our top priorities is transitioning blight to promise. And added onto that too is making sure that the city does not become our next absentee landlord. And that’s why one of the goals that I have had is as we take ownership of these problem properties, getting them out for sale as soon as possible through an RFP process that we can make sure we know we’re going to get redeveloped through the contracts that come from those processes, but we’re not sitting on them and waiting for them to further deteriorate on our end. And we saw that with the factory over on Stuart Street, the old Prospect Street School in South Gardner, and several other properties throughout the city.
Question: Now you actually had an initiative that you partnered with one of the city councilors on in order to do something about blighted buildings in the city. Can you tell us once again about that?
Answer: Absolutely. Councilor George Tyros and I jointly proposed an ordinance that gave our building department and our health department a little extra teeth to go after these properties, not only to make sure that our problem properties are being addressed, but also to prevent further problem properties from coming to place. And if we can prevent a problem from existing before it even comes forward, now we’re burning that candle on both ends of the stick and really getting rid of that problem altogether. When I was in Washington, D.C., I mentioned this program when I was in a meeting with Congressman Jake Auchincloss, and he kind of reminded me that when he was in graduate school, or excuse me, when he was in college, one of his professors mentioned a, he jokingly called it a PAW Patrol activity, and PAW Patrol playing a name off of the kids’ TV show, but PAW putting assets to work and finding ways to find these underutilized properties and finding new ways to think outside the box to bring them back up to their full, most effective usage rather than a rundown place that people are embarrassed to see and talk about when they think about their home.
Question: Now tell us specifically what teeth does that give you when you have a particular building?Let’s say everything looks wonderful and gardened, but then you get another landlord who doesn’t take care of something. What does this ordinance give you as far as teeth to address the problem?
Answer: It gives the building department and health department in certain cases the authority to write a citation and require that a property owner fix certain things to a certain standard, be it not boarding up windows for a certain amount of time, broken glass in the area, things of that nature. And if they’re not fixed by a certain timeline, there are fines that are issued on a daily basis until the property is fixed. And if the fines are never paid, we can then lean those against the property, and it basically becomes something that the city can go after the courts for, that if it needs to in the end we can actually go after the property owner for ownership of the property. But that’s never our goal. Our goal is to hope that we have enough enforcement activity to the threat of fines and the fines themselves that the problem just gets fixed.
Question: So the goal basically is to not put the city in a position again where you have blighted properties.
Answer: Correct, yes. And that’s everything that’s in line with the current building code and the health code. So, for instance, one of the things that’s in there is if someone’s grass is over 6 inches long, the health department can cite that property owner until the grass is mowed, and that’s because it’s mosquito mitigation policies within the state. When you have high grass, you likely have more areas of pooling because the grass makes it so the water can’t evaporate as quick, which means more mosquito growth could happen. So those are some things that are actually in state law in the state health code that we can cite for on a local basis as well. Same thing with boarding up windows over a certain amount of period, it becomes a public safety issue at times. If a brick wall seems to be falling like we saw at the Rome building or before Candor Realty purchased the Alexa Fashion building, the previous owner had some issues with scaffolding over there. Those are public safety concerns that the building department can cite for under the building code. So we’re just utilizing the tools that we have finally to our advantage here in Gardner.