Editorial: BusinessWest July 27, 2015
A Character Test for Springfield
Looking at the matter objectively, this would seem like a strange time to be voicing anything approaching concern when it comes to the city of Springfield.
Indeed, in many ways, things haven’t been this good in the City of Homes for decades — maybe a century when you get right down to it. There’s excitement and energy in the air, a can-do feeling that comes naturally when the city is chosen as home for a half-billion-dollar casino, a Chinese company has selected it as the place where it wants to build subway cars, Union Station is poised to end nearly a half-century of frustrating dormancy, and there is greater entrepreneurial juice than at any time since Smith and Wesson started manufacturing guns here.
But momentum is a curious thing. One moment, an individual or baseball team — or city — can have it in abundance, and the next minute, all or most of it can be lost.
Springfield could very well be at one of those types of crossroads.
The casino project is, in fact, underway, although you really couldn’t tell that by walking though the South End. Things are off to a very slow start, and already MGM is asking the gaming commission to move up the opening date from 2017 to 2018.
The stated reason is the pending I-91 viaduct reconstruction project (we’ll get to that in a minute), but there is already concern that there might be more to this — much more. Connecticut has passed legislation allowing the owners of Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun to explore opening a jointly run casino near the border with Massachusetts. Suddenly, 2018 looks like a best-case scenario for MGM’s facility, and people are starting to wonder out loud just how successful a Springfield casino will be with an already-established competitor operating 10 to 15 miles away.
And then, there’s that I-91 project. It’s been looming for about 18 months now, and work is set to begin (lane-closing schedules are starting to dominate local news broadcasts).
Residents, business owners, and people who work downtown are wary about this project, and they should be. Anyone who lived through — or tried to do business through — the Memorial Bridge reconstruction project and/or the seemingly simple process of reversing the ramps on I-91 to make the new Basketball Hall of Fame more accessible, can readily attest that these projects rarely proceed on schedule and are far more of an inconvenience than even the worst skeptics can anticipate.
Already, service businesses such as law, accounting, and financial services firms, as well as retail operations, are beginning to wonder if people will even try to get to downtown Springfield to do business with them.
All this is enough to potentially zap some of that all-too-critical momentum from the city at a time when Springfield seems to be rebounding in a very big way.
This may sound over-simplistic, but the city, its elected officials, and its business leaders, can’t let that happen. How? That’s the $64,000 question, and it will take some imagination to answer it.
One piece to the puzzle could be a well-constructed pubic relations campaign, one focused on how far the city has come, and how far it can go once the casino opens, construction crews have replaced the last piece of deteriorating viaduct, and some of the startups and next-stage companies taking root in Springfield hit their stride.
A PR blitz won’t make it any easier to get into downtown Springfield once the heavy work on I-91 begins, but it might keep the focus where it belongs — on the city’s long-term future — and not on traffic jams or the slow pace of progress in the construction of MGM Springfield.
As we said at the top, this might seem like a strange time to be even a little worried about Springfield, but that’s a sentiment many people are expressing.
The challenge moving forward is not to allow worry to stifle momentum.
