| The following Business Certificates and Trade Names were issued or renewed during the month of February 2006. |
| AGAWAM Auto Sport Distributors Belmorie Consulting China Star James Hansmann Santo C. DeSpirt AMHERST Baystate Tax Service George Parks Drum Major Academy Strongbridge Associates LLC CHICOPEE The Grattan St. Grind Jenco Property Maintenance Services EAST LONGMEADOW Dances with Stoves The Energy Store HADLEY Fancy Nails HOLYOKE J.B. Renovations Liberty Tax Service LIDS LONGMEADOW Family Wireless Lexington Development LLC TLS Systems NORTHAMPTON Leeper Business Services Pioneer Valley Dietetics SOUTH HADLEY The Global Group Transformational Healing SPRINGFIELD Bronto and Amrah’s Inc. Cumberland Farms #6717 Diyha Animation Production Studios East Coast Swappers El Fogan Market HIBA Food Mart His Praise Worship Sound Jem Offices Kevin Conway Auto Sales Lillian’s Mini Mart Netwerks 31 Brunswick St. O-Mi Oriental Grocery Pick Quick Paper Ronald R. DeSellier Electric Santiago’s Tree & Landscaping Service Stepping Stones Daycare Torrel Jr. LLC Wayne’s Delivery Service X-Diman/Export WEST SPRINGFIELD Bel-Air Inn Complete Pest Control Service Electrology Associates Fred Astaire Dance Studio Hoodtech Inc. L.A. Nails Maaco Auto Painting & Bodyworks O’Donnell Landscaping Phycho Hobb’s Entertainment WestSide Customs/Cap and Hitch of New England WESTFIELD Carlson Carpentry Frost Notification Solutions In & Out PC Westfield Cleaners |
| The following business incorporations were recorded in Hampden and Hampshire counties, and are the latest available. They are listed by community. | |
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Chase, Clarke, Stewart & Fontana Insurance Agency Inc. in Springfield announced that Paul P. Petell II, formerly of the Paul Petell & Teece Insurance Agencies Inc., has joined its staff. ••••• Benefits Consulting Group, LLC in Holyoke announced the following: ••••• James A. Russell, Chief Executive of American Exterminating Co. of Springfield, will receive the Barlett W. Eldridge Award from the New England Pest Management Association. Russell’s grandfather, Abraham Russell, started the company in 1913. His father, Mathew Russell, also operated the business and now his son, Robert Russell, is active in the daily operations. ••••• Sue Rheaume of Landmark Realtors in Hampden has earned the designation of Graduate Realtor Institute by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors. ••••• Matthew B. Hedenberg has been named Informational Technology Manager for OFS in Sturbridge. •••••
Maryanne Rooney recently has been named Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Elms College in Chicopee. An Elms graduate, Rooney had been working at St. Mary’s High School in Lynn as Director of Development and Alumni Relations. ••••• Byron S. Bullock has been named Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life at UMass Amherst. Bullock, who is currently Dean of Enrollment Services at St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, N.C., will assume his new post on April 2. He will oversee the new Center for Student Development (CSD), which coordinates programs and services aimed at promoting community and multiculturalism across campus. The CSD works closely with academic affairs units to develop students’ social, scholarly and leadership skills and improve student retention and success. ••••• Glenn O. Steiger, a California utility executive with more than 35 years of experience in all facets of the electric power industry, has been named General Manager of the Mass. Municipal Wholesale Electric Company (MMWEC) in Ludlow. The MMWEC is a nonprofit, joint-action agency for public power in the state. Steiger will be responsible for the daily operations of the MMWEC, including management of administrative and plant operations in Ludlow, implementation of board policies, and interaction with the organization’s member and project participant utilities. ••••• David J. Cameron, PWS, Senior Environmental Scientist, of Tighe & Bond Inc. in Westfield, recently became the company’s first Certified Wildlife Biologist (CWB). The CWB designation is granted by the Wildlife Society, a nonprofit scientific and educational organization representing wildlife professionals in conservation and resource management. Cameron has 13 years of wetlands, waterways, and rare species regulatory experience, and provides project review services for many of the town conservation commissions in Massachusetts. •••••
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R. Patricia Grenier, CFP, CSA with BRP/Grenier Financial Services of Springfield, has achieved the designation of Certified Financial Planner (CFP). The designation is awarded by the CFP Board of Standards Inc. to individuals who meet educational, examination, experience, and ethics requirements. ••••• Girl Scouts of Pioneer Valley recently announced the winners of the 2006 Women of Distinction award as follows: ••••• Linda S. Rotti, a Real Estate Sales Manager at Jones-Town & Country Realty in Amherst, has been named President of the Realtor Association of Pioneer Valley for a one-year term. Rotti will be responsible for implementing the Association’s new strategic plan with includes an emphasis on education and government affairs. ••••• Wallace W. Altes has been appointed to the Board of Directors of Berkshire Hills Bancorp Inc., the holding company for Berkshire Bank. He becomes the first Albany (N.Y.) Capital Region resident to serve as a Director of the Pittsfield-based financial institution. He is currently Executive-in-Residence at the Graduate College of Union University in Schenectady, N.Y. ••••• Sales Agent Joyce L. Korona has joined Carlson GMAC Real Estate in its Westfield office. ••••• St. Germain Investment Management announced the following: ••••• Berkshire Bank in Pittsfield announced the following: ••••• Srisubha Gadey has joined the accounting firm of Kostin, Ruffkess, Themistos & Dane LLC in Springfield. ••••• Fuss & O’Neill’s West Springfield office announced these promotions: ••••• Big Y Foods Inc. in Springfield announced the following: |
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For years, Springfield, the birthplace of basketball, was also home to the finals of the NCAA Men’s Division II Basketball Championship. After a 12-year hiatus, the city has been awarded the Elite Eight for the next two years. Event organizers intend to use that time to make a solid case for establishing Springfield as a permanent home.
Of late, when the National Collegiate Athletic Assoc. (NCAA) awards the Division II Men’s Basketball Championship to a city, it’s a one-year proposition.
That’s the way it’s been since the start of the decade, with stops in such places as Lakeland, Fla., Evansville, Ind., Bakersfield, Calif., and, last year, Grand Forks … North Dakota.
But when a group of Springfield businesspeople and basketball enthusiasts made a bid to bring the tournament back to Springfield for what would the 50th anniversary of the Division II championship in 2006, they asked the NCAA for two years — and they got them.
But that wasn’t the real goal.
Indeed, their mission was and is to make The City of Homes a permanent home for what has come to be known as the Elite Eight. This is a nearly week-long series of games that climaxes a 64-team tournament staged over two weeks each March, with the championship game broadcast live on CBS.
The request for two years, says Don Senecal, vice president of Finance and Operations for the Basketball Hall of Fame, was a bid to give Springfield a chance to show what it can do.
“This will be our opportunity to show that Springfield, Basketball City, is the place where the Elite Eight should be,” he told BusinessWest, “and we’re going to do our best to convince them.”
Already, organizers have commitments from 22 area businesses, amounting to more than $100,000 that will be used to stage the event and purchase tickets, some of which will go to area young people as part of broad basketball-oriented educational program called MVP’s of Character. Senecal said the immediate goal is to build on that base of support and thus show the NCAA that Springfield’s desire to host the event is a region-wide phenomenon.
Springfield was home for the tournament’s final games throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, Senecal explained, and drew decent crowds. But with a desire to spread the wealth, and perhaps give the tournament a boost, the NCAA took the show on the road — specifically to Louisville, Ky. There it stayed for six years before moving on to Bakersfield, Evansville, and other locales.
But Bob Burke and others in Springfield believe the Elite Eight belongs here.
Burke, athletic director at American International College, a Division II school that has acted as official host for the tournament in the past, and will do so again in ’06 and ’07, called Springfield the “natural home” for the championship.
“This is the birthplace of the sport,” he explained. “And we have everything the NCAA needs — a great facility, a number of hotels, and some great educational opportunities for the athletes playing in the tournament.”
Burke said this is a different Springfield than the one that last hosted the event in 1994, one with a refurbished arena that is part of a new, $55 million convention center, and a new Basketball Hall of Fame, one with a number of facilities and exhibits that didn’t exist in the old Hall.
“We have a lot to offer here,” he explained. “This will be a great opportunity for Springfield, the NCAA, and the athletes themselves.”
Sal D’Amato agreed.
Chairman of this year’s tournament and executive vice president of the TD Banknorth Insurance Group, he said the Elite Eight is about much more than basketball.
He told BusinessWest that there are economic benefits for Springfield and the region — for starters, the event is expected to consume 1,000 hotel nights — but there are other dividends, as well. The event will provide a chance to showcase the city and its gleaming new MassMutual Center, for example, and in the process show the NCAA and other groups it is a fitting site for conventions, meetings, and other sporting events.
Meanwhile, the games and the accompanying festivities could provide a needed psychological boost for the city at a time of extreme fiscal duress and headlines about possible bankruptcy or receivership.
“Springfield has had some difficult times, to be sure, but it’s starting to climb back,” D’Amato said. “The Elite Eight can be a big part of that comeback.”
BusinessWest looks this issue at how Springfield intends to make the most of its two-year window, and soon make the city and the name Elite Eight synonymous.
Bouncing Back
The colleges are not exactly household names.
Kennesaw State. Fort Hays State. Virginia Union. North Carolina Central. Kentucky Wesleyan. Metro State. These are some of the recent Men’s Division II champions, and most people would be hard pressed to find some of them on a map.
But while the schools may be small and somewhat obscure, the basketball they play is still top caliber, said Mark Morris, vice chairman of this year’s event and director of public relations for Health New England.
Tracing the history of the event, Morris said it all started in 1957 in Evansville (with Evansville College as the host school) and remained there for 20 tournaments, five of which were won by the hosts.
When Evansville became a Division I school, the tournament had to move, and Springfield earned its first opportunity to host the event in 1977. The event moved to another Springfield, the one in Missouri, for the next two years, before it returned to the Pioneer Valley for a 15-year run.
It was during that time, that area residents became familiar with such schools as Central Missouri State, Florida Southern, St. Augustine’s, Alaska-Anchorage, and Mount St, Mary’s. Attendance for the final games was fairly steady through those years — championship game turnout ran from a high of
6,894 in 1987 to a low of 3,555 in 1980 — and often reflected the proximity of the teams to the region and the number of fans they brought with them, Morris explained.
But by 1994, the NCAA wanted to take the event to other sites, said Morris, noting that this is the policy with Division I basketball finals, the hugely popular Final Four, and other tournaments. Louisville played host for six years, drawing attendance numbers similar to Springfield’s. But turnout has declined in the past few years, with only 2,378 coming out for the championship game in 2002 in Evansville, 1,600 for the 2004 game in Bakersfield, and about 1,500 for last year’s tilt in North Dakota.
“Grand Forks had a great facility, a wonderful place to watch a basketball game,” said Morris. “But they didn’t get the turnout; there were some logistical challenges — only one airline actually flies into the city.”
But even before the tip-off in Grand Forks, Springfield was making its case to bring the tournament back to Springfield, said Senecal, noting that as it did so, it had commitments from 22 area businesses and organizations that helped sell the NCAA on the city and the region.
Net Results
As he talked about Springfield’s two-year window of opportunity to impress the NCAA and make the Elite Eight a fixture in the city, D’Amato said organizers have to do more than fill seats — although that is an important consideration.
Indeed, there must be a broad base of support that includes business and civic leaders and area residents. Building that base is a process that started more than a year ago, he told BusinessWest, adding that it started with a commitment on the part of officials at the Hall of Fame and others to bring the championship back to Springfield.
To make that happen, the city needed to make a bid to the NCAA, and to do that it needed a solid case.
There are many elements to that case, said Senecal, including accessibilty — getting teams and fans to the game — and also facilities and accommodations. Beyond those essentials, however, he added, the city needed a solid core of supporters.
Springfield had one in the form of an organizing committee for the championship comprised of those 22 businesses and groups, also known as ‘Community shareholders.’
They include the Affiliated Chambers of Commerce of Greater Springfield, TD Banknorth, the Hall of Fame, Chicopee Savings Bank, Comcast, the Economic Development Council of Western Mass., Freedom Credit Union, the Greater Springfield Convention and Visitors Burea, Health New England, Houser Auto Group, and Verizon. Also, MassMutual, the Northeast-10 Conference (which includes AIC), Peoplesbank, The Republican, Sheraton Springfield, Six Flags New England, Spalding, the MassMutual Center, Springfield Marriott, the Tip Off Committee, and Western Mass. Electric.
“Having that base of supporters really convinced the NCAA that Springfield could do this, that we could put on a great championship,” said D’Amato, adding quickly that organizers are seeking additional sponsorships from area businesses. “That’s what sold them.”
Now that Springfield has the Elite Eight for this year and next, said Senecal, the assignment is to put on tournaments that will give the NCAA reason to keep the event here. He said the facilities such as the MassMutual Center, the new Hall of Fame, the downtown hotels, and the proximity to Bradley International Airport will all help in that regard.
But another key ingredient in the equation is making the Elite Eight more than a series of seven basketball games, he said, and instead a community event.
This was the motivation behind such initiatives as MVP’s of Character, which is expected to include nearly 1,000 area students. They will hear several speakers, including Bob Amastas, founder and director of Students Against Drunk Driving, and former Olympic gold medalist and motivational speaker Tim Daggett.
“There is an important philanthropic component to this,” said D’Amato. “We’re going to have 1,000 kids at the MassMutual Center to watch some basketball, but also listening and learning.”
Senecal told BusinessWest that there are no hard estimates on the overall economic impact of the championship on the city and region. Beyond the 1,000 hotel nights, however, the event is expected to be a boon for area restaurants, clubs, the Hall of Fame, and other hospitality related businesses.
But there will other benefits, he contin
ued, including the opportunity to showcase the city before a fairly large and diverse audience (the final game will be broadcast nationally) that includes the NCAA, which stages hundreds of championships and events each year.
“This will be a chance for us to show we a great city this is,” said D’Amato. “And if we do a good job hosting this event — and I’m very confident that we will — there may be opportunities for us to host other NCAA events down the road.”
In the meantime, the event should provide a psychological boost, the size of which is still to be determined.
“There will be a sense of pride to come with staging this event and making it successful,” said Senecal. “
| Fast Facts
What:The NCAA Division II Men’s Basketball Championship — the Elite Eight. |
Courting History
The tournament committee has chosen the marketing slogan The National Championship Happens Here for the upcoming Elite Eight.
The plan, however, is to be able to use the branding tool for a long time.
Armed with a solid game plan and a team of business leaders supporting the effort, organizers believe they have a winning proposition.
They’ll have two years to make their case.
George O’Brien can be reached at[email protected]
Higher education is to Massachusetts what the citrus industry is to Florida.
It is simultaneously our greatest natural resource and one of our leading industries. Maintaining and strengthening the public and private higher-education institutions and their students is critical to maintaining the state’s economic competitiveness.
In recent years, Massachusetts has fallen dangerously behind competitor states in its funding of grant aid for needy students. From 1989 to 2004, Massachusetts joined, Alabama, North Dakota, and Hawaii as one of only four states to allow a decline in its state appropriations for student financial aid.
In our case, it dropped by 13.5%.
Massachusetts is the only state in the nation where more students are enrolled in independent colleges than in public institutions. About 40% of these students are Massachusetts residents. Moreover, those who come from out of state to attend college here contribute to a brain gain for the Commonwealth. Many out-of-staters choose to remain in Massachusetts after graduation at least for their first jobs.
The public benefits of our private higher-education sector are vast, but undervalued. The independent sector educates nearly 80% of the minority students attending four-year colleges in Massachusetts.
The independent sector also graduates a disproportionate share of students majoring in math, science, and other disciplines critically important to the Massachusetts economy. These graduates are well prepared to move into key industries, such as health care, biotechnology, nonotechnology, and telecommunications — industries the independent higher-education sector has helped spawn through research and development and entrepreneurial activity.
The bottom line: The independent sector simultaneously attracts billions of research dollars to the state, invests billions in payroll, construction, and other purchases, and annually saves billions of dollars in public expenditures. Massachusetts, unlike many competitor states, has had the luxury of not needing to allocate double-digit percentages of its annual state budget to higher education, precisely because of the breadth, depth, and quality of our higher education sector. That is not to say, however, that we are spending adequately on education.
Per-student spending on higher education in Massachusetts has been among the lowest in the nation. Massachusetts invests less than 4% of its budget on higher education. In comparison, North Carolina invests more than 14%. This decline in state funding has forced students to take out more loans or not enroll at all. This can only result in a brain drain and weakening of the Massachusetts economy. Last year, the independent colleges and universities in Massachusetts contributed $275 million from their own institutional resources to fund financial aid for Massachusetts residents. For many, this represents a significant portion of their operating budget.
The Legislature and the Romney administration should appropriate funding of operations, capital, and student financial aid for our higher education sector.
This year’s commitment to our public higher education system is an important step in the right direction. A significant investment in state appropriations for student financial aid for Massachusetts residents attending both our public and private independent colleges and universities is warranted and desperately needed. The governor and the Legislature should move ahead with the Board of Education’s cost-effective proposal released last month to increase the Commonwealth’s investment in higher education, including a $20 million increase in student financial aid for residents seeking to attend the college of their choice in Massachusetts.
Just as Florida invests millions of dollars each year to promote its signature citrus industry, so, too, must we invest in our signature industry — higher education and the students we educate to become productive citizens and lifelong contributors to our economy.
Richard Doherty is president of the Association of Independent Colleges & Universities in Massachusetts.
Those grappling with Springfield’s many fiscal and social issues often wonder where to start in the process of fixing a system that is clearly broken.
We have a suggestion, and it is one that would seem less obvious to many. And that is with a strong commitment to early childhood education, especially among the region’s underprivileged populations.
Making investments in young people will pay many dividends down the road — in the region’s schools, neighborhoods, and businesses. Statistics show that when young people are stimulated and prompted to learn early, communities will eventually see reductions in drop-out rates, crime, teenage pregnancy, and welfare dependency.
Meanwhile, businesses will see a higher-quality-workforce and greater productivity from those they hire. In other words, investing in disadvantaged youths is good for business and good for the economy.
The problem is that benefits do not materialize until years after the investments are made, prompting some — usually those who lack vision — to focus on steps that may yield results more quickly, with the emphasis on may.
The importance of early childhood education and the need for government funded programs to ensure universal access to such education was the general message delivered at a recent conference in New York called Building the Economic Case for Investments in Preschool. Sponsored by the Committee for Economic Development, a group of business executives, university presidents, and other groups, the conference was attended by several local business and civic leaders, including Affiliated Chambers of Commerce President Russell Denver and Control Board Director Phillip Puccia.
They heard a host of speakers qualify and quantify the need to invest in young children. James J. Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economics professor from the University of Chicago discussed his findings, which show that investments in early education programs for disadvantaged children bring far greater ROI than investments later in life such as job-training, reduced pupil-teacher ratios, tuition subsidies, and convict rehabilitation. And Isabel Sawhill, director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institute, a nonprofit policy organization, estimated that investment in universal preschool would increase the gross domestic product by nearly $1 trillion within 60 years.
It is our hope that conference attendees from the Pioneer Valley and elsewhere use what they’ve learned to inspire continued progress in the creation and expansion of early childhood education programs. While there has been some progress — 14 states increased their preschool funding by $300 million in 2004 and last year, there were increases in 26 states totaling $600 million — the U.S. continues to lag behind — often way behind — other countries.
Locally, the Cherish Every Child initiative has started a number of programs to enhance early education. These include QUEST — Quality Enhancement for Springfield Teachers — a professional development effort to increase the number of early education and care providers in the city who attend and complete a higher education degree.
Meanwhile, there are other efforts, such as the Get Off On the Right Foot program, a campaign launched by Charlie Epstein, president of the Epstein Financial Group, and Springfield Day Nursery, to encourage area businesses and individuals to contgribute scholarships that will enable children to attend SDN for year.
We encourage area businesses to support these initiatives and lend support to those groups blueprinting new concepts and programs to inspire young children to embrace learning.
Looking at the big picture in Springfield today — and at the prospects for the future — at least two problems are apparent. The first is a poverty rate that impacts everything from crime in the streets to the continuing decline of retail in the city’s downtown. The second is a workforce — or lack thereof — that is hindering development of new industry groups, such as the biosciences, and will continue to do so.
Investing in early childhood education, and giving underprivileged children a better chance to break the cycle of poverty, is a step that can address both issues and help provide Springfield with a brighter future.
Higher education is to Massachusetts what the citrus industry is to Florida.
It is simultaneously our greatest natural resource and one of our leading industries. Maintaining and strengthening the public and private higher-education institutions and their students is critical to maintaining the state’s economic competitiveness.
In recent years, Massachusetts has fallen dangerously behind competitor states in its funding of grant aid for needy students. From 1989 to 2004, Massachusetts joined, Alabama, North Dakota, and Hawaii as one of only four states to allow a decline in its state appropriations for student financial aid.
In our case, it dropped by 13.5%.
Massachusetts is the only state in the nation where more students are enrolled in independent colleges than in public institutions. About 40% of these students are Massachusetts residents. Moreover, those who come from out of state to attend college here contribute to a brain gain for the Commonwealth. Many out-of-staters choose to remain in Massachusetts after graduation at least for their first jobs.
The public benefits of our private higher-education sector are vast, but undervalued. The independent sector educates nearly 80% of the minority students attending four-year colleges in Massachusetts.
The independent sector also graduates a disproportionate share of students majoring in math, science, and other disciplines critically important to the Massachusetts economy. These graduates are well prepared to move into key industries, such as health care, biotechnology, nonotechnology, and telecommunications — industries the independent higher-education sector has helped spawn through research and development and entrepreneurial activity.
The bottom line: The independent sector simultaneously attracts billions of research dollars to the state, invests billions in payroll, construction, and other purchases, and annually saves billions of dollars in public expenditures. Massachusetts, unlike many competitor states, has had the luxury of not needing to allocate double-digit percentages of its annual state budget to higher education, precisely because of the breadth, depth, and quality of our higher education sector. That is not to say, however, that we are spending adequately on education.
Per-student spending on higher education in Massachusetts has been among the lowest in the nation. Massachusetts invests less than 4% of its budget on higher education. In comparison, North Carolina invests more than 14%. This decline in state funding has forced students to take out more loans or not enroll at all. This can only result in a brain drain and weakening of the Massachusetts economy. Last year, the independent colleges and universities in Massachusetts contributed $275 million from their own institutional resources to fund financial aid for Massachusetts residents. For many, this represents a significant portion of their operating budget.
The Legislature and the Romney administration should appropriate funding of operations, capital, and student financial aid for our higher education sector.
This year’s commitment to our public higher education system is an important step in the right direction. A significant investment in state appropriations for student financial aid for Massachusetts residents attending both our public and private independent colleges and universities is warranted and desperately needed. The governor and the Legislature should move ahead with the Board of Education’s cost-effective proposal released last month to increase the Commonwealth’s investment in higher education, including a $20 million increase in student financial aid for residents seeking to attend the college of their choice in Massachusetts.
Just as Florida invests millions of dollars each year to promote its signature citrus industry, so, too, must we invest in our signature industry — higher education and the students we educate to become productive citizens and lifelong contributors to our economy.
Richard Doherty is president of the Association of Independent Colleges & Universities in Massachusetts.
Those grappling with Springfield’s many fiscal and social issues often wonder where to start in the process of fixing a system that is clearly broken.
We have a suggestion, and it is one that would seem less obvious to many. And that is with a strong commitment to early childhood education, especially among the region’s underprivileged populations.
Making investments in young people will pay many dividends down the road — in the region’s schools, neighborhoods, and businesses. Statistics show that when young people are stimulated and prompted to learn early, communities will eventually see reductions in drop-out rates, crime, teenage pregnancy, and welfare dependency.
Meanwhile, businesses will see a higher-quality-workforce and greater productivity from those they hire. In other words, investing in disadvantaged youths is good for business and good for the economy.
The problem is that benefits do not materialize until years after the investments are made, prompting some — usually those who lack vision — to focus on steps that may yield results more quickly, with the emphasis on may.
The importance of early childhood education and the need for government funded programs to ensure universal access to such education was the general message delivered at a recent conference in New York called Building the Economic Case for Investments in Preschool. Sponsored by the Committee for Economic Development, a group of business executives, university presidents, and other groups, the conference was attended by several local business and civic leaders, including Affiliated Chambers of Commerce President Russell Denver and Control Board Director Phillip Puccia.
They heard a host of speakers qualify and quantify the need to invest in young children. James J. Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economics professor from the University of Chicago discussed his findings, which show that investments in early education programs for disadvantaged children bring far greater ROI than investments later in life such as job-training, reduced pupil-teacher ratios, tuition subsidies, and convict rehabilitation. And Isabel Sawhill, director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institute, a nonprofit policy organization, estimated that investment in universal preschool would increase the gross domestic product by nearly $1 trillion within 60 years.
It is our hope that conference attendees from the Pioneer Valley and elsewhere use what they’ve learned to inspire continued progress in the creation and expansion of early childhood education programs. While there has been some progress — 14 states increased their preschool funding by $300 million in 2004 and last year, there were increases in 26 states totaling $600 million — the U.S. continues to lag behind — often way behind — other countries.
Locally, the Cherish Every Child initiative has started a number of programs to enhance early education. These include QUEST — Quality Enhancement for Springfield Teachers — a professional development effort to increase the number of early education and care providers in the city who attend and complete a higher education degree.
Meanwhile, there are other efforts, such as the Get Off On the Right Foot program, a campaign launched by Charlie Epstein, president of the Epstein Financial Group, and Springfield Day Nursery, to encourage area businesses and individuals to contgribute scholarships that will enable children to attend SDN for year.
We encourage area businesses to support these initiatives and lend support to those groups blueprinting new concepts and programs to inspire young children to embrace learning.
Looking at the big picture in Springfield today — and at the prospects for the future — at least two problems are apparent. The first is a poverty rate that impacts everything from crime in the streets to the continuing decline of retail in the city’s downtown. The second is a workforce — or lack thereof — that is hindering development of new industry groups, such as the biosciences, and will continue to do so.
Investing in early childhood education, and giving underprivileged children a better chance to break the cycle of poverty, is a step that can address both issues and help provide Springfield with a brighter future.
Museums 10 picked a unique subject for its first endeavor as a formal organization – Dutch culture. More notable than the topic from which the museums and several other groups and businesses will derive inspiration, however, is the increasingly expansive nature of the Go Dutch! program, which is spanning the region and attempting to break down invisible barriers between the counties of the Pioneer Valley.
Unpack your tulip vase and dust off your wooden shoes … it’s time to Go Dutch.
In less than a month, a multi-organization, cultural exhibit will kick off in the Pioneer Valley, offering art, music, literature, floral, and other programs to the public, all centered on the theme of Dutch culture and both the modern life and historical relevance of The Netherlands.
What makes this project different from other cultural exhibits, however, is that it involves several non-profit organizations and for-profit businesses, serves as the first major program spearheaded by a new partnership between 10 Hampshire and Franklin county museums, and will run for several months, drawing in visitors from both the local area and surrounding cities and states.
And it is expected to break through the ‘Tofu Curtain.’
That’s what some people call the invisible line that separates Hampden from Hampshire and Franklin counties, and often stalls cultural partnerships between them. A joke referring to Hampshire and Franklin counties’ reputation as the more liberal and artsy portion of the Pioneer Valley, and to Hampden County’s more industrial identity, the Tofu Curtain gives some levity to a very real issue in the Pioneer Valley — the disconnect between many cities and towns in terms of the cultural tourism initiatives of the region.
Nora Maroulis, director of Development and Marketing for the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and a member of the marketing team of Museums 10, a cultural partnership launched last year, said the primary goal of the organization’s first major project, Go Dutch!, will be to promote the cultural gems of the Pioneer Valley as a whole, not separated by town lines.
“This project is completely unprecedented,” she said. “Chambers of commerce in Franklin, Hampshire, and Hampden counties are all sitting at the same table, along with the GSCVB (Greater Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau), several organizations, and businesses across the region. And we’re all talking about one thing: tourism.”
The Power of 10
Museums 10 was officially launched last year, following many years of successful partnerships on a less formal level among the museums’ directors.
The organization now consists of seven college museums, all located on the ‘Five College’ campuses in Amherst, Northampton, and South Hadley: The University Gallery at UMass, Amherst; the Mead Art Museum, Emily Dickinson Museum and Homestead, and Museum of Natural History at Amherst College; the Hampshire College Art Gallery; the Smith College Museum of Art, and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.
Two independent Amherst museums – the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and the National Yiddish Book Center – and Historic Deerfield complete the group, and a suite of materials promoting the museums as one set of attractions was also created last year.
Maroulis explained that the marketing professionals of each museum were asked by the museums’ directors to begin meeting on a regular basis, as the directors had with some success.
“You put a group of marketing directors in the same room, and it’s inevitable that some major brainstorming is going to happen,” she said.
The first byproduct of such brainstorming is Go Dutch!, a region-wide exhibition of Dutch art and culture that will be anchored by a traveling art exhibit slated to appear at the Eric Carle Museum from March through July, titled Dutch Treats: Contemporary Illustration from the Netherlands. The other museums in the organization will also hold exhibits, performances, and other events in keeping with the same Dutch theme.
However, as Maroulis was quick to note, not only Museums 10 galleries will be participating in Go Dutch! – museums, businesses, and other venues across the Pioneer Valley have pledged their support and participation, creating a partnership that is a first in the area.
In addition to Museums 10, more than 25 businesses and organizations across the valley are slated to offer some type of exhibit or event in keeping with the Go Dutch! theme, including the Springfield Museums, Chandler’s Tavern and Yankee Candle in South Deerfield, the Springfield Armory, the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, the UMass School of Architecture and Regional Planning, the Log Cabin, the Paradise City Arts Festival, and several others.
Rediscover the Spring and Summer
Maroulis said the number of participants continues to grow as the start date for Go Dutch! nears, and added that in addition to the growing numbers of participants across the valley, other aspects of the project are expected to factor into its overall success, including the ever-important issue of economics.
“We didn’t want the museums to create new programs for Go Dutch!, because creating programs costs money,” she explained. “Instead, we asked them to look inward at their existing collections for art work or potential performances and events that would fit the theme of Dutch culture or the Netherlands.”
To that end, several museums, including the Mead Art Museum and the Springfield Museums, will showcase paintings or sculpture by some of the Dutch masters, including Rembrandt and Vermeer, and the botanical gardens of Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, for example, will use their existing stores to create Dutch-inspired flower and plant shows. But all of the planned programs are unique in their subject matter, and include a wide-range of topics, for instance:
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From March to May, the Emily Dickinson Museum will allow visitors to explore unexpected connections between the Dickinsons and cultural influences of the Low Countries, and throughout the spring, the museum grounds will be peppered with tulips and other bulb-grown flowers;
- Showcasing tulips and other spring flowers on a grander scale will be the Mount Holyoke College Botanic Garden Spring Flower Show, dubbed On the Dutch Waterways, from March 4 to 19;
- The Smith College bulb show, also opening March 4;
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The Arcadia Players, a baroque ensemble based in Northampton, will perform a Dutch Baroque organ music program at First Church in Amherst on March 4;
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From March to June, the Smith College Museum of Art will exhibit Dutch prints and drawings from its collection. The selected prints represent the art of 17th century Holland, often called the Golden Age of Dutch art;
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Similarly, the Springfield Museums at the Quadrangle will also exhibit prints and drawings from the Golden Age during the same time;
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A Family Day is planned for March 11, offering a preview of Go Dutch! From 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., at no cost, on the Mount Holyoke College campus. Families are invited to enjoy a variety of activities, including a scavenger hunt focusing on the museum’s collection of Dutch art;
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From March 31 to May 19, the University Gallery of UMass Amherst will exhibit of works by contemporary Dutch artist Avery Preesman, whose abstract paintings and wall reliefs are gaining notoriety;
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Beginning April 1 and running until late December, Historic Deerfield will offer At Home in Holland: Dutch Decorative arts from the Historic Deerfield collection to all visitors. Colonial-era objects created in or inspired by Holland will be on display at the Flynt Center of Early New England Life;
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The Yiddish Book Center, which already stages several programs a year to promote Yiddish culture and literature, has scheduled 10 individual programs throughout the spring and summer as well as two art exhibitions as part of Go Dutch!, which will include a concert titled Music from the Time of Anne Frank on April 23, and on view in the Gerson Gallery, a series of etchings created by illustrator Joseph Goldyne, depicting scenes inspired by the diary of Anne Frank; and
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From May 5 to 7, the Mass. International Festival of the Arts (MIFA) will stage a theater production of Van Gogh’s Ear, a new musical theater work based on the painter’s letters, at the Rooke Theater, Mount Holyoke College.
A Blooming Economy?
Some funding for the various programs as well as advertising for the Go Dutch! project was made possible by a matching grant from the Mass. Cultural Council (MCC), which provided $50,000 to Museums 10 that the organization must match with cash or in-kind contributions.
As the program continues to grow across the region, said Maroulis, Museums 10 is focused on recruiting more for-profit businesses to serve as partners or sponsors with the museums and other cultural outfits comprised in Go Dutch!, in order to ensure those matching grant funds are secured and also to underscore the importance of cultural tourism to the Pioneer Valley’s overall economic health.
“We’ve already seen programs like this succeed in other areas,” she said, noting as an example a recent county-wide endeavor in the Berkshires, titled the Vienna Project. “In that case, businesses and restaurants were very involved, and we want to mirror that involvement here.”
Christine Noh, marketing manager for the Eric Carle Museum, added that not only would the involvement of more for-profit businesses benefit Go Dutch!, but the program can also provide some unique marketing opportunities for those businesses.
“This is a groundbreaking project, and some savvy business owners, particularly in the small business sector, have been quick to jump on board,” she said. “Go Dutch! is going to get a lot of play up and down the I-91 corridor, but also outside the area in key markets like Boston and New York.”
Noh explained that, in addition, a lengthy booklet is being published by Museums 10 that features all partnering organizations and businesses, as well as a ‘passport’ program that allows visitors to Go Dutch! exhibits to receive stamps that make them eligible for an all-expense paid trip to the Netherlands. There are advertising opportunities within the booklet, which will be distributed throughout the Pioneer Valley and outside of the area as a visitor’s guide.
“We’re trying to remind people that live here of what is so great about the valley, and of everything we have to offer culturally,” said Noh, “but we’re also working to bring new tourism in. Several small business owners have been very responsive to that goal, and the hotels are joining us quickly, too. We have a core group of people who understand the value of cultural tourism that is very strong.”
Still, Noh and Maroulis agreed that to give Go Dutch! that final push, greater involvement from some of the area’s larger companies is necessary.
“Businesses need to understand that the cultural and academic organizations of the area bring in more than 500,000 visitors to the area a year,” said Noh. “That’s a lot of people who will come back, or better yet, stay, if they like what they see.”
Maroulis added that Museums 10 is sensitive to the financial obligations of for-profit organizations, but added that in terms of Go Dutch!, the positive marketing opportunities could outweigh economic factors and also give many businesses a boost.
Home Improvements
“We would like very much to see some of the larger employers in the area become corporate sponsors,” she said. “With the support we’ve received from the GSCVB and from the MCC, we have been able to be very successful very quickly with branding ourselves as a permanent fixture in the area, and Go Dutch! is sort of the big event that is heralding the arrival of Museums 10.
“We’re not going anywhere … and we want to work with major businesses to increase the visitorship to their stores or increase awareness of their services, as much as we want to promote ourselves,” she continued. “It all helps us work toward the same goal – benefiting and promoting the place we call home.”
A home she hopes will soon include more open doors and windows of opportunity, unfettered by curtains of any kind.
Jaclyn Stevenson can be reached at[email protected]
Some of Trish Hannon’s earliest memories are of times spent in a hospital.
An orthopedic birth defect provided her with an and early — and thorough — introduction to the health care community, one that ultimately left her with the ability to walk and a desire to help others in the same way that teams of doctors and nurses had helped her.
“I was hospitalized on and off as a child, and those experiences were in many ways good experiences, as odd as that sounds,” said Hannon, senior vice president for Healthcare Operations for Baystate Health and COO of Baystate Medical Center. “It was an opportunity for me to see how people who were in health care, particularly nurses, were able to impact people’s lives.
“I felt personally as if my life had been changed by the experience,” she continued. “Early in my life I had a very hard time walking, but by age 10, I was able to walk without any issues. And I knew I was going to be able to dream a lot bigger because I would be able to walk — and it was all because of the great nurses and doctors who took care of me.”
And because of those early experiences and a similar desire to change lives, the first dream was to become a nurse.
“I knew at age 5 that this was what I wanted to do,” she said. “I grew up watching Dr. Kildare and reading Cherry Ames (the mystery-solving nurse in the series authored by Helen Wells); I would go to the library and read everything I could on nursing, and set out to be one as quickly as I possibly could.”
That route was through the Nursing program at Marymount College in Virginia. From there, she started her professional career in pediatric nursing, eventually gravitating toward the operating room and the emergency room.
After relocating from the Washington, D.C. area to San Diego, Calif., and, later, to Springfield and the Baystate system, her career transitioned into roles that were increasingly administrative in nature — titles varied from director of Surgery and Emergency Services to vice president of Clinical Affairs.
But the desire to change lives has remained the common denominator.
“I’ve moved from touching one life at a time from a clinical perspective,” she explained, “to hopefully influencing many thousands of lives with a great team of people through the work that we do; that’s very powerful as it relates to my original dream.”
Today, in her current capacities with Baystate Health, which she joined in 1994, her job description and specific duties are broad in nature; she’s involved in everything from revenue-cycle performance to pension plan redesign to development of a state-of-the-art clinical information system for the system’s three hospitals, Baystate, Franklin Medical Center, and Mary Lane Hospital. But the mission is actually rather simple — the day-to-day delivery of quality health care services.
Walking the Walk
Hannon has a large office in what is known as the Springfield Building at the Baystate complex — but she told BusinessWest she’s rarely in it.
Indeed, as she talked about her current responsibilities within the system, Hannon said her job is largely about listening, and she does it pretty much anywhere but at her desk.
“I manage by walking around,” she explained, noting that she conducts daily “rounds,” during which she talks with patients, nurses, doctors, pharmacists, receptionists — anyone who has something to say about the care administered at Baystate and how to make it better.
Walking and listening are the two main operating philosophies for Hannon in her role as COO of BMC and senior vice president for Healthcare Operations at Baystate Health. This is the latest step in a 32-year career in health care that has seen her transition from hands-on care of single patients in the pediatric ward to direct and indirect responsibility for hundreds of patients and the 4,500 or so employees at BMC.
Hannon came to Baystate after nearly 20 years of work with various health care facilities in San Diego. She spent four years as the director of Specialty Services at Sharp Health Care in Chula Vista, and prior to that worked as senior consultant and president of the Physicians Business Network in San Diego. She also served as director of the Mericos Eye Institute at Scripps Health Inc. in La Jolla, and as director of Surgery and Emergency Services at Villa View Community Hospital in San Diego.
At Baystate, she started in 1994 as service line director of Surgery and Anesthesia, before moving on to director of Clinical Affairs, vice president of Clinical Services, and, in 2000, to COO of BMC. She was named senior vice president of Healthcare Operations for the system in 2005.
Breaking down her present responsibilities, she said they come in three main areas, or sets of activities, that she addresses in partnership with Chief Medical Officer Loring Flint and in conjunction with teams of individuals;
- Providing physicians, nurses, and other staff with the proper environment, resources, tools, and support systems, as she called them, to provide quality care;
- Developing new leaders in both clinical and administrative capabilities throughout the system — in other words, putting the right people in positions at every level of service; and
- Putting the necessary processes in place to measure results and continuously look for ways to improve the work being done.
Lessons in Listening
Elaborating, she stressed that the first of these assignments is perhaps the most critical, and the one that most consistently tests and refines her ability to listen.
“I listen carefully to what the staff is telling us, what the managers are telling us, what the physicians and patients are telling us,” she explained, adding that much of the feedback is garnered while doing rounds of patient wings. “I stop in the emergency department, the oncology unit, the pharmacy, the Comprehensive Breast Center, everywhere.”
Rounds come in two varieties, informal and formal, she noted, adding that during the latter, known as “safety rounds,” the questions are of a more serious nature.
“We interview staff, nurses, pharmacists, and other health care professionals about what concerns them, and the things they are most worried about with respect to the resources they have and the responsibilities they have,” she said. “We ask what them what they need, and if they can identify opportunities to improve; it’s a process we use to create the proper environment people need to do what they do.”
As for leadership development, Hannon said this is another critical component of her work, and another that involves solid teamwork. She told BusinessWest that she is directly involved in the hiring of operating vice presidents and takes part in interviews at the director level. But, system-wide, she is responsible for setting standards and a tone in defining leadership capabilities for managers, directors, and supervisors. She also teaches a class for front-line supervisors that helps provide the skills they need to be effective leaders.
“We constantly look at the development needs of each of the leaders, and make sure that we’re appointing people with the right competencies,” she explained. “We work to make sure that those leaders are developing relationships with the staff that are open and communicative, and that they listen.”
Skills are an important factor in hiring decisions, she continued, but in a word, she’s looking more at personality, or fit with the organization. Elaborating, she said the system’s leaders must possess a “style that is fundamentally about connecting with other human beings and feeling privileged to be serving other human beings.”
Finding such individuals is an inexact science, she acknowledged, but a critical process in making sure the Baystate system is able to carry out its overall mission — today and tomorrow.
“What’s most important to us is a philosophy that we hire for a fit with our organization’s culture and operating principles, and we train for skill development,” she continued. “In my view, it’s a mistake for people to hire on the basis of technical skill, without regard or with less regard to the individual’s ability to effectively lead in an environment that’s about trust and respect and communication and collaboration.”
Many of those elements go into the third component of Hannon’s job description, the quality-measurement responsibilities, or continuous improvement efforts.
“This is a relentless pursuit of perfection,” she told BusinessWest. “And while noting is ever really perfect, the work is in that relentless pursuit.”
Borrowing lessons from the manufacturing sector, the airline industry, and other business groups, health care is becoming increasingly focused on the processes involved with quality and continuous improvement, said Hannon. She noted that the key is to embed this mindset into the culture of the system and make it “part of what you do every day.”
“It is about creating opportunities to learn from things that didn’t go so well,” she explained, “and the opportunity to replicate things that go very well; we focus very much on how to be a better organization all the time.”
Positive Prognosis
Looking at the sum of her many responsibilities, Hannon told BusinessWest that she finds her work both consistently challenging and deeply rewarding.
And it is also honors her original motivation for entering the health care field: impacting lives.
“The work is always exciting because it’s about people,” she said, “and the greatest part of my job is being able to talk with both the staff and patients about the work that we do and the opportunity to actually improve someone’s life because they’ve touched Baystate and Baystate has touched them.
“I have the benefit of both learning continually and working with colleagues who have the same passion for the relentless pursuit of perfection in the way we deliver care,” she continued. “It’s fun to get up in the morning and know that on any given day we have the opportunity to really impact someone’s life in a very meaningful way; that’s very worthwhie.”
In other words, it’s another of her bigger dreams come true.
George O’Brien can be reached at[email protected]
Celeste Surreira says she’s always had a passion for emergency room nursing.
“I like everything about it … you can really make an impact on people here,” said Surreira, manager of the Emergency Department at Mercy Medical Center. “I enjoy the fast pace and I love dealing with patients. Then, there’s the diversity, which comes in many ways; you see people of many different ethnic groups and every socio-economic category, and we deal with every age group — pediatrics to geriatrics and everything in between.”
And there’s something else, as well — what Surreira calls the public relations factor.
She described the ER as the front door of the hospital, one where introductions are often made and critical first impressions formed.
“You’ve got about 30 seconds to make or break that visit,” she explained. “That’s why emergency room nurses, especially, have the ability to impact that person’s experience and, therefore, their relationship with the facility.”
Making first impressions as favorable as possible is one way to describe the work Surreira does as ED manager, a post she assumed about a year ago. There are others. “You might say I help replace chaos with organization,” she explained, noting that the medical center and its leadership have made a strong commitment in recent years to the ED and continuously improving the delivery of care there.
The initiative included an extensive renovation project completed last year that was designed to streamline patient flow and improve overall customer satisfaction, a term Surreira likes to use when describing her work.
“People who come to the ER are more than patients, they are customers.” She said. “We want to treat those customers in a way that will make them feel positive about their experience here. No one wants to be in the ER, but we can make their visit more bearable.”
Efforts to improve service to patients have contributed to a sharp rise in the ED census from 2004 to 2005, when the number rose from about 45,000 visits to nearly 55,000, or about 150 per day.
“Part of that results from a national trend — in general, numbers are up,” she explained. “And I’d like to think that some of it is due to the fact that we’re doing a better job and our reputation is steadily improving.”
As department director, Surreira does far less hands-on care delivery than she did several years ago, although she still does some, especially when the unit is busy, which is often. In her administrative role, her passion for the patients remains, but takes on a different, broader scope.
Wait-reduction Exercises
Surreira told BusinessWest that waiting is a fact of life in the emergency room.
People wait to see a triage nurse, for registration, to see a doctor, to receive test results, for a bed in the hospital … every step of the process, she explained. The waiting cannot be eliminated, she continued, not at Mercy or any other ED, but it can minimized and also be made more palatable.
“People have told me that they expect to wait, but they want information as to why they are waiting,” she said. “As long as I kept them updated, they were fine.”
Reducing wait times and improving the overall ED experience have been the focal points for Surreira since she became ED director, and, in many ways, since she first started working in that critical area of health care.
That was roughly a year after she graduated from the nursing school affiliated with what is now Baystate Health. Surreira told BusinessWest that, growing up, she knew that she wanted to work with people and impact their lives.
This is what drew her to nursing and, specifically to the ED.
“In emergency room nursing, there is good deal of autonomy, which I like, and also a good deal of patient-teaching, which I also enjoy,” she explained. “I just find this work very rewarding — you feel as though you’re making a difference.”
Baystate did not have any openings in the emergency department, so she left that system for Mercy in 1986. She worked as an ED nurse there for several years, before advancing first to the role of clinical nurse supervisor and then ED director.
In the former, she said, her charge was essentially patient flow during her shift. In the latter, meanwhile, she says, there is more accountability and direct leadership.
“I don’t like to think of myself as a manager,” she explained. “I like to think of myself as a leader.”
Her current assignment is one with a broad job description, one that includes everything from managing payroll for the 70 staff members in the ED to creating classes in customer service for those nurses, orderlies, and other professionals.
But she boils it down to just a few words.
“I’m the ultimate communicator,” she explained, noting that she acts as intermediary between the medical center’s administration and the ED staff, and also plays a key role in coordinating care and developing policies and procedures.
Surreira said broad changes in the health care environment, specifically the rising numbers of uninsured and underinsured individuals, has made the ER the first, and sometimes the only, option for people seeking care.
This phenomenon is reflected in the rising numbers of people visiting the ED, at Mercy and elsewhere, she said, adding quickly that while there are access-to-care issues impacting all providers, the emergency room has always played a key role in serving a specific population.
“Even if you have a doctor and you have insurance, that doctor may not be able to see you for several days,” she said, adding that the ED often becomes a second, critical source of primary care. “We’re really good at what we do … we can see you, do your tests, and give your results all at once.
“So we’re good at customer service, which is how American culture is today,” she continued. “It’s one-stop shopping, sort of speak.”
Bed-time Stories
Improving that shopping experience has been an ongoing obsession for Surreira, her staff, and Mercy administrators. It’s an process, she says, that involves taking the ED visit, breaking it down step by step, and initiating efforts to improve each of them.
And while reducing wait times is a critical piece of the initiative, there are other goals, she said, adding that the general mission is to reduce stress and anxiety from what can often be a traumatic experience.
It starts when the individual enters the door. “We greet every person on arrival,” she said, adding that, for their duration of their stay, staff members are committed to keeping patients and family informed and, in a word, comfortable.
That’s why, for example, the department added what are known as ‘patient
advocates’ to the roster of care providers. These individuals work in the waiting room as liaisons between staff and family members, facilitating the flow of communication and updating patients as to why they are waiting.
“If they see someone who is dissatisfied, angry, or anxious,” she said, “they intervene immediately and do what we call a “service recovery and address the issue at that moment.”
The broad process-improvement effort involves dissecting each step, crafting solutions, and measuring results to confirm progress. “The line is, ‘if you can measure it, you can change it,’ and we have measures in place for all of these steps.”
Listing them, she said the first is the time from when one walks in the door until he or she sees a triage nurse; the second is from that moment until registration is complete; then it’s from registration until one is placed in a room; from that moment until one is seen by a doctor; from the doctor’s visit to the booking for administration; and, finally, the time until one is actually admitted.
Improvement has been achieved at each of these intervals, from the time it takes to see a triage nurse to the time an individual must wait for a bed in the hospital, she said, noting that with the latter, the period has been reduced from 24 hours or more to less than two hours.
“In some cases, that’s a dramatic turnaround,” said Surreira, attributing it to a system-wide commitment to the ED. “It stems from this administration understanding the true value of the ER — this is the public relations door to the hospital — and dedicating itself to making it a real asset to the community and this facility.”
That commitment includes ‘Project 10,000.’ That was the first name given to the series of renovations that took place last year and included everything from enlarging the waiting area to making the triage room more private to increasing the ED bed count from 24 to 29. The name stems from a stated goal of increasing the ED census by 10,000, a goal that has largely been reached, said Surreira, adding that it was later called ‘Project 10’ to connote the highest score on customer-satisfaction surveys.
Bringing up those scores has been a labor of love for Surreira, who came back to her point about chaos and eliminating it.
“This can be a very chaotic environment — the key is to make it organized chaos,” she explained. “And when you truncate every step in the process and make it a system, then chaos goes away and organization takes over.”
The Bottom Line
As she talked about life in the emergency room, Surreira said she sees many familiar faces during her rounds of the department.
These patients, or repeat customers, as she called them, have in some ways become extended family, individuals she has come to know and care about.
This is the where the public relations component of work in the ED meets the part about impacting people’s lives.
“That’s why I’m passionate about emergency room nursing and taking care of emergency room patients,” she said, “and why ER nurses are very special people.”
It’s called ‘medication reconciliation.’
That’s a process for ensuring that patients are getting only the medications intended for them, and that these medications do not react negatively with anything the patient is already taking. Northampton’s Cooley Dickinson Hospital is addressing the matter through a number of programs, including medication cards, carried by patients, which alert caregivers to the full list of medications an individual is taking.
This is one of many patient safety initiatives in which Cooley-Dickinson is no longer trying to merely match industry best practices, but in many instances, establishing best practices.
And leading such efforts is Donna Truesdell, MS, RNC, CDH’s director of Quality Improvement, who says she takes enormous pride and satisfaction in her work.
She told BusinessWest that medication reconciliation is just one of several quality initiatives ongoing at Cooley Dicksinson, all designed to improve patient safety, reduce medical errors, and enhance the overall quality of care being administered, Other efforts include everything from a program to reduce the incidence of falls among patients to an effort to speed up the time it takes to make a room ready for a patient to a new system that dramatically reduces the time it takes to secure clean IV pumps and other equipment.
Quality has been the informal, one-word job description for Truesdell for much of her 25-year career in health care. Originally a staff nurse in a hospital in Punxsutawney, Pa. (home of the groundhog), she relocated to Massachusetts in the mid ’80s, and eventually landed at Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield. There, she assumed titles that included director of Quality, Diagnostic, and Clinicial Support Services, and director of Performance Improvement and Clinical Support Services.
In those capacities, as in her current one at CDH, the focus was on process improvement, she explained, and giving staff members — from those who make the beds and clean patient rooms to physicians and nurses — opportunities to do what they do better, and in the process, improve safety and save lives.
This is work much different than hands-on delivery of care, she said, but, in many ways just as rewarding.
“Early in my career, I was frustrated with systems that didn’t help people; I was frustrated when I saw barriers,” she explained. “When I moved into management, I sought to remove barriers and make it easier for people to do their work and care for patients.
“A good day for me,” she continued, “is when I know my work has resulted in a front-line staff person doing their job better.”
Care Package
Truesdell vividly remembers the two years she spent as a school nurse, first at the Academy at Charlemont, and then at Mohawk Trail Regional Schools in Shelbourne Falls.
“When people think of the school nurse they picture Band-aides and skinned knees,” she said. “That’s not what it’s like in many places, including Charlemont.”
Indeed, the school nurse was often the primary care giver for low-income families with no access to health care — real or imagined, she said. “Mothers with no health insurance would bring in pre-school aged children for me to look at and give assessments. Often, I would send kids home with supplies like bandages, because there weren’t any at home.”
There was an educational component to the school nurse duties — working with teachers to help young students learn the basics of health care, she said, adding that she sometimes referred to this period as the “vacation” in her career because of the less hectic, enjoyable nature of the work.
But in many ways, it created an effective bridge to the next stage of her career, which has focused primarily on the two words quality and safety. And they go hand in hand, she said.
From the Mohawk Trail schools, Truesdell moved on to FMC, part of the Baystate Health system, where she served first as manager of the hospital’s Education Department, a post she held from 1988 to 1992. From there, she moved up the ladder to manager of Education and Medical Information Services, where she managed hospital-wide education, patient registration, medical records, and ultilization management departments.
In 1996, she became senior manager at FMC, and a year later was promoted to director of Performance Improvement and Clinical Support Services. And in 2000, she acquired another new title, director of Quality, Diagnostic and Clinical Support Services.
In that role, she coordinated the hospital’s quality-management program and chaired its Performance Improvement Committee, among many other duties. And it was in that capacity that she developed a passion for quality and the processes for achieving it, especially the coaching and mentoring of front-line managers to solve problems.
She said she came to CDH in part for quality-of-life reasons — she had a 2-year-old at the time and desired a position with more reasonable hours — but also because of the facility’s commitment to quality and continuous improvement.
“I had never heard of a community hospital where the CEO, the medical staff, and the leadership team had such an obvious vision for quality care and putting resources toward that,” she explained. “It was that vision that attracted me — and the desire here to become one of the best hospitals in the nation for its size.”
Today, Truesdell, who oversees a staff of nine, is spearheading CDH’s efforts as part of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 1000,000 Lives campaign, which is working to enlist 1,600 hospitals across the country to adopt changes in care that have been proven to prevent deaths due to medication errors. She also heads up the hospital’s participation in the Mass. Hospital Association’s Patient First program and other initiatives aimed at improving the quality of care delivered.
This assignment is carried on in many ways, she explained, and in every department of the hospital, from maintenance to the operating room.
Getting Pumped Ext. 6867.
That’s the number nurses at CDH punch when they want a clean IV pump. That’s what the numbers spell — pump — said Truesdell, adding that the extension was chosen, like all other elements of this particular quality initiative, to save people time and trouble.
And the IV pump is just one of 21 different pieces of equipment brought together in one area of the hospital for faster distribution by something called the Centralized Equipment Management Team. Working with survey data — time studies, employee surveys, and focus groups, the team identified one key concern; an inability to access common patient-care equipment when needed.
“Nurses were spending too much time searching for equipment,” said Truesdell, noting that initiatives like the new extension for pumps have helped reduce that time from several hours — and several phone calls — to an average of seven minutes and one call.
CDH has logged a number of other quality improvements over the past year, including:
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A drop in the percentage of unreconciled medications from 30% in May 2005 to 5.22% in November of that year in the units where the medication-reconciliation program had been rolled out. (It has now been implemented in all inpatient and outpatient settings);
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Decreased bed-turnaround time from an average of more than 90 minutes to less than 45 minutes from the time the Environmental Service office is paged to the completion of the discharge patient room cleaning;
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Decreased facility-acquired pressure ulcers (similar to bed sores) by 8%, to a rate of zero, between December ’04 and December ’05. The achievement was attributed to hiring a dedicated wound and skin care nurse and implementation of a multidisciplinary pressure ulcer prevention program, and
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The hospital even received commendation from the Northampton Fire Department for the reduction of hallway clutter over the past year.
Assessing these and other quality success stories, Truesdell said solutions usually come through common sense analysis and breaking a process into its specific steps, a methodology that manufacturers have employed for many years now.
In the case of the bed turn-around-time-reduction efforts, she said the solution was fairly simple — outfitting Environmental Service staffers with pagers that would enable them to notified the moment a room was ready to be cleaned and prepped for the next patient.
“Before, people simply put notes on the door alerting staff that a room was ready to be cleaned,” she said. “Sometimes, it would be a while before anyone saw the note.”
To effectuate changes and improvements such as the IV pump program, medication reconciliation, patient room-preparation, and a fall-reduction effort called “Striving for Zero,” Truesdell said CDH uses team of individuals on the front-lines, as she called them. These are the people directly effected by a problem or issue, and they are the ones best able to help brainstorm an answer.
“In hospitals, we have to continually remember to get the front-line people involved,” she said. “In the past, a group of managers would sit down in a room and think they were going to solve the problem. My experience has been that they will either solve the wrong problem or come up with a solution that doesn’t address the real issue.”
In the Q
Empowering staff members and providing them with the tools they need to develop answers to quality issues is one of the many rewards Truesdell says she derives from her current assignment.
Another is the successful — and ongoing — removal of the kinds of barriers that frustrated her when she was a staff nurse in Pennsylvania.
Her dedication to quality and CDH’s ability to establish benchmarks rather than aspire to reach them, has enabled her to have a number of good days — with the promise of more to come.
George O’Brien can be reached at[email protected]
On a sunny day, the Norwottuck Rail Trail seems to be paved with gold.
Actually, it’s recycled glass embedded in the pavement – a design aspect of the trail that makes the bike path unique.
But it’s also a metaphor that the Mass. Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), business owners, and the residents of the towns through which the trail runs – Hadley, Amherst, Belchertown, and Northampton – hope will ring true in the coming years.
The Norwottuck Rail Trail opened in 1993, after the tract of land where the first phase of the path was constructed was purchased by the state from the Boston and Maine Railroad Corporation in 1985. It was given its name at the suggestion of the Hadley Historical Commission, to reflect the Native American heritage of the area, and represents one of the first trails in Massachusetts. Others in the state, including the popular Cape Cod Rail Trail, have been up and running for more than two decades.
According to Danny O’Brien, a rail trail coordinator, the DCR partnered with Mass Highway to finalize a design for the trail, which originally ran from Damon Road in Northampton to Station Avenue in Amherst – an eight-mile course.
“But once they’re constructed, these trails always extend,” O’Brien said. “They generally become very popular within the towns and cities they run though, and then everyone wants them to run into their town.”
Staying the Course
The first extension of the Norwottuck Trail was another mile into Belchertown in the mid 1990s; O’Brien added that a second extension is now planned to bring the trail into downtown Northampton, a move that would not only create a connection between the busy towns of Amherst and Northampton, but is also expected to alleviate parking issues at the start of the trail and spur further business development along the trail.
He also expects the Norwottuck Trail to mirror the success of older trails, attracting businesses to plots along the route and creating a steady stream of both local and long distance tourism in the spring and summer months.
“There were a couple of businesses that were built right away along the route, and they’re doing quite well,” he said. “I expect that trend will continue … a study of the Cape Cod Rail Trail returned some interesting findings in terms of business development around rail trails, and that is a good indicator of where some of the newer trails could be headed.”
In fact, a survey completed among 38 businesses along the Cape Cod Rail Trail by the DCR revealed some noteworthy statistics, which O’Brien said will be measured along other rail trails across the state and also used as proof of the success of such facilities as economic drivers. Some of the DCR’s findings included:
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24% of business owners reporting that the trail played a part in opening and/or acquiring their business;
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82% reporting that the trail does not hinder their business operations;
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60% reporting expansions to their businesses, due in part to rail trail traffic;
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75% reporting that the rail trail’s proximity to their business could make selling the business easier in the future, and
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53% reporting that revenues from trail users constituted more than 10% of their overall annual revenues.
O’Brien added that rail trails also attract small businesses, or those that cater to tourism or outdoor recreation, a key focal point for area planners and developers as they work to spur new economic growth in the region.
Restaurants, convenience stores, and outdoor activity-based businesses – there are nine bike shops along the Cape Cod Rail Trail alone – are some of the more likely candidates for rail trail placement.
In Hadley, Pete’s Drive-in is probably the most apt example of a business that owes some of its profitability to rail trail visitors, as well as some of its local notoriety.
Patrick Serio, owner of Pete’s Drive-in (he named the restaurant after his youngest son) opened in 1991, unaware that the bike path project was in the works.
Formerly Twintetti’s, opened by Herrell’s Ice Cream founder Steve Herrell and later operated by two local teachers, the drive-in has been energized by Serio, who made the switch to restaurateur after a long career in the grocery business – his family founded Serio’s Market in Northampton.
He said he planned to depend on street traffic on Route 9, where the restaurant is located, and was surprised to benefit from trail business instantly, once it opened to the public.
“We didn’t even have a connector from the path to the restaurant,” he said. “Bicyclists were crossing a drainage ditch to get to us.”
Serio said he soon asked the state for permission to create a small path connecting the trail to the restaurant, and a partnership of sorts was born – permission was granted, and business at Pete’s Drive-in, at the time just a small burger stand, began to boom.
“I think the state wanted to do what they had to, to see the path succeed, and the connector was an instant hit for me,” he explained. “It also did a lot in terms of exposure for the trail.”
Serio said early on, he began offering bike and in-line skating demos in tandem with area bike shops at the trail accessible entrance to his restaurant, bringing more traffic to his business and to the shops he partnered with. And today, Pete’s is seen as the ‘mecca’ of the bike path – a tourist destination for cyclists as well as a pit stop for a burger or a hot dog.
Across New England, Pete’s has begun to glean some positive press, having been featured on NECN’s Phantom Gourmet for an entire summer, and soon seeing the benefits of the show’s glowing review of two of Pete’s signature dishes – the Big Bopper Deluxe burger and Dragon Fries – topped with chili and cheese.
“The spring is the busiest season, and in the summer there’s some competition with the beaches or places like Six flags, but then it cycles back in the fall,” he said. “When the bike path opened, my business improved by 50%. I’d say now, 25% to 30% of my business is still bike path business.”
And that boost played a large part in a recent expansion and remodel of Pete’s, Serio explained. Open year-round, he wanted to increase indoor seating and the restaurant’s visibility from Route 9, so in 2001 he completed a major overhaul that turned the burger stand into a full-scale, ’50s-inspired eatery. He maintained outdoor seating for bicyclists, and allows in-line skaters to zoom into the restaurant to place orders – small examples of the homage he continues to pay to the rail trail that gave his restaurant an undeniable push toward greater success.
“It’s important for us to be user-friendly from both the street and the bike path,” he said.
The Gold Standard
O’Brien agreed that Pete’s is the best example of the Norwottuck Rail Trail providing an economic boost in the Hadley and Amherst area.
“Pete’s is doing very well, and it’s the best example of a successful business model on a rail trail,” he said, adding that with continued improvements to the trail – the recycled glass component has posed a few problems, but they are being worked out – and additional extensions, that success should begin to spread.
And the path is paved with great intentions.
Jaclyn Stevenson can be reached at[email protected]
Growing up, Sidney Cooley’s first passion was music, specifically the piano, which he played in a host of area of clubs during the 1930s. Convinced by his mother that he couldn’t make a good living as a musician, he instead ventured into law, and forged a career that lasted six decades, including more than 20 years behind the bench. As he looks back, he says his profession has been marked by change — not all of it positive.
Sid Cooley remembers attending law school classes in a tuxedo.
That was back in the late ’30s, when Cooley was going to night school at Northeastern University Law School’s Springfield campus — forerunner to what is now Western New College School of Law.
“I was the best-dressed guy in the place,” he laughed, noting that the chosen attire was for one of his jobs at the time — playing the piano and leading his dance band in performances at area clubs, colleges, and social functions, which he often did after his law classes ended.
“I really enjoyed music and I was very good at it … I made money doing something I loved, and I never thought of it as work.” he told BusinessWest, adding that it was his mother who convinced him that he wasn’t quite good enough to make a living from tickling the ivory. Instead, she pushed him, along with his brother, Ed, into a career in law.
And he had a pretty good one, by nearly every account.
In fact, it’s only quite recently that Cooley, who last fall turned 92, started actually using the past tense when referring to that career, which covered six decades, first as a partner with his brother in the firm Cooley & Cooley — actually, it had many names over the years — and, later, more than 20 years behind various District Court benches.
Still known as ‘Judge’ to friends, colleagues, and all those at Cooley Shair, the Springfield-based firm he still reports to every day, Cooley recently talked with BusinessWest on the occasion of his firm’s — and his career’s — 60th anniversary.
He said that while he’s proud of what he’s accomplished with his firm and behind the bench, he’s perhaps most proud of the fact that the administration building at the Willie Ross School for the Deaf, which he has served as a director for more than 25 years, now has his name over door.
He’s also proud of his work with several other area organizations, from the United Way to the Boy Scouts to the Hampden County Assoc, for the Retarded, and of the four honorary degrees he’s received from area colleges.
He’s less proud, however, of some of the many changes that have come to his profession over the past 60 years. In fact, he said that word may no longer be suitable.
“More and more, it seems like a competitive business rather than a profession,” he said, referring to a combination of issues ranging from advertising to the sheer volume of lawyers in the Yellow Pages.
“We’re churning out lawyers in huge numbers these days,” he explained. “We don’t need that many.”
Meanwhile, he said the mandatory sentences for many crimes today removes large amounts of flexibility and imagination from work on the bench, and society suffers as a result.
“Now, the emphasis is all on punishment,” he explained, noting that his liberal approach to sentencing would not be tolerated today. “There is no distinguishing between a guy you can salvage and a guy who’s got to go down the drain. Everyone is treated the same, and that’s not the way we should be doing things.”
BusinessWest looks this issue at Cooley’s long career in the law and at his reflections on the profession and its evolution.
Keys to Success
Cooley was supposed to go home with the other members of the 63rd Infantry Division, which had worked its way across France and to the German city of Beyreuth by the spring of 1945 and the end of hostilities.
But the Army had other ideas.
After getting a closer inspection of his background, especially his law degree, officials decided that Cooley would stay on in the capacity of deputy military governor in the city of 200,000, which had been a hotbed of Nazi activity.
In that capacity, it was his job to assist with the process of “de-Nazifying” the area, as it was called — in other words, removing Nazis from positions of power and replacing them with those considered politically clean. He also worked to help rehabilitate hundreds of individuals liberated from concentration camps to the east of the Bavarian city.
“At first, I really didn’t like it all — I wanted to go home and get married (which he did late in 1946),” he recalled. “But in time, I came to enjoy it; it was really very rewarding. If I live to a million I won’t help as many people as I did when I was there.”
Cooley said his experiences in Beyreuth helped instill a desire to give back to the community, especially to those less fortunate. And he has done so since he joined his brother, who had already been practicing law for several years, in a one-room office over the old 5 Cent Savings Bank on Main and Court streets in downtown Springfield.
Ed Cooley had a number of medical problems that kept him from enlisting in the service, said his younger brother, noting that during the war, he started his own private practice and began establishing a reputation as one of the region’s leading labor lawyers.
The brothers Cooley operated a general practice — most law firms were in those days — and added other names to theirs over the years, including that of current managing partner David Shrair, who first served the Cooleys as an intern in 1958, joined as an associate in 1960, and became a partner in 1970.
Another of the firm’s many partners over the years was an attorney from Longmeadow, Foster Furcolo. A Congressman in the early 50s, and unsuccessful candidate for Senate in 1954, he would eventually be elected governor in 1956. And during his last year in the Statehouse, he appointed Sid Cooley to the position of special justice of the District Court of Franklin County, a post he served for 13 years.
As a special justice, Cooley would travel the region, filling in at whichever area district court needed him, earning the then-standard per-diem wage of $15 per day.
The compensation levels are not the only things that have changed since then, he recalled, noting first that judges could maintain their private practices while serving on the bench — a policy changed in the mid ’70s — and that District Court had a much broader range of responsibilitoies.
“It was known as the poor people’s court,” he recalled, adding that virtually all matters that didn’t require a jury, including housing and most family matters were handled by the court. “
In 1973, Cooley was chosen by Republican Gov. Frank Sergeant to be the presiding justice of the District Court of Western Hampden in Westfield, a move that surprised him in many ways.
“He was a Republican and I had been a Democrat my whole life … my brother was the founder of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Club in Western Mass.; that’s not how you ingratiate yourself to a Republican governor,” he recalled. Somehow, he was eventually chosen over several other candidates, including current State Supreme Judicial Court Justice John Greaney, who would soon be awarded a Housing Court seat instead.
“That was the best 10 years of my life,” Cooley said of his time in Westfield. “It was a great court — there was no finer court in the Commonwealth — and it had great people; we accomplished a lot together as a team.”
Striking a Chord
Cooley recalls that the Westfield court was a marvelous institution, known far more for its personnel and progressive programs than its facilities.
In fact, for most of his tenure on that bench, the court was located in City Hall, above the city’s senior center.
“You’d be sitting there listening to important testimony from a key witness,” he recalled, “and then, there would be a momentary lull, and you’d hear this loud voice from below: ‘under the B …’ and then a little later, “under the I …’ It was a little unnerving, but we kept our sense of humor.”
While suffering through Bingo and other senior center activities, Cooley was forging a reputation for fairness and innovative policies, while also cementing solid relationships between the court and the city’s business and religious communities, education system, and even the Air National Guard unit based at Barnes Municipal Airport.
It was Guard personnel who, among things, participated in what became known as Cooley’s war on graffiti. It was a battle waged through science — specifically chemists at Stanley Home Products (later Stanhome) which had its headquarters in the city — and waged by volunteers working side by side with those caught putting the graffiti on the walls.
Another initiative was the “Scared Straight” program, which gave young people a tour of the Hampden County jail (then on York Street in Springfield) with the hope that it would deter them from the criminal behavior that would make them a resident there. The program had been in operation for several years, but Cooley made extensive use of it, with a number of constituencies, before it was scaled back by funding and manpower challenges.
Scared Straight was one of many initiatives that Cooley, working in collaboration with Hampden County Sheriff Michael Ashe, created or expanded to help keep people out of jail, reduce recidivism, and rehabilitate individuals when they got out of prison. The motivation was simple, he said, noting the many costs associated with incarceration.
“When a person goes to jail, something happens to them up here,” he said, touching his temple. “They become anti-social, their home life breaks up and ends up in divorce, the kids go on welfare — the whole system falls apart,” he explained. “We tried to help create these programs that worked not only to keep a family together while a person was jail, but on what we would do with those individuals when they got out of jail.”
This philosophy extended to sentencing, said Cooley, noting he practiced what he called “constructive disposition.”
“Not always, but when you could, you’d try to come up with something whereby the family was salvaged, perhaps the children were salvaged, and the system didn’t break down,” he said. “You had some people — and there were many of them — where you could see that they had learned their lesson and they would never, ever be found in a compromising position again.”
Today, judges are far less able to practice construction disposition, he continued, noting that mandatory sentencing for several categories of crime has removed the critical element of subjectivity from the larger equation.
“If I were a judge today and I tried to do some of the things I did years ago — things that were not frowned upon — I’d be hung up my thumbs,” he told BusinessWest. “The people who are getting 10 years today as a mandatory sentence … some of them can be salvaged. When we put them away like that there is a great cost to society; I don’t like how things are done now.”
Nor does he like the proliferation of advertising in the legal community today — “years ago, you had a sign on your door and that was it,” — which he views as part of the evolution of law from a profession into a competitive business, a process accelerated by the large volume of lawyers entering the field.
The result is a perception about lawyers and the legal community that is much different from when Cooley joined his brother and created Cooley & Cooley 60 years ago.
“I was so proud to become a lawyer back then,” he said. “I’m not sure too many people feel that same way today.”
End Note
Upon retiring from the bench, Cooley went back to Cooley-Shrair. He worked as an arbitrator for several years, and continued his work with area non-profit agencies, including those who offer services to the mentally challenged, the autistic, the elderly, and other groups.
Today, he continues to counsel attorneys at the firm and impart wisdom when and wherever it’s required.
“I’m grateful to still have the opportunity to come to the office every day and talk with the lawyers and be a part of it,” he told BusinessWest. “It’s great to still be associated with the profession; I think I’d be dead if I couldn’t do that anymore.”
After his retirement from the bench in 1982, Cooley rejuvenated his music career — sort of.
He spent considerable time playing the piano as a volunteer serving the incapacitated and elderly shut-ins. In so doing, he blended two of his passions; music and community service.
Those have been just of the few of the many achievements of note from a lengthy career that has touched thousands of people — from Beyreuth Germany to Greenfield, to the Willie Ross School for the Deaf.
George O’Brien can be reached at[email protected]
Alan Seewald recalls what one former town moderator is reported to have said about that remarkable institution known as Amherst town meeting.
“He said that if someone ran into the hallway screaming ‘fire!’ you’d have five people asking for a definition of ‘fire,’ and another five people trying to form a committee to make sure that we included every definition of ‘fire.’
“That’s Amherst — that’s what we love about it and that’s what some hate about it,” continued Seewald, who, as the community’s town counsel for the past seven years and assistant town counsel for the decade before, has had to represent the town in a highly charged, often litigious environment made even more challenging by the presence of UMass and its 20,000 students.
And he’s very thankful for the opportunity.
“It has taken me places that the normal, small town practitioner would never get to see,” he said of municipal law in general, and his Amherst assignment in particular. “I’ve been to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, the SJC (Supreme Judicial Court), every trial court except the Juvenile Court, and I’ve been to state agencies that most people never get to.
“I’ve had a varied and multi-dimensional practice,” he continued, “because municipal law is one of those areas where you touch on nearly every aspect of the law — contracts, tort civil rights cases, municipal finance, land use, personnel, all of it. It’s given me an opportunity to have a practice that’s never boring.”
Indeed, there is both a quality and quantity to the legal workload for the town of Amherst, said Seewald, a partner in the firm Seewald, Janikowski & Spencer, PC, and the latest subject in BusinessWest’s ongoing Attorney Profile Series. He noted that, in recent years, those with strong opinions — and there is no shortage of them in this intellectual and very liberal community — have seemingly acquired greater determination to translate their words into legal action.
“What you’re seeing is an entrenchment that you didn’t see years ago,” he said, speaking from two decades of experience. “When I first started here in the ’80s, I think people were more apt to state their position, press their position, and, if their position didn’t win the day, move on to the next issue; today, I think people are finding it harder to move on — and positions fester.”
That was certainly true in the famous, or infamous, case of the town’s new downtown parking garage, an initiative that survived five separate lawsuits to block it and took several years to bring from town meeting vote to reality.
To successfully represent the town and its employees in this climate, Seewald, who is also town counsel for the Worcester County community of Westminster, says he must separate policy, or politics, from the law.
“Debate in Amherst is spirited, it really is,” he explained. “My formula for success in representing the town has been to always call it as I see it and not get involved in the political process,” he explained. “I have to treat everyone in town with respect and dignity and not get drawn into the political fray.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Seewald talked about the challenging yet rewarding work in municipal law, and also about handling legal duties in what some call the ‘People’s Republic of Amherst.’
Liberal Interpretation
This is a town that has been Seewald’s home for nearly 30 years now. He attended UMass in the late ‘70s — earning a degree in Theater Arts — and “never left,” as he put it.
After graduation, he worked several different jobs before enrolling in Western New College School of Law. As a first-year law student, Seewald did some work in the UMass Legal Services Offices, where he spent considerable time advising students in civil rights cases against the Amherst Police Dept. It was while handling such work that he met Bob Ritchie, an attorney in Amherst who was then town counsel and the individual representing the police officers in such matters.
Upon graduation from WNEC, Seewald would eventually joined Ritchie as an associate in a firm then known as Ritchie & Ennis, and became a partner two years later. He also became assistant town counsel in January, 1987, beginning what has become a two-decade-long stint of service to the community.
His firm, meanwhile, now boasts three partners — Seewald, Bob Spencer, and Debra Jankowski — and an associate, Kristine Bodine. It is a general practice with several specialties, including real estate, generally handled by Spencer, trusts and estates, handled by Jankowski, and civil litigation and municipal law, which is Seewald’s realm.
In addition to his work for Amherst and Westminster, an appointment he assumed in 2003, Seewald has also acted as special counsel, representing a host of communities on issues from ranging from sewer moratoriums to landfill expansions. He also represents individuals in cases against communities other than Amherst and Westminster. Often the clients are developers trying to advance commercial and residential projects through the bureaucratic process. Meanwhile, he also represents neighborhood groups and other constituencies that might oppose such initiatives.
His portfolio of work on both sides of the fence has enabled him to establish reputation — and a growing practice — in a field, municipal law, he says has undergone some dramatic change over the past few decades, making it more complex and thus more specialized.
“State laws apply to big towns and little towns alike, and it’s become quite complicated,” he said, citing measures on everything from procurement to conflict of interest. “It takes someone who has a particular concentration in this area of the law to really do it right.”
He said work as a town counsel involves not only representing a community when claims are filed against it, but also “preventative maintenance,” as called it, to keep a town and its employees out of harm’s way.
This means frequently telling appointed and elected officials things they don’t necessarily want to hear — such as Seewald’s recent advisement to conduct recent interviews for the town manager’s position in open, rather than executive, session.
“People love policy and process here,” he said. “I stay out of policy and try to tell boards and try to tell politicians what the range of their discretion is — what they’re allowed to do and what they’re not allowed to do.”
Case in Point
As he described his work as town counsel in Amherst, Seewald started with the obvious: “There’s never a dull moment here.”
Elaborating, he said the town poses several somewhat unique challenges for its legal representation. For starters, there are the colleges — Amherst and Hampshire — and the university, which is a small community unto itself.
“Obviously, having a young, mobile population can sometimes be inconsistent with the stable family neighborhoods that we like,” he said. “But I think the town and the university have come together in recent years better than they have in the past.”
As an example, he cited the apparent end of one infamous Amherst tradition, the so-called Hobart Hoedown, a spring party in North Amherst that had turned ugly earlier this decade; the 2003 event ended with a riot in which 15 police officers were hurt. Ten individuals, many of them UMass students, were later indicted on a number of charges.
“That’s one example of the town and university coming together and working on issues and common problems,” said Seewald, noting that there has not been a hodown the past two years. “We owe a lot to the colleges; they do present us with a lot of challenges, but they also contribute greatly to the tremendous quality of life we have here.”
Preservation of that quality of life is at the heart of what some see as an anti-business, anti-development mindset in Amherst — Seewald believes perception is not exactly reality on that issue — and cases like the town’s long-delayed parking garage.
“We had people who, for some very legitimate reasons, thought this was not appropriate policy,” he said of the project, the six town meeting warrant articles to revise or rescind the initial approval, and the various unsuccessful lawsuits filed to stop it, involving everything from the acquisition of easements to the town exceeding set appropriations.
Opposition to the garage is an example of the “entrenchment” he described earlier, and also a model for how he approaches his work as town counsel.
“My approach to that was the same as my approach to everything else in town,” he said. “As far as I was concerned, the legislature had spoken and my mission was to effectuate the vote of the legislative body in town — town meeting — which said, ‘build a garage.’
“I think I’ve survived in this town because no one knew whether I personally supported the garage or not,” he continued. “And if were to ask me, I wouldn’t tell you, because it was none of my business; the legislature spoke and my advice to the town was to build the garage.”
| Fast Facts:
Attorney: Alan Seewald |
Final Arguments
In other words, it was another case of calling it as he sees it.
That’s how Seewald has crafted a solid reputation in the field of municipal law, and how he’s managed to represent the town of Amherst for nearly 20 years.
As he said, it’s an assignment that provides more variety — and less boredom — than most lawyers, and most town counsels for that matter, will ever experience.
And there’s no debating that.
George O’Brien can be reached at[email protected]
At some point in life, everyone needs to consult with an attorney, but there are many things that should be considered when trying to find the right one.
Knowing how to approach the task of choosing a lawyer is perhaps the first step in the process.
Where to begin?
The best references are from trusted associates. These can include accountants, friends, insurance agents, clergy, bankers, stockbrokers, etc. Consider people with whom you serve on civic boards or church organizations. Is there an attorney on the board whose manner of handling matters demonstrates leadership and intelligence?
If you do not have access to people who know an attorney, you can consider contacting your local bar association to request a recommendation. There are also professional organizations and publications that you can consult for recommendations, including Boston Magazine’s “Super Lawyers” issue, BusinessWest magazine, and Martindale-Hubbell, (martindale.com.) This well-established organization rates attorneys and law firms on both legal ability and professional ethics, and it is widely used throughout the legal and business communities. The highest quality lawyers will be rated AV.
Making Your Initial Contact:
Once you have identified potential attorneys with whom you would like to speak, it is recommended that you contact them by phone and explain the type of problem you have, to see if they are interested in handling that type of matter. You should ask if they offer a free initial consultation, or whether you will be charged for the first meeting.
Ask their experience level within your particular area of the law. Several of the basic legal areas include family, business, estate planning, personal injury, employment, litigation, real estate, immigration, tax, and banking. Even general practitioners tend to specialize in a few of them. Ask how many similar cases they have handled, the number of years that they have been in practice, and the size of their firm and support system.
Next, check the background of the attorney and his or her law firm. A good way to do that is to review the firm’s Web site. See what awards the attorney has won, undergraduate and law schools attended, and whether he or she has published articles that correspond with your practice area. All of these are indicators that will help you to further gauge the attorney’s level of expertise within your required field. You may also want to check with the state licensing authority to see if there have been any ethics violations brought against the attorney. In Massachusetts, that information can be obtained from the Mass. Board of Bar Overseers, located in Boston.
Discuss Fees and Billing Procedures:
Ask how the attorney sets legal fees. There are a few fee options, including hourly, flat, and contingency. An attorney provides knowledge in return for a fee, which normally includes charging you for phone call consultations as well as office visits, so you should clarify how fees are calculated.
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Hourly fees are most often used by an attorney in non-personal-injury cases, whereby the attorney will charge an agreed-upon fee for the amount of time spent on your behalf;
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Flat fees are most common in certain types of consumer cases, including real estate closings, simple wills, simple bankruptcies, and other matters that can usually be estimated to take a certain amount of time. This should be discussed and agreed upon before the work is done;
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In personal injury cases, and sometimes in other instances, an attorney will agree to handle a matter on a percentage basis, called a contingent fee. In those cases the attorney is paid a percentage of the money that is recovered on your behalf;
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In some cases, an attorney will consider a combination of the above fee distinctions; for instance, a reduced hourly fee may be agreed upon in combination with a contingency fee.
In regard to attorney bills, you should ask how they are determined and how often they will be sent. Will you be required to pay a retainer? If so, will you be billed monthly, quarterly, annually; and what does the fee you are paying include? In addition to legal fees, will you be responsible for filing fees and additional expenses if a lawsuit is filed?
Come Prepared for the Meeting
To best prepare yourself for that initial meeting with your attorney, you should be organized. This will ensure that you present all of your important facts to the attorney, and this will better allow him or her to address your issues. It is a good idea to provide a written narrative of the facts as you understand them, and bring copies of all of your documents so that the attorney can retain a set for further review and discussion.
It is important that you disclose all of the facts to the attorney, both good and bad, and that you do not hide any information. Full disclosure is the only way that an attorney can give you honest advice and a fair assessment of the viability of your case. Generally, all of the facts eventually come to light, and it is both embarrassing and disheartening to realize that had you disclosed all of the facts at an earlier stage, your attorney may have been able to dramatically improve your case.
Finally, remember that the attorney wants to succeed on your behalf and needs to know that you are as committed to your case as he or she will be. You should have a clear expectation of your prospects for successfully obtaining your goals after the attorney has presented his or her analysis of the potential outcome. If you do not get a positive feeling from your discussion with the attorney, or you sense a lack of enthusiasm for your case, you are probably better off to consult with another attorney to see if you can make a better connection.
Most attorneys are educated, compassionate, and caring people, who genuinely want to do well for their clients. Working together as a team with your lawyer will substantially improve your chances for success, whether purchasing your first house, obtaining immigration status for your aunt, forming your new business, or obtaining damages from the contractor who failed to properly finish your kitchen.
Hopefully, you will have a successful outcome and will have made a new friend for life.
Michael B. Katz, Esq. is a senior partner with the law firm of Bacon & Wilson, P.C. A frequent author and lecturer on business and health care matters, he specializes in business, insolvency and health care legal matters in the firm’s Springfield, Westfield and Northampton offices; (413) 781-0560;[email protected].
The law firm Robinson Donovan, which has offices in Springfield and Northampton, has added three new associates over the past several months, bolstering its litigation, estate planning, and employment law departments in the process.
Civil litigation will be the primary focus for Dianne Brooks, a graduate of Harvard Law School who was an associate professor in the Department of Legal Studies at UMass Amherst for 15 years before starting her own practice in Northampton in 2004.
She joined Robinson Donovan in early January, seizing an opportunity to take her career in a different direction. “As much as I enjoyed having my own practice, I wanted to take my work to a higher level and take on more sophisticated litigation,” she told BusinessWest.
Her practice areas will incorporate civil litigation including business, employment, products liability, and intellectual property.
David Lawless will also be focusing on many of those specialties.
A 1998 graduate of the University of Connecticut at Storrs and 2005 graduate of the law school at UConn, he joined Robinson Donovan last fall. He told BusinessWest that he likes the Northeast, especially the Pioneer Valley, and joined Robinson Donovan for that reason and also the quality mentoring for which the firm is noted.
Lawless has worked in the New York County District Attorney’s Office and an investigative analyst in the Money Laundering and Tax Crimes unit. He will use that experience at Robinson Donovan in practice areas that include business litigation, employment law and litigation, and products liability.
Mentoring was also a motivating factor in Rebucca Mutch’s decision to join the firm last November.
“The level of mentoring here was a major selling point for me,” she told BusinessWest. “It drew me out of Boston and drew me out of litigation.”
A graduate of Mount Holyoke College and a 2004 graduate of Suffolk University Law School, Mutch practiced business litigation for a mid-sized firm in Boston before leaving to join Robinson Donovan. There, she will concentrate her practice in the areas of estate planning, probate litigation, and business law.
| The following bankruptcy petitions were recently filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Readers should confirm all information with the court. | |
| Blair, Cristie A. Emond, John D. Hatcher, Robert Major Macurkiewicz, Shawn E. Moody, Nelson MC
| Morris, Lisa M. Morris, Patricia A. Murphy, Christopher A. Thiphavong, Kalinthone Zych, Richard S. |
| The following building permits were issued during the month of January 2006. | |
| AMHEREST Amherst Shopping Center Friends of Hospice House City of Holyoke Engine City of Northampton | Curran Associates SPRINGFIELD |
The following is a compilation of recent lawsuits involving area businesses and organizations. These are strictly allegations that have yet to be proven in a court of law. Readers are advised to contact the parties listed, or the court, for more information concerning the individual claims.
NORTHAMPTON DISTRICT COURT
Book Distributors Inc. d/b/a Koen Book Distributors Inc. v.
Bookline Booksellers Inc.
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for goods sold and delivered: $8,450.94
Date Filed: Jan. 3
Advogue Carpet Gallery Inc.
d/b/a National Carpet Center v. Kenneth Lynds d/b/a A-2-Z Home Improvements
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for goods sold and delivered: $4,691.29
Date Filed: Jan. 6
SPRINGFIELD DISTRICT COURT
United Rentals (North America) Inc.
v. Adams Enterprises
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for goods sold and delivered: $4,999.15
Date Filed: Jan. 3
United Rentals (North America) Inc. v. J.C. Stevens Co. Inc.
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for goods sold and delivered: $14,691.00
Date Filed: Jan. 3
United Rentals (North America) Inc. v.
Daniel J. Dunn d/b/a Bay View Development
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for goods sold and delivered: $10,056.92
Date Filed: Jan. 3
United Rentals (North America) Inc. v.
Beacon Site Development Corp. and Philip J. Montalto
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for goods sold and delivered: $19,733.52
Date Filed: Jan. 3
Conversent Communications of MA Inc. v.
F.L Roberts & Co. Inc.
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for services: $17,018.87
Date Filed: Jan. 9
Construction Service, a division of Dauphna’s & Sons Inc. v.
Ames Design Inc. a/k/a Ames Design, Leslie Clement a/k/a Leslie A. Clement a/k/a Leslie McCarthy
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for goods sold and delivered: $3,201.00
Date Filed: Jan. 11
| The following Business Certificates and Trade Names were issued or |
| AGAWAM Almac Industrial Flooring Candies Dent Master’s Home Comfort Windows & Exteriors P & E Vending Silva Real Estate AMHERST Amherst Bulletin Daily Hampshire Gazette Mind Body Systems CHICOPEE Digital Vision J & M Siding & Replacement Mike Darsch Home Improvements EAST LONGMEADOW Affordable Home Improvement E.L.S. Triad Therapeutic Massage HOLYOKE Herrera Auto Sales LCR Distributors LONGMEADOW ABC Home Day Care Gunta Ringa-Jekabsone Wholesale NORTHAMPTON Audible/Visible Paper Gems Wonderment Images SOUTH HADLEY Chaffee Logging Natural Races SPRINGFIELD Bermudez Transportation Corey’s Landscaping Service Debra’s Beauty Solutions EZ Services El Bohio Rest #2 First Class Shuttle His Praise Worship Sound J x 2 Productions LLC Jessie’s Roofing & Siding Kim’s Nails Millennium Nails MultiLingual Communications New England Janitorial Services Payson & Williams Pinnock Transport Samuel’s Communications She Has Everything Springfield Diocesan Cemeteries Inc. V.I.P. Cuts Western MA Medical Billing WEST SPRINGFIELD Accent Interior Redesign Boston Cullinary Group Inc. David Camp Sales & Furniture Restoration Fathers & Sons Inc. Geraldine’s Lounge “Huny Do List” Larry’s Painting New England Van & Truck Equipment Oreck Vacuum Stores/Oreck Home Care R.B.C. WESTFIELD BP Courier The Country Store Fuller Enterprise The Red Case Co. |
United Bank announced the following:
• Doug Bourbeau has been promoted to Vice President, Commercial Banking. He is responsible for generating new commercial loans and specializes in equipment financing; • Dena M. Hall has been promoted to Vice President, Marketing and Communication Relations. She has overall responsibility for the bank’s marketing and community relations efforts and manages the Investor Relations program for United Financial Bancorp, a publicly owned corporation and the holding company for United Bank, which is traded on the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol UBNK. She also serves as Vice President of the United Charitable Foundation.
• Joanne Sheedy has been promoted to Assistant Vice President, Credit Department. She manages the credit department and ensures the bank’s high standards for credit quality are met and maintained.
• Steve Piubeni has been promoted to Assistant Vice President, Management Information Systems (MIS). He has overall responsibility for the Information Systems Department, designing and maintaining the bank’s computer networks and plays a key role in the implementation of the bank’s technology plan.
• Kim Merritt has been promoted to assistant vice president, Operations. She is responsible for managing the operations staff including loan and deposit operations and the bank’s call center.
A. Rima Dael has been named the Administrative Director for the Woronoco Savings Charitable Foundation, based in Westfield. She will be responsible for administering the grants program of the Foundation. The Foundation supports education and youth development, health and human services, cultural activities, humanities, and public and civic projects. ••••• Lynn F. Boscher, owner of the Travel Bureau in Westfield for more than 30 years, was recently appointed Executive Director/Affiliate Coordinator for the Greater Westfield Chamber of Commerce. He is responsible for managing the Chamber, and supporting and enhancing the economic health of the Westfield business community. A resident of Westfield since 1967, Boscher is a former city councilor, and served as president of the Westfield Rotary Club, Boys and Girls Club of Greater Westfield, and St. Mary’s PTO. He has also played an active role with the Westfield Area Drug Council, Westfield Community Development Corporation, and City of Westfield’s Planning Board. ••••• | Michael P. D’Amour has been named Fresh Foods Director for Big Y Foods, Inc. in Springfield. The position was created to further the company’s emphasis on high quality fresh products. D’Amour will be responsible for sales and marketing for the produce, floral, deli, bakery, food service, seafood and meat departments. In addition to developing a long-term fresh food strategy for the company, he will be responsible for all aspects related to these departments including financials, training and development, merchandising and advertising. ••••• Meyers Brothers Kalicka, P.C. of Holyoke and Greenfield announced the following: ••••• Sue Rheaume of Landmark Realtors in Hampden has earned the designation of Graduate Realtor Institute by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors. ••••• Matthew B. Hedenberg has been named Informational Technology Manager for OFS in Sturbridge. ••••• Benefits Consulting Group, LLC in Holyoke announced the following: ••••• James A. Russell, Chief Executive of American Exterminating Co. of Springfield, will receive the Barlett W. Eldridge Award from the New England Pest Management Association. Russell’s grandfather, Abraham Russell, started the company in 1913. His father, Mathew Russell, also operated the business and now his son, Robert Russell, is active in the daily operations. |
|
An historic neighborhood named for three streets that intersect to create a busy commercial district has seen highlights and lowlights over the past 50 years, but one organization is poised to shed new light on the X, through collaborative, arts-centered initiatives.
Springfield residents: try giving someone from out of town directions to Forest Park without using the term ‘the X.’
It’s not easy.
The historic landmark, which typically refers to the intersection of Sumner Ave., Dickinson, and Belmont streets and the surrounding area, has long been a center of commercial activity in Springfield and something of a source of pride for locals. We know why it has its distinctive name. We know to look both ways – twice – when driving through.
But there is a group of people who want the X to mean much more.
The X Main Street Corp., named as such due to its involvement in the federal ‘Main Street’ program for commercial district improvement and consisting of residents, business owners, and civic leaders, want the X to live up to its hip name, and are working to create a new hot spot in Western Mass.
The X, specifically, is a commercial district within the Forest Park neighborhood of Springfield, which some call a city within a city, due to its rich history, diverse ethnic and economic make-up, and its distinction as home to 25,000 of Springfield’s residents. But in the past, it has been known more for its flavor than its demographics.
Lyn Nolan, executive director of the X Main Street Corp., remembers a time when the area was bustling with shoppers, and the shops and restaurants were as unique as they were prosperous.
“Blake’s department store was a hub of activity,” she said, harkening back to her first year as a Springfield resident in 1980. “And there were specialty clothing stores, fantastic restaurants, a movie house where the Walgreens is now … it was definitely a ‘Northampton kind of place.’”
Even today, she continued, the X includes some of the city’s brightest gems – distinctive restaurants, unique clothiers, and a smattering of successful niche businesses.
It’s also home to a number of popular seasonal events, including the Farmer’s Market at the X, now entering its ninth year, and the annual Boar’s Head Festival, a medieval fair of sorts held at Trinity United Methodist Church. And year-round, several community organizations based at the X and within Forest Park work toward a number of goals, all aimed at bettering the neighborhood.
In addition to the non-profit X Main Street Corp., the Forest Park Partnership and Forest Park Civic Association are also active, as are neighborhood councils such as the La Broad and Avalon councils, centered on quality of life and crime-reduction issues, and the for-profit Concerned Citizens for Springfield, which focuses much of its time in the Forest Park neighborhood.
Still, the spark that once defined a crossroads has dimmed somewhat, now lacking many of those one-of-a-kind storefronts and the neighborly feel that Nolan remembers.
“There was some flight in terms of residents,” she said, “and malls happened. That had a huge impact on the commercial success of many small businesses that once thrived here.”
The X Main Street Corp. has been focused on re-lighting the fire at the X for the past decade. But one overriding theme has emerged within all of the X Main Street Corp.’s initiatives for 2006, which its members hope will help fan the flames: the creation and promotion of a cohesive arts and entertainment-based culture at the X – one that starts internally with X Main Street’s own efforts, and extends to other groups, residents, and, most importantly, other businesses.
They’ve Made a FoPa
The overall mission of the corporation, Nolan said, is to spearhead ongoing development projects within the X commercial district, and to promote those improvements in partnership with other community organizations and businesses in the Forest Park area.
“There is a lot of overlap between the different groups,” she said. “Some people work with all of them. We work with each other, not against.”
The renewed focus on arts and culture is one she also hopes will resonate within those other organizations, as one answer to many issues ranging from decreasing home ownership to lagging interest in commercial real estate.
Although Nolan said the commercial landscape at the X has seen some improvement in the past few years, and is showing signs of a continued climb, the business make-up has changed somewhat since its heyday.
“Economic development in the X commercial district is stable,” Nolan said. “We’re at a 92% capacity in the area. But, for example, we have four dollar stores. We definitely need some diversification.”
Essentially, the X Main Street Corp. hopes to cultivate a climate at the X that will ripple throughout its parent neighborhood of Forest Park. There’s business sense to it, Nolan said – the arts have been proven in other communities, including neighboring Northampton and Amherst, to serve as effective economic drivers – but there are also some intriguing marketing opportunities to be had.
Brian Hale, vice president of the X Main Street Corp. Board of Directors and Chair of the Bing Arts Center Committee (more on that later), said working toward a stronger arts and entertainment scene at the X could start with creating a buzz – a move that, among other things, is more economical than most.
“The X is the hub of Forest Park,” he said. “Or, as we’d like to start calling it, FoPa.”
Borrowed from similar nicknames such as New York’s Soho (‘south of Houston street’) neighborhood, or, more regionally, Noho, the abbreviation often given to Northampton, ‘FoPa’ is a small, simple way to start branding the neighborhood as well as its cultural attributes.
And the play on words isn’t an accident.
“A booming arts community in Springfield? Some might call the suggestion a faux pas,” Hale joked. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned as Springfield residents, it’s that you have to have a sense of humor.”
It’s important to note, though, that the X Main Street Corp. doesn’t just brainstorm catchy nicknames for the neighborhood. Rather, the organization is actively involved with a number of real estate improvement ventures, serves as an advocacy group for zoning, legislative, and public safety policies, and is one of the X’s primary grant-writing entities, forever in search of funds to keep various projects and business ventures going. The corporation is partially funded by a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant, but gleans much of its funding from local, state, and national grants and loans.
The organization also works with the city to enforce some code regulations at the X, which is designated an overlay district (a zoning change X Main Street kick-started), and as such, requires businesses to meet or exceed certain aesthetic requirements.
Signage must meet a certain quality threshold, for instance – backlit plastic signs are prohibited as are unframed, aluminum placards.
That aspect of the corporation’s duties can both help and hinder its relationship with X merchants, Nolan said. It allows for greater contact with businesses, but can also turn X Main Street into the “sign police.”
“We don’t want all the businesses to look the same,” she said, “but we want to achieve a certain level of quality, a certain look. The main goal of X Main Street is to increase arts and culture in the X commercial district, and the look of the businesses is one part of that. It’s what will make the most sense in terms of diversifying the area and bringing in more great businesses as well as visitors.”
Bought-A-Bing
As another part of that focus, the corporation soon hopes to make its new headquarters the historic Bing Theatre, which it purchased in 2003. The property, now known as the Bing Arts Center, has been vacant for years but is seeing some new activity: the X Main Street Corporation and the Bing Arts Center Committee, a group of concerned citizens and business owners committed to arts, culture, and entertainment endeavors in Springfield, are in the process of renovating the building to create a combination art gallery, community center, and, eventually, a movie theater and performance venue.
Hale said re-opening the cinema itself represents the last step in a long process, but he hopes to see the other components of the arts center fall into place within the next two years.
“The Bing represents exactly what we want to see more of at the X, in Forest Park, and across the city, and that is investing in the arts and culture as a primary economic driver,” he said, adding that he sees arts, culture, and entertainment investments as the logical choice in a city that is still struggling in most other sectors and is in dire need of some good news.
“Frankly, I think it’s the city’s only choice. Historically, Springfield has been a manufacturing center, but that’s long gone,” he told BusinessWest. “We need to face that, and work to get people into this city to spend their money, plain and simple. How do we do that? By having some cool things going on.”
The Bing actually sits on the periphery of the X, but Nolan agreed with Hale that it represents the heart and soul of the organization’s work.
“Creating an arts center at the Bing is a perfect example of how the arts can serve as a way to engage the entire community,” she said. “We want to see things going on constantly in that building, creating a buzz and at the same time opening up the arts to a whole new audience.”
Hale added that it’s important to sell that point, especially to X merchants, many of whom are struggling to make their ventures work.
“The arts might be one of the only economic drivers in which we can say you can put a little in, and gain a lot,” he said. “At the Bing Arts Center we’ll be able to hold art shows and performances, after school programs, fundraisers, sell artwork … the possibilities are endless. Merchants can do much of the same on many levels, and we want to work with them to increase their own profits for the overall good of the area.”
Blue Moon Coffee Roasters, Hale offered as an example, has already seen some success with just such an initiative. Located across the street from the Bing, the coffee, bean, and gift shop expanded its retail component recently to include an art glass gallery, and in December, owner Dan Higgins reported that sales of the artwork represented 30% of his total receipts.
“We need to reach a certain critical mass before people are going to notice this,” said Hale, “but we can start by marketing ourselves as an arts-oriented neighborhood, and a big part of the neighborhood is the businesses at the X.”
Turnip Turn-out
But it’s not just the Bing that’s getting attention from X Main Street, and the other organizations at the X and in Forest Park. The annual Farmers’ Market at the X, a Forest Park staple for nearly a decade, will be expanding its scope in 2006, welcoming artisans to the ranks of fresh produce, meat, whole foods, plant, and flower businesses, in order to add a new dimension to the event as well as a venue for artists and craftspeople.
“We want to work closely with artisans to give them a unique venue to show their work, but we’re also trying to move with the times,” Nolan explained, adding that the event is also moving from its spot near the Goodwill Shoppes to the Trinity church parking lot, visible from Sumner Ave. “Farmers’ markets in general are starting to suffer in New England – in the past, they were held specifically for farmers.”
But with a changing landscape must come a change in the event, she said.
“Adding arts and crafts to the market will add to the overall arts and culture thrust in the X commercial district, and give the market a shot in the arm.”
It’s also another way to capitalize on an already well-known event at the X for the benefit of local businesses.
Belle Rita Novak, manager of the Farmers’ Market at the X and a member of the Forest Park Civic Association and the X Main Street Corp. Board of Directors, said she has already seen the positive effect the market can have on surrounding merchants.
“Many patrons shop at the X while they are in the area for the market,” she said. “Throughout the country, farmers’ markets in urban areas are economic engines for the businesses nearby.”
Novak added that increased cooperation with X business owners would likely create a positive ripple effect in the district.
“I think that we have a strong X Main Street board now, but we need more input from the business and property owners at the X,” she said. “After all, if the X improves, it benefits everyone, including residents in the neighborhood.
“The X looks much better than it did 10 years ago,” she continued, “but if it doesn’t continue to improve I fear that it could backslide very easily. We are in this together, merchants, property owners, and residents. If we want a nice, clean business district then we all have to do our part.”
New Direction Home
Hale agreed with Novak that continued partnerships are the keys to spurring further arts-related initiatives, as well as projects aimed at the overall health of the commercial district.
“In order to revitalize any commercial district, there needs to be a certain camaraderie,” he said. “We can’t just start walking into stores and asking for money. We need to sell them on the arts and culture premise, and show them how it can benefit their businesses … and in turn, their businesses will benefit the entire area.”
And the members of the X Main Street Corp. will be keeping an ear close to the ground, listening for the sound of success – someone asking for directions to FoPa.
It’s easy to find – just start at the X.
Jaclyn Stevenson can be reached at[email protected]
Springfield City Councilor Tim Rooke wants to impose a tax on people who commute to Springfield to go to work.
That’s right, Rooke, the chairman of the council’s Finance Commitee, is mulling several ways to reduce Springfield’s soaring budget deficit. His concepts include a tax — how much he’s not sure — on those who merely drive into the city to make a living. He’s also looking into cutting the salaries for city department heads, employing a strange formula whereby someone making $100,000 would take a 10% cut, those making $90,000 would get a 9% hit, and so on. He’s also looking at ways to tax neighboring communities for what he calls an overflow of services like halfway houses, subsidized housing, and homeless shelters.
This is what it has come down to in Springfield, where officials are seemingly grasping at straws trying to find some way to erase a deficit that could grow to $300 million within the next seven or eight years, according to some projections.
The ideas include everything from selling golf courses to charging fees for trash disposal; from asking nonprofit, nontaxable institutions, such as colleges and hospitals, for payments in lieu of taxes, to Rooke’s nonsensical tax on commuters, something the councilor has proposed before, without success. Indeed, we want to encourage people to work in Springfield, not punish them because the Albano administration continuously spent more money than it had.
These are nickel-and-dime proposals that are not going to solve Springfield’s desperate budget problems, and would seemingly only delay what a growing number of people now consider inevitable: bankruptcy.
So why not get it over with, and thus begin the process of getting Springfield back on its feet? Because bankruptcy would be considered a failure, and no one — from Control Board Executive Director Phillip Puccia to Gov. Mitt Romney — wants to admit to failure.
But, and this is sad to say, failure is reality. In 18 or so months of work, the Control Board hasn’t made any significant progress in balancing Springfield’s budget. In fact, by playing hardball with the unions and continuing a wage freeze for city teachers, it has probably made things worse. A superior court judge recently ordered the city to fund increases for teachers’ salaries, and if other unions prevail in similar court challenges, Springfield will see its deficit swell.
However, control board members don’t seem too worried about the teachers’ salary rulings, or others that may come down soon, because they know that they can’t pay a bill if they don’t have the money — and right now, Springfield doesn’t have the money.
And it won’t, no matter how many golf courses or parking garages it sells.
Like an individual swamped with credit card debt, Springfield is desperate to find a way out, but there really isn’t one, except for a miracle bailout from the state, which legislative leaders say simply won’t happen.
Which brings us back to bankruptcy.
As we said earlier, this is not an attractive option, and for a lot of reasons. For starters, it would be another huge psychological blow to a city that has had more than its fair share over the past few years. And the stigma would have a decidedly negative impact on business and economic development: who would want to start a business in, or relocate to, a bankrupt city?
Meanwhile, bankruptcy would leave deep political scars, and it might even have serious ramifications on a Romney bid for the White House. How can someone lead the country when he is seemingly powerless to save the third-largest city in his state from fiscal ruin?
But as unattractive as bankruptcy might be, it appears to be Springfield’s best option. There would be pain — unions would lose all power, elected officials would have virtually no control of the city’s finances, and there would be major layoffs in an effort to put the budget into balance.
But the process of getting Springfield back on its feet would be started, and the current practice of treading water and waiting for a rescue that isn’t going to come would be over.
Rooke’s idea to tax commuters makes no sense and it won’t happen — major employers rely on people from outside the city’s borders to operate their businesses. But even the other, more logical steps, such as trash-collection fees, won’t be enough to save the city from the fiscal abyss.
That’s why bankruptcy might make the most sense.
With cold and flu season upon us, some interesting challenges for employers and employees alike arise. ‘Presenteeism,’ a newly coined term which means being present at work while sick or for some other reason disengaged from your assigned work, can be extremely detrimental to organizations and their workforce.
Traditionally, the focus of most organizations has been on absenteeism and the opportunities lost when an employee isn’t at work. This focus, however, assumes that when people are at work they are productive. Unfortunately, many times, this is simply an illusion.
According to a recent survey by OfficeTeam, a staffing service based in Menlo Park, Calif., 80% of employees polled frequently show up to work while sick; with only a mere 8% of the respondents reporting they never come into the office when ill. Performance levels of sick individuals are rarely at peak or even at an acceptable level.
In fact, employees who come to work when they are ill may be costing employers more in lost productivity than their employers pay for sick days and other medical and disability benefits. In 2004, Cornell University cited in WebMD that presenteeism may account for up to 60% of employer health costs, and found that up to 60% of the total cost of employee illnesses come from people who continue to work despite illnesses that reduce their productivity.
Morale and contagion are also concerns associated with ‘presenteeism.’ Being in contact with contagious individuals jeopardizes the health and productivity of all employees. According to CCH Inc., a division of Wolters Kluwer, a provider of employment law information and software, organizations with already-low employee morale are at even greater risk of sick workers on the job, with 52% of companies with poor or fair morale reporting presenteeism as a problem.
But presenteeism isn’t just limited to physical illness such as allergies, headaches, colds, or flu. Burnout, stress, and depression from work/life or work-related conflicts also contribute to loss of productivity while on the job. These causes may include emotional problems, family issues, elder or child care concerns, employee vs. employer distrust, overwork, or workplace distractions ranging from heat, light, or air quality, communication breakdowns, lack of training, and many other variables.
Curing the Problem
Employers can take steps to discourage presenteeism and enhance productivity. During cold and flu season, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommends individuals to stay home when they are sick. It also provides helpful tips and posters that can be displayed within the workplace. Employers can also create guidelines to help the workforce understand the conditions for staying home, when it is safe to return to work, and when to re-evaluate a company’s absenteeism policies.
The single most common absence-control program utilized by 91% of organizations surveyed by CCH is disciplinary action. This approach is counterproductive to helping sick workers stay home when they are ill, especially when one considers that most of these programs allow five sick days per year and one bad cold or flu can wipe an individual out for that same amount of time or longer.
An alternative to traditional sick day policies is paid leave banks, also known as Paid Time Off (PTO) programs. Under a PTO program, personal, sick, and vacation days are combined into a single bank of days that the employee can use in any way he or she needs; allowing the employee to have more control.
Employers can also work to foster a healthy work environment and set a good example. A 2005 Workplace Productivity Survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) states that poor management is the number-one factor hurting employee productivity. Therefore, managers need to be aware of how not only their words but their actions are being interpreted by employees. Are your employees comfortable in asking for time off when ill or for other necessary reasons?
What message are you sending when you come to work sick, injured, or distracted?
Employers should be sure to keep communication open with employees. With many companies experiencing lay-offs, relocation, and expecting employees to do more with less, job insecurity and overwork may compel employees to put in excessive work hours, many unproductive. This can then lead to stress, burnout, or illness.
Executive and business coaching programs can be very valuable in establishing effective communication throughout organizations and creating engaged and resilient workforces. Coaches work with management and staff to enhance performance, morale and productivity.
Besides coaching, employee assistance programs (EAPs), and other wellness or work/life balance programs offer employees assistance beyond cold and flu season by helping them maintain focus on work while at work. EAPs provide confidential 24/7 counseling to employees and their families helping them to manage both physical and emotional concerns ranging from addictions to loss and grief.
Wellness programs, such as flu clinics, blood drives with free cholesterol screenings, etc., create opportunities for workers to receive preventative health benefits while at work. Something they may not otherwise take the time to do on their own and thus maintaining their health and welfare. Because of busy schedules, many work/life balance programs have been initiated that make services and/or resources easily accessible to employees so they can spend their time on work while at work. Child care, elder care, and financial concerns are among the myriad of issues addressed through these programs. Many times these work/life balance offerings can be provided at no cost to the organization.
Multiple Remedies
Just as there are many causes for presenteeism, there is no one solution.
Each organization and its workforce has different needs and requirements. These needs may shift with time, so it is important to re-evaluate your programs periodically. Get employees involved and ask for their input. No one enjoys being unproductive. Adopt healthy, flexible, positive work environments that meet the multitude of personal and professional challenges faced by employees. Investing in your employees will help alleviate this drain on your people, profits, and productivity.
Lynn Turner is an executive coach and owner of Ironweed Business Alliance, a coaching and consulting firm specializing in leadership development, team building and work/life balance strategies. She is also the host and producer of a local radio talk show/Web site Business Link Radio (www.businesslinkradio.com); (413) 283-7091.
The Construction Institute at the University of Hartford is technically a networking group for those in the building trades — and also businesses with facilities management issues and concerns. But its directors say its mission goes well beyond the pressing of flesh and, as the name suggests, focuses on education.
Bob Gonyeau draws a clear distinction between education and intelligence.
“Education is learning how to do something,” he told BusinessWest. “Intelligence is learning about things that you need to know about, getting the information you need to do your business better.”
Both processes are at the heart of the mission of the 31-year-old Construction Institute, which Gonyeau serves as assistant executive director. Based at the University of Hartford, but now serving a membership base that stretches from New York City to Boston, the institute was created to serve businesses in what is known as the ‘built environment.’
This means general contractors, architects, and engineering firms, obviously, said Gonyeau, but it also includes companies — like MassMutual, Baystate Health, area colleges, and other businesses — that have vast operational facilities and need to know how to manage them efficiently and cost-effectively.
And, in a broad sense, it includes virtually any business that will be impacted by skyrocketing energy prices this winter and wants to develop strategies to minimize those costs.
“It appears that these higher energy costs will be here for a while — they’re becoming a fact of life,” he said. “In that environment, it just makes sense to build smart and find ways to conserve energy and control your costs; we want to help people understand how to do that.”
This is what Gonyeau means by intelligence, and he says the institute provides it through a number of formal and informal gatherings — meetings of the minds, as he called them, involving people from across the broad spectrum of the built environment.
Such programs include the ‘North-Central Conn. & Western Mass. Construction Forecast,’ set for Jan. 26 at the Basketball Hall of Fame. Titled Bridging the Borders … There’s Work for Everyone!, the program will explore the challenges and opportunities for design and construction in North Central Connecticut and Western Mass., or the I-91 corridor, as it’s called, said Gonyeau, noting that it is one of many regional forecasts staged by the institute to inform members and potential members of opportunities within both the public and private sectors and to provide a sense of what the future holds for the construction sector.
The forecasts are just some of the institute’s many attempts at outreach, said Gonyeau, noting that the most significant of such efforts is the upcoming, two-day ConstruCT 2006, the 9th Annual New England Construction & Facilities Management Conference & Exhibition. Set for March 21st and 22nd at the recently opened Connecticut Convention Center, the event will feature a number of educational sessions to, as organizers put it, “improve the process of construction.”
Such process-improvement efforts are at the very heart of the institute’s mission, said Gonyeau, adding that beyond its basic goal of bringing a diverse set of professionals together to discuss common issues and concerns, the institute wants to help enable those in this sector to do what they do better.
“When that happens, everyone benefits,” he said, noting that ConstruCT 2006 and the annual construction forecasts represent just some of the many ways the Construction Institute moves beyond the realm of the traditional networking group.
Another example is its extensive educational component, which includes continuing education programs in the form of half-day workshops offered by the University of Hartford. Workshops are conducted on a wide range of subjects, from construction management to building codes and regulations.
Designed to fill educational gaps within the industry, the workshops help individuals earn certificates and advance within the industry. It’s all part of the institute’s global efforts to inform, enlighten, and develop business leaders.
In two words, Gonyeau told BusinessWest, the institute is all about building relationships.
Solid Foundation
A look at the agenda for ConstruCT 2006 reveals both some of the issues facing the ‘built community’ and the overall mission of the institute.
Individual educational sessions are slated in such topics as:
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Energy management, conservation, and sustainable design;
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Emergency preparedness, safety, and critical response;
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Design and construction issues in higher education, municipalities, and public schools;
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Marketing, business development, and customer satisfaction;
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Successful negotiations, construction claims, and dispute resolution; and
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“How to Succeed in the Connecticut DPW Design and Construction Process.”
The last of those items is a nod to one of the institute’s original charges said Gonyeau — helping firms across the construction sector understand the rules of the road in the Nutmeg State and successfully attain business there. The others? Well, they speak to the seemingly constant change that defines the built environment, and how the institute has continuously evolved in response.
“The industry is constantly changing, and we want to help people keep pace,” he explained. “You can’t be stagnant in this business — if you do, you’ll be left behind.”
The institute was created in the mid-’70s, said Gonyeau, in response to an emerging need for a forum, in which people in businesses across the construction industry could share experiences and knowledge, stimulate growth within the industry, and, in many ways, create opportunities through relationship-building.
This is the essence of any networking group, he said, adding that the mission has grown and evolved over the years, and the institute, while still Connecticut-based and, in many ways, Connecticut-focused, has broadened its geographical reach.
The institute was created at a time of turmoil and challenge for the Connecticut construction community, said Gonyeau, noting that in the mid-’70s, the industry was fragmented and many projects became bogged down by logistical problems and tangled lines of communication. The institute, a non-profit, non-partisan professional organization and one of the few organizations of its kind in the country, was seen as a mechanism for streamlining and strengthening what was then an industry in disarray.
Within a few years of the institute’s creation, there was a deadly collapse of a section of highway bridge in Southern Connecticut and the nearly tragic collapse of the Hartford Civic Center’s roof, said Gonyeau, noting that these events and others helped inspire the many educational components of the institute.
“Those events helped give the institute a sense of purpose — and some credibility,” he explained. “They provided a sense of urgency within the industry to focus attention on issues and improving communication.”
In other words, the institute helped create a dialogue among professionals within the construction community that simply didn’t exist before. Today, that dialogue continues, shaped by emerging trends, economic conditions, and factors that impact builders and end-users alike.
Things like energy costs.
“They touch everyone who owns a building or is thinking about building one,” said Gonyeau, noting that the institute recently staged a seminar, in conjunction with Northeast Utilities, on soaring energy costs and what can be done about them.
“We addressed it from a design standpoint, a construction standpoint, and an operational standpoint,” he explained, “and discussed what people can do, from materials for building, sensible design, and sustainable building.
“When you make a capital investment in a property you intend on keeping, the life-cycle costing is very important,” he continued. “You need to address matters such as where your windows face, how well the building is insulated, how your connections are made in the construction process so you don’t have a lot of air loss; these are all issues to be considered.”
Shedding light on such issues is part of the institute’s broad efforts to educate and disseminate information, said Gonyeau, noting that the educational component continues to grow. Indeed, several hundred students enroll each year in the workshops, administered by the University of Hartford’s Office of Continuing & Professional Education.
Workshop subjects are designed to address specific industry needs, he explained, and involve a hands-on, learn-by-doing style of training. The list of offerings includes subjects that are broad — “Environmental Health and Safety for Facility Managers” is one example — and also quite specific — “Construction on Contaminated Land: How to Prepare and How to Respond.”
Concrete Examples
And while the institute strives to widen the scope of its educational and informational initiatives, it is also working to broaden its audience.
The institute now boasts roughly 375 members, which represent every facet of the built environment. More than two-thirds of those members are from Connecticut, said Gonyeau, but the number of those from out-of-state has grown steadily in recent years.
A number of firms based in Western Mass. or with regional offices there have joined, including Holyoke-based Daniel O’Connell’s Sons Inc., the Mount Vernon Group, a Chicopee-based architectural firm, Tighe & Bond, an environmental engineering firm with headquarters in Westfield, and B-G Mechanical Contractors, also in Chicopee.
Efforts to recruit more companies in this region continue on both a formal and informal basis, said Gonyeau, noting that the institute stages a number of programs over the course of the year during which attendees can learn about the many benefits it offers.
New members have been recruited from New York and Rhode Island, he said, but the natural direction for expansion is north, to the Pioneer Valley. This initiative parallels other efforts, such as the creation of the Hartford-Springfield Economic Partner-ship, to bridge the border between the states — or effectively erase it.
The economic partnership is a now five-year-old effort designed to market the region from Amherst to Storrs, Conn. as one economic region. By combining the demographics of the two major cities and the region between them, organizers believe they can create more economic development opportunities for businesses and residents in both states.
Gonyeau added that the institute takes has adopted a similar philosophy, noting that development in Connecticut could yield opportunities for construction-related businesses in Massachusetts, and vice versa.
“There will always be some measure of territoriality,” he explained, noting that construction and architecture firms in some cities and regions aren’t enamored with the thought of companies from other area codes taking work that could go to them. “But, as the name of our forecast suggests, we really believe there is enough work for everyone.”
Attendees at the Jan. 26 North-Central Conn. & Western Mass. Construction Forecast can find out about some of that work, said Gonyeau, adding that they will hear about opportunities on both sides of the border.
Indeed, among the speakers will be Oz Griebel, president & CEO of the MetroHartford Alliance, and Sandra Johnson, vice president of Business Development for the alliance. They will address current revitalization efforts in Hartford, including the broad Andrien’s Landing initiative on the riverfront.
Meanwhile, Peter Pappas, an East Longmeadow-based real estate developer, one of two partners who have forwarded a $9 million proposal to renovate and expand the old Basketball of Fame Hall building into an integrated sports, fitness, and entertainment complex, is scheduled to talk about that specific project and also the broad subject of riverfront development in Springfield.
Also on the agenda is Westfield Community Development Director James Boardman, who will detail a series of public (a new bridge over the Westfield River, for example) and private construction projects slated in that community.
The institute stages a number of regional forecasts each year, said Gonyeau, all designed to keep members and potential members informed about what’s happening, and also foster the relationship-building efforts that make the group successful.
Hard Hat Area
As he talked about the construction sector, Gonyeau said that large projects, and even smaller initiatives, are marvels of coordination and communication.
| Fast Facts
Agency:The Construction Institute Address:University of Hartford, 312 Bloomfield Ave., West Hartford, Conn. 06117 Phone:(860) 768-4459 Web Site:www.construction.org |
Bringing a project to successful completion requires organization and a step-by-step approach to getting the job done, he explained. “It can be very complex … one hand has to know what the other is doing.”
Bringing together elements of the built environment can be equally complicated, he continued, but such efforts are vital to moving that sector forward and creating opportunities for companies and individuals.
The Construction Institute is succeeding in that mission because it has created a solid foundation and continues to build on it.
George O’Brien can be reached at[email protected]
Edward Murphy, president of First American Insurance Agency in Chicopee, has a neat stack of poker chips sitting on the corner of his desk, ready for a friendly poker game.
But while Murphy might like to blow off some steam with a game of blackjack or Texas Hold ’Em every once in a while, in the ever-changing insurance industry, he never gambles with his own company. Instead, he has plotted a course for First American that, as the company celebrates its 20th anniversary, has allowed for steady growth, some national reach, stability in a difficult industry, and the creation of some community-focused business goals for the coming years.
And while the company remains ready for the current challenges within the industry – auto insurance reform and the trickle-down effects of Hurricane Katrina, which include price adjustments and an overall tightening of the types of policies that can be written, for instance – its specialty is anticipating the challenges ahead.
The company’s very reason for being, Murphy explained, is the need for services that didn’t exist in the mid-1980s.
“In 1986 when we first started, there were a lot of services that weren’t being offered in Western Mass.,” he said. “There was a need for new programs and new ideas, and it boiled down to providing the services that people needed most – insurance for life, as we know it.”
And that practice has become First American’s trump card. The company now enjoys a strong local presence as well as some reach into markets in other parts of the country, thanks to the niches created by addressing issues some other companies might have missed, and a growing strength within the small business community and industries such as manufacturing.
But despite that national success, Murphy said the company’s roots are in Western Mass., and that’s where they’ll stay.
“All companies, small or big, have to a part of their community,” he said. “And we’re not going anywhere.”
Movin’ On Up
First American’s first location was at the ‘X’ in Springfield, but as it grew, Murphy and his staff made a few moves to accommodate an expanding client base. The company moved from Springfield to West Springfield in 1990, and in 1994 moved again to Chicopee, where it has remained, having recently relocated to a new location on Front Street.
“We just kept growing beyond the space we had,” said Jim Lagodich, marketing director for First American. “We were continuously looking for buildings in which we could expand, that would remain customer-friendly and service-oriented.”
Lagodich added that First American has been a company that has worked to provide products that other agencies don’t offer in order to stand apart from the competition.
The company has been a front-runner, for example, in the areas of workers’ compensation and self-insurance, with programs such as COMPro, a workers’ compensation administrative service for stand-alone self-insureds, self-insurance groups, and large employers. Other specialties include bundled programs, which offer a number of insurance products within one package, claims administration, a service typically outsourced by agencies of First American’s size, and payroll deductible products for employers and the self-insured.
Dave Matosky, operations director at First American, said each of those products are good examples of initiatives that have led to increased flexibility when dealing with a diverse set of clients, and consequently growth within some specific areas, including small business.
“They allow us to react to market changes more quickly, “ he said, “and to serve clients more effectively. When working with larger employers, we can suggest programs and services they may not have known existed, or would be a good fit for them. And when working with smaller businesses or individuals, we can offer their core insurance needs in one package.”
That has made First American an attractive choice for many businesses, but also for municipalities, niche businesses, and, particularly, new start-ups.
“We get a lot of calls from people who are still just thinking about starting a business,” Matosky said. “Most have no idea what’s involved with things like workers’ compensation or group insurance at first, and they need a tailored approach and most importantly answers to those tough questions.
“The very fact that we don’t offer ‘the product off the shelf’ is what attracts those types of entrepreneurs to us,” he added, “and what helps us to retain them as clients and grow with them over the course of time.”
Soaring to New Heights
In fact, a greater push within First American to market itself through community outreach and educational programs has stemmed from that strength within the small business market. It began with seminars for managers and supervisors in a number of industries, addressing topics such as accident investigation, and the key points anyone in a supervisory capacity needs to know.
“We spend a lot of resources on education, for others and within the company,” Lagodich said. “That has allowed us to reach new audiences and has also expanded our boundaries – we’re not intimidated by new moves forward.”
One of the first educational seminars, that accident-investigation course, was open to new business owners and supervisors, and was held in Natick, Mass. But First American has also extended its reach into other locales, including New York, New Hampshire, and even Chicago, working with a large manufacturer.
“Educational outreach programs also contribute to retention of our employee base,” said Lagodich. “It fosters more contact with clients, helps build relationships, and keeps the job fresh, so overall, our employees are happier.”
But on the occasion of the company’s 20th anniversary, not all of the programs First American is rolling out are aimed solely at business growth. Currently, one of the most often-discussed initiatives within the agency’s offices is the S.O.A.R. program, a partnership with Chicopee’s Selser Memorial School that rewards students for good behavior.
The program – an acronym for staying Safe, Offering a helping hand, Aiming to achieve, and Respecting yourself, others, and your school – is a response to issues surrounding behavior, conduct and delinquency. The school originally solicited businesses in the community to sponsor the project in hopes of creating a turn-around within the young student body before the children reach high school age. But Corey Murphy, vice president at First American, said the company took the offer to partner with the school very seriously, and pledged support beyond financial assistance.
“Like most businesses, we’re constantly asked to help, but we really bought into this program,” he said. “It has become our one big, public program and has really helped to strengthen the ties between us and the community of Chicopee.
“As a business in this community, it is our responsibility to help the community, and we decided early on that our focus was going to be on the city’s kids,” Murphy continued.
And while programs like S.O.A.R. are sponsored by businesses across the region, First American has actually made community service one of its primary business goals for 2006, a move that Murphy said underscores the importance of such initiatives to the overall well-being of the region as well as to the business health of the company.
“We hope to begin more community programs like this within the year,” he said, noting that one such partnership might be with the Chicopee Boys and Girls Club. “It’s something we’ve decided to focus on in an effort to strengthen our role as a good corporate citizen.”
High Rollers
In addition to those community-oriented projects, Matosky added that additional goals for 2006 will be to continue to expand the company’s ability to find solutions to emerging issues within the insurance sector — the game is constantly changing, he said, bringing a new meaning to the word ‘proactive’ for all insurance agents – and to continue to foster steady growth.
“We’re going to continue to focus our resources on education, and there are the inevitable technology upgrades to think about,” he said. “Like a lot of offices we’re moving forward with going paperless, in part because of the changes in the industry. Things are moving at such a rapid pace that books are becoming obsolete. Now, it’s necessary that our resources be accessed quickly in order to stay current and do research for our clients – only online resources and databases make that possible.”
So as the stakes grow, First American plans to hold strong. And that’s a bet Edward Murphy is willing to take.
Jaclyn Stevenson can be reached at[email protected]
It’s not uncommon for property owners to face significant capital gains (and the consequential tax) in the sale of real estate, either through accumulated depreciation or appreciating asset value, or the combination of both. Rather than pay the capital gain tax and reinvest the difference in another property, the 1031 Exchange allows the taxpayer to replace the property with an ‘exchange’ into another ‘like-kind’ property and essentially defer the payment of the capital gain tax by adjusting the basis of the newly acquired property.
Just over 15 years ago, the Internal Revenue Service instituted the long-awaited rules on deferred exchanges. Section 1.1031 of the Internal Revenue Code details the procedure for turning a sale/purchase transaction into an exchange. The opportunity to defer the payment of capital gains tax is available to owners of investment real estate if the owner intends to re-invest the equity of the sale of another real estate investment.
This deferment results in more equity to invest in the new property and allows the taxpayer to acquire a more substantial investment than had the original property been sold, and the capital gain tax paid.
How it Works
A properly structured 1031 exchange allows an investor (1) to sell a property; (2) reinvest the proceeds in another property; and (3) defer the capital gain taxes. This procedure allows for real estate portfolio growth while protecting the investor from capital gain taxes. Let’s say that an investor incurs $70,000 in combined taxes (depreciation recapture, federal capital gain tax) on a $200,000 capital gain. The investor has two choices:
• The investor incurs the $70,000 tax burden and reinvests the remaining $130,000. Assuming a 20% down payment and an 80% loan-to-value ratio the investor can purchase a property up to $650,000;
• With the 1031 exchange, the same investor can transfer all of the $200,000 in equity. Assuming the same loan constraints, the investor is able to purchase up to $1,000,000 in real estate.
When using this strategy, the taxpayer acquires the new property with a reduced basis, which results in the ‘deferred’ tax being due when the investor eventually cashes out. However, in estate planning, if the taxpayer/investor wills his property to his heirs, they will receive the property at the value at time of death and the deferred tax may be avoided altogether. Thus the 1031 Exchange can be a powerful tool in equity-building for the investor and his estate.
Of course, as with any investment strategy, the advice of tax attorneys, accountants, and real estate brokers familiar with these procedures is critical to compliance with the tax code and the enjoyment of the tax-deferral strategy.
Know When to Say ‘When’
Sound good? How do investors know if they are candidates for an exchange?
First, any investor completing a sale should have his or her tax advisors calculate the federal capital gains tax that would be due should the property be sold at the anticipated sale price to determine how much actual tax ‘savings’/ ‘deferment’ is at stake.
Then the investor must identify a ‘like-kind’ property to acquire. There are rules as to what is like kind, so be careful. The rovision for real property is broad and includes land, rental, and business property. Alas, no, you cannot exchange investment property for a personal residence for your retirement home.
Know Which Exchange is Best
There are various types of exchanges such as simultaneous, delayed, reverse, and an improvement exchange. Often, there is need for an ‘intermediary’ to hold title for either acquired property or the relinquished property to satisfy the rules. There are firms that specialize in providing such a service and can be thought of as an escrow agent for titles. They are known as ‘qualified intermediaries.’ They provide the safe harbor for title.
Various exchange arrangements call for different time limits for acquiring and relinquishing title to the involved properties. Also, the identification of the replacement property can be made several different ways.
Again, it is imperative to engage experienced professionals to ensure compliance and a valid transaction.
If an investor is facing a relatively significant capital gain tax in the sale of property, and desires to defer the tax burden, then it would be worthwhile to investigate and evaluate the 1031 Exchange opportunity.
Bob Greeley is owner of R.J. Greeley Company, LLC, a full-service real estate firm with extensive experience across the spectrum of commercial, industrial and telecommunication real estate transactions; (413) 734-7923
Curt Edgin gestured toward a photo of the old chapel at UMass-Amherst.
It’s one of many framed pictures that cover nearly every inch of wall space at the offices of Caolo & Bieniek and effectively tell of the story of this half-century-old architecture firm.
It’s one of many framed pictures that cover nearly every inch of wall space at the offices of Caolo & Bieniek and effectively tell of the story of this half-century-old architecture firm.
Indeed, the photos display the full range of the company’s work — from design of modern classroom buildings at Springfield Technical Community College, to libraries both new and renovated; from a large number of police, fire, and public safety complexes designed for communities across New England, to the old chapel, which illustrates some of the more unique work this firm does — duties that might seem to fall outside the realm of what some might expect from an architecture firm.
The oldest building on the UMass campus and perhaps the university’s most recognizable landmark, the stone chapel was earmarked in the mid-’90s for what university administrators thought would be minor repairs, what amounted to caulking work. Caolo & Bieniek, which was commissioned to assess the structure and design restoration efforts, quickly determined that the chapel was in far worse condition than previously believed.
“Essentially, the building was being held up by the forces of gravity,” Edgin, the company’s president, explained. “The lime mortar was gone — it was essentially sand between the stones. Any good tremor would have brought that building down.
“It ended up that the building was taken down to its base and reconstructed,” he continued, adding that individual stones had to carefully removed and numbered in order to reconstruct the building as it was originally built.
The old chapel work, which earned the firm accolades from the Mass. Historical Commission, is an example of how Caolo & Bieniek works imaginatively to meet client needs and address concerns — blending form and function, to borrow terms from the industry.
Such customer-focused efforts have enabled the company to survive the economic ups and downs that have a dramatic and often immediate impact on construction-related businesses — and provide a deep sense of optimism for the next 50 years in business.
BusinessWest looks this issue at Caolo & Bieniek’s rich history, the solid reputation it has built, and its prospects for the future.
Step by Step
As they talked with BusinessWest about their company and its recent milestone anniversry, Edgin and fellow principals Ken Jodrie and James Hannifan would use the photos on the walls to punctuate their remarks.
When talking about the public sector and the importance of cost-effective, low-maintenance building materials and design, Jodrie pointed to a sequence of shots of three classroom buildings built at STCC during the 1980s.
“These are durable materials, designed to last,” he explained, referring to the brick structures designed to blend in with the historical Springfield Armory complex that surrounds them. “That’s what the owner wants, something that can be easily maintained. That’s why they typically use masonry in buildings like this — because masonry is a product that once it’s installed the owner can ignore it for a long period of time; he won’t have to do anything to it for 50 years.”
Meanwhile, as they talked about diversity and specialties the company has developed over the years, the three pointed to public safety facilities built locally (Chicopee and Easthampton are just a few) and well beyond the 413 area code — Ashburnham, Mass., for example.
“Public safety is one of the areas we’ve moved into and developed quite a reputation for quality,” said Edgin, pointing to photos of complexes designed for Northampton, Lowell, and other cities and towns. “This is a highly specialized field, one where we’re achieved a good deal of success.”
As the walls attest, the company’s portfolio is extensive, and the process of building it began in 1955, when Vito Caolo (now deceased) and Victor Bieniek (retired since 2001) set up shop in a small office on Pearl Street in Springfield. As the company grew, it moved first to bigger quarters in the old Gilbarco complex in West Springfield and, later, to still-larger space on Cottage Street in Springfield.
Eventually, after the addition of several employees and the emergence of the next generation of ownership, the company moved once again, this time into the former Falls Provision market on East Street in Chicopee, which was renovated into a suite of offices.
As Bieniek was nearing retirement, he took steps to expand the staff and put succession plans in place, said Edgin, adding that he joined the firm in 1987 after working for architecture firms locally, and also in New Jersey and Kentucky. Meanwhile, Hannifan became part of the new leadership team in 1993, and Jodrie joined in 1995.
Over the years, the company has built its reputation largely in the public sector, with dozens of schools, libraries (including the new facility in Chicopee), police and fire stations, the Holyoke Soldiers Home, and even a parking garage or two in the portfolio — and on the walls. In addition to the buildings at STCC, for example, Caolo & Bieniek has designed new buildings and renovations at Westfield State College, Holyoke Community College, UMass, and a host of other schools.
But the public sector is easily impacted by swings in the economy and the flow of tax revenue to Boston and Washington, said Hannifan, citing, for example, the current stagnation (and growing backlog) of public school building projects — work is expected to start flowing again in 2007. This phenomenon necessitates diversity, he told BusinessWest, adding that the firm has handled work across a number of business sectors — from retail (including preliminary designs for a new Starbucks on East Columbus Avenue in Springfield) to physician offices.
And while new building projects comprise a good amount of the firm’s workload, renovations, restorations, and modernizations — at sites ranging from the old chapel at UMass to the central library in Springfield — have kept the company (and area frame shops) busy.
Edgin noted that schools built a century ago, or even 30 years ago — were not designed to accommodate today’s communications technology.
“Quite often the infrastructure and the electrical capacity isn’t there,” he explained. “As recent as the ’60s, there was one plug in the front of the classroom, for the overhead projector, and one in the back; now you need electrical supply everywhere, because everyone has a laptop.”
The qualities that have enabled Caolo & Bieniek to survive a half-century in the often-turbulent construction field, are the same ones that will propel it forward, said Edgin. Elaborating, he listed diversity as an obvious factor, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the firm’s ability to generate repeat business from satisfied customers.
Quality of work has much to do with this, but there is also the “comfort level,” as he described it, that the firm works to create.
“At many of the larger firms in Boston, New York, and elsewhere, you have people whose job it is to sell — and that’s what they do, sell,” he explained. “And after they’re done selling, those people probably won’t be involved with the project again.
“Here, it’s different,” he continued. “The three principals are involved in every project … we’re accessible, and we’re involved every step of the way. That’s the way we do things, and it has helped us generate a good deal of repeat business.”
Room to Grow
If a picture is really worth 1,000 words, then visitors to the offices of Caolo & Bieniek should allocate considerable time for ‘reading.’
The photos relate a 50-year success story, one with many chapters still to be written. The company that takes a highly personalized approach to doing business has no plans to deviate from that pattern.
If there’s an immediate challenge, it might be the need for more wall space.
George O’Brien can be reached at[email protected]
The business cycle contains upturns and downturns. This is hardly news. Unfortunately, how your business weathers the bad times often dictates whether it will survive.
In such times, it may be necessary to enter into negotiations with your lenders to restructure your debt and get your business back on track to financial stability. This process is called a ‘workout.’ Each situation is unique and generalized observations concerning workouts are difficult to make. However, there are some elements that are commonly incorporated in workouts in various combinations. The following is an overview of those elements.
In a workout, both the lender and the borrower give up something to gain something. A lender must be prepared to give up some of its legal and contractual rights and provide some short-term relief for the borrower, with the long-term goal of enhancing the relationship and likelihood of repayment. The concessions made by the borrower in the workout vary on a case-by-case basis, but in broad terms, in order for a workout to be successful, the borrower must minimally reaffirm its obligations to repay the loan.
Before engaging in any workout discussions, a lender should assess the strength of its position under its existing agreements with the borrower. He should also assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of the borrower and its ability to perform its obligations under various workout scenarios.
As a borrower, you can expect the lender’s review of the loan documentation to be the first step in the lender’s assessment. Title reports and financing statement searches should be ordered and reviewed to determine any lien priority problems and to discover any other interests in the collateral of which the lender was unaware.
Problems are often discovered at this stage and include errors or other inadequacies in descriptions of collateral, improperly drafted or unrecorded extension agreements, and defective, aged, or unfiled Uniform Commercial Code financing statements. A savvy lender can use the workout as a means of curing defects discovered at this stage.
The lender should also assess the borrower’s total financial position and require the borrower to inform the lender of the status of its relations with other lenders as well as with keeping it updated on other workout negotiations. In certain instances, a lender may benefit by joining with other lenders to seek a comprehensive workout of the borrower’s financial affairs. The lender’s analysis of the borrower’s honesty and competence is as important as the analysis of the borrower’s financial condition. The lender should attempt to review as objectively as possible the borrower’s dealings with the lender in the past.
The lender’s representative should also take stock of his or her subjective feelings toward the borrower to determine if it will be possible to work together reasonably. Because a workout necessarily requires the borrower and the lender to work with each other after the optimism that accompanied the initial closing of a loan has faded, there may be feelings of mistrust on the lender’s side and feelings of persecution or harassment on the borrower’s side. It is unlikely that a workout can be successfully consummated if either party consistently feels that the other side is attempting to gain an unfair or unreasonable advantage or is untrust The business cycle contains upturns and downturns. This is hardly news. Unfortunately, how your business weathers the bad times often dictates whether it will survive.
In such times, it may be necessary to enter into negotiations with your lenders to restructure your debt and get your business back on track to financial stability. This process is called a ‘workout.’ Each situation is unique and generalized observations concerning workouts are difficult to make. However, there are some elements that are commonly incorporated in workouts in various combinations. The following is an overview of those elements.
In a workout, both the lender and the borrower give up something to gain something. A lender must be prepared to give up some of its legal and contractual rights and provide some short-term relief for the borrower, with the long-term goal of enhancing the relationship and likelihood of repayment. The concessions made by the borrower in the workout vary on a case-by-case basis, but in broad terms, in order for a workout to be successful, the borrower must minimally reaffirm its obligations to repay the loan.
Before engaging in any workout discussions, a lender should assess the strength of its position under its existing agreements with the borrower. He should also assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of the borrower and its ability to perform its obligations under various workout scenarios.
As a borrower, you can expect the lender’s review of the loan documentation to be the first step in the lender’s assessment. Title reports and financing statement searches should be ordered and reviewed to determine any lien priority problems and to discover any other interests in the collateral of which the lender was unaware.
Problems are often discovered at this stage and include errors or other inadequacies in descriptions of collateral, improperly drafted or unrecorded extension agreements, and defective, aged, or unfiled Uniform Commercial Code financing statements. A savvy lender can use the workout as a means of curing defects discovered at this stage.
The lender should also assess the borrower’s total financial position and require the borrower to inform the lender of the status of its relations with other lenders as well as with keeping it updated on other workout negotiations. In certain instances, a lender may benefit by joining with other lenders to seek a comprehensive workout of the borrower’s financial affairs. The lender’s analysis of the borrower’s honesty and competence is as important as the analysis of the borrower’s financial condition. The lender should attempt to review as objectively as possible the borrower’s dealings with the lender in the past.
The lender’s representative should also take stock of his or her subjective feelings toward the borrower to determine if it will be possible to work together reasonably. Because a workout necessarily requires the borrower and the lender to work with each other after the optimism that accompanied the initial closing of a loan has faded, there may be feelings of mistrust on the lender’s side and feelings of persecution or harassment on the borrower’s side. It is unlikely that a workout can be successfully consummated if either party consistently feels that the other side is attempting to gain an unfair or unreasonable advantage or is untrustworthy. One of the most important aspects of this pre-workout analysis is a determination of the value of the collateral securing the loan. This information may be determinative of whether a workout is warranted at all.
The lender may also find it prudent to enter into a ‘pre-workout agreement’ as a condition to any further, substantive negotiations. The pre-workout agreement need not be extensive, but should include the borrower’s acknowledgment of the validity and amount of the loan, the existence of the borrower’s default under the loan documents, the lender’s reservation of all of its rights under the loan documents until a comprehensive settlement agreement is executed and delivered, and that nothing discussed in the course of the negotiations shall be binding upon the lender until it is reduced to a formal written, signed settlement agreement.
The lender will often require the borrower to make a principal reduction as a condition to making other modifications to the loan terms. The borrower may attempt to convince the lender that a source of funds for the pay down should be a sale of a property, in some cases financed by the lender. If a decision is made to provide additional funds for a project, the lender will likely require additional collateral to support the increase, which should be subjected to the same scrutiny and review as are called for by an initial loan funding.
From the borrower’s perspective, this additional funding presents a downside in that if the loan problems continue after the workout, he would find it more difficult to walk away from the project, since more assets would be encumbered. Generally, lenders must be careful during workout negotiations not to say, do, or write anything that may be used against them should negotiations fail and the borrower commences a lender liability action.
While it is often the case that the analysis and investigations described are being conducted as negotiations in progress, in no event should the workout be consummated until the lender has completed this due diligence.
Assuming that the lender has determined in principle that a workout of the loan is feasible and appropriate, decisions must be made as to the particular elements to be included in the workout package. At least some of the following elements typically are incorporated into most workouts:
• Extension of the payment term;
• Modification of the interest rate;
• Partial forgiveness of principal;
• Requirement of a partial payment of principal;
• Increase of the loan amount;
• Tying interest and principal payments to positive cash flow produced by collateral;
• Temporary deferment of some or all interest payments; and
• Requiring the borrower to ‘give back’ some collateral to the lender through deed-in-lieu of foreclosure or requiring the borrower to put up additional collateral, either because the original collateral’s value has declined to a degree that it no longer adequately secures the funds advanced or because additional funds are being advanced.
The workout process invariably occurs at a stressful time for all concerned. However, with some advance planning and cooperation on the part of the borrower and lender, the end result can be a win-win for both parties.
Martin C. Dunn, Esquire is an associate with Bacon & Wilson, P.C. He practice includes commercial finance and transactions, immigration law, real estate, and corporate law; (413) 781-0560;[email protected].
Open House
Feb. 1: The Western New England College Law and Business Center for Advancing Entrepreneurship will host an open house from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Scibelli Enterprise Center, 1 Federal St., Springfield. The new center was established to provide graduate business and law students with an opportunity to offer practical consultation to entrepreneurs starting new and building existing small businesses in the community. From 4 to 5 p.m. in the Teleconference Room, a panel of intellectual property experts will discuss how entrepreneurs can legally protect creative output and innovations. Also, they will review patents, trademarks, and copyrights of small businesses. To register or for more information, E-mail Aimee Munnings, Director, at [email protected] prior to Jan. 25.
Contractual Liability Seminar
Feb. 6: Geoffrey Smith, senior vice president, TD Banknorth Insurance Group, will be the featured speaker at a free luncheon hosted by TD Banknorth Insurance Agency Inc., from 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 2077 Roosevelt Ave., Springfield. His presentation during the Lunch & Learn session is titled “Contractual Liability?” and will explore what to look for and what to look out for in the risk-transfer provisions found in everyday contracts. To sign up, E-mail your request to [email protected]. Seating is limited.
Western Mass. Economic Review
Feb. 8: The Regional Technology Corporation will sponsor a presentation on the economic profile of the region from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. in the TD Banknorth Conference Center, 1441 Main St., Springfield. The profile is based on Western Massachusetts Electric Company’s annual report to its customers titled Western Massachusetts Economic Review. The free presentation will summarize key findings from the 2005 Review and provide a regional economic outlook for 2006. Seating is limited and advance registration is required. For more information, contact April Cloutier at (413) 755-1314 or [email protected].
‘Double Bottom Line’ Lecture
Feb. 9: Lisa Fairfax, an associate professor of Law at the University of Maryland Law School, will present “Achieving the Double Bottom Line: A Framework for Corporations Seeking To Deliver Profits and Public Services” at 5:30 p.m., hosted by the Western New England College Law and Business Center for Advancing Entrepreneurship. The lecture will take place in the S. Prestley Blake Law Center on WNEC’s main campus, 1215 Wilbraham Road, Springfield. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, call (413) 736-8462 or visit www.law.wnec.edu/lawandbusiness.
Outlook 2006
Feb. 10: Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent for Newsweek magazine, will deliver the keynote address for Outlook 2006, hosted by the Affiliated Chambers of Commerce of Greater Springfield. The annual legislative event will be conducted from 11:45 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at Chez Josef in Agawam. In addition to Fineman’s presentation, Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey will discuss the state outlook, and Northampton Mayor Claire Higgins will present remarks for the region. Higgins is also serving as this year’s president of the Mass Municipal Assoc. Tickets are $40 for Chamber members, $60 for nonmembers. Tables of 10 can be reserved. Deadline for reservations is Feb. 3. For more information, contact Diane Swanson, Events Manager, at (413) 787-1555.
Business Entity & Basic Contracts
Feb. 22: The Mass. Small Business Development Center (MSBDC) Network will present Business Entity & Basic Contracts from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. at the Scibelli Enterprise Center, 1 Federal St., Springfield. The workshop will look at ways a business can be run, the advantages and disadvantages of corporations, limited liability companies, partnerships and sole proprietorships. In addition, the workshop will look at income tax issues as well as the minimum needed to protect the business owner in writing when they enter into contracts with third parties. The cost of the workshop is $25. For more information or to register, contact Diane Randall at the MSBDC Network, (413) 737-6712.
Running A Successful Restaurant
March 14: The Mass. Small Business Development Center (MSBDC) Network will sponsor Food For Thought: Tips For Running A Successful Restaurant from 9 to 11:30 a.m. at the Berkshire Chamber of Commerce, 75 North St., Suite 360, Pittsfield. The program will discuss the key ingredients of successful restaurants and the pitfalls that can lead to failure, and will offer tips for improving a restaurant operation from the dining room to the kitchen. The cost is $25. For more information or to register, contact Diane Randall at the MSBDC Network, (413) 737-6712.
| The following bankruptcy petitions were recently filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court Readers should confirm all information with the court. | |
| Carlson, Cindy A. Chaplin, Kathleen R. Haugaard, Paul A. Hernandez, Jorge S. Lee, William E LeSiege, Jeffrey O. | Parker, Tamaris Quinones, Trinidad Rancourt, David John Small, Camille M. Josephson, Keith A. |
| A.I.M. Creates HR Resource Center Planning Board Assistance Program Offered Lees Won’t Seek Re-election Developer Interested in Danaher Site State Moves Toward Stricter Emission Rules Firm Receives Grant For Engine Prototype State Economic Picture Flat |
| The following building permits were issued during the month of January 2006. | |
| AMHERST Amherst Cinema Theatre NORTHAMPTON Children’s Aid & Family Service Florence Congregational Church Hampden County PA LLC Silkmill Associates Smith College Smith College 293 Northampton Realty LLC Wal—Mart Stores East Inc.
| SPRINGFIELD Coffee Roaster Inc. Eastfield Management Laundry Capital Mercy Medical Center New Colony Court Picknelly Family Sovereign Bank WESTFIELD Joseph Flahive |
Mercy Receives Grant To Improve Access to Health Care
SPRINGFIELD — Mercy Medical Center recently was awarded a $20,000 grant from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation to improve access to health care for uninsured and low-income residents. The “Connecting Consumers To Care” grant will target services to the local homeless population and Vietnamese residents. The grant will support assistance with eligibility, enrollment, primary care provider selection, and post-enrollment services. The funds will also be used to provide case management for preventative, medical and behavioral health services. In administering the grant, Mercy Medical Center will collaborate with the Mental Health Association of Greater Springfield, Vietnamese American Civic Association, and Friends of the Homeless, Inc.
Hudson United Bancorp, TD Banknorth Shareholders Approve Merger
PORTLAND, Maine — TD Banknorth Inc. shareholders recently voted at a special meeting to approve the acquisition of Hudson United Bancorp. More than 99% of the votes cast were voted in favor of the transaction. In a separate meeting in Mahwah, N.J., the shareholders of Hudson United Bancorp also voted heavily in favor of sale to TD Banknorth. More than 98% of the votes cast by Hudson United shareholders were in favor of the transaction. Pending approval by the Federal Reserve, the transaction is expected to close later in the first quarter of 2006. On a pro forma basis, the transaction creates a regional financial services company with approximately 590 branches, 751 ATMs and more than $26 billion in deposits across eight northeastern states. In other TD Banknorth news, bank officials recently said that fourth-quarter earnings per share will be 62 cents, 2 cents lower than analysts’ projections. Company officials cited the lower earnings per share because of declining net interest margins. TD Banknorth will release its fourth-quarter and year-end earnings report on Jan. 23.
Virginia Police Purchase Smith & Wesson Pistol
SPRINGFIELD — The sheriff’s department of Patrick County, Va., recently signed a deal to purchase 32 of Smith & Wesson’s new M&P 40 pistol – the first sale for the new military firearm. The new gun’s safety features, low recoil, and ease of handling were reasons cited by Patrick County Sheriff David E. Hubbard regarding the purchase. The M&P models load .40-caliber ammunition. Smith & Wesson also recently announced that the company plans to add more versions of the gun in the coming weeks. For example, new models will fire .357-caliber SIG rounds as well as 9 mm ammunition. The new handgun, with a retail price of $695, will also be available to individual customers through retail outlets.
Center For Teaching Receives High Marks
AMHERST — The Center for Teaching at UMass, Amherst has been recognized in a national survey as one of the top faculty- development programs in the United States and Canada. Nearly 500 faculty developers at 300 higher education institutions responded to the survey, which is part of a recently published study, “Creating the Future of Faculty Development: Learning from the Past, Understanding the Present.” The survey identified faculty development programs at UMass, Amherst, University of Michigan, University of Delaware and Miami University of Ohio as the four best in the U.S. and Canada. The Center For Teaching also had the distinction of being named most often as a ‘model program’ that guided best practices by developers across every institutional type – from community colleges to research universities. The survey was sent to 1,000 members of the Professional and Organizational Development Network, the oldest and largest professional association of faculty development scholars and practitioners.
Schools Benefit From Civic Action Program
GREENFIELD — Greenfield Savings Bank’s Civic Action accounts raised $10,000 in its first nine months for 11 participating school districts, according to Joan Cramer, Vice President and Marketing Officer. Launched last March, the unique civic action bank accounts give back to schools in Franklin County and in Amherst. Bank customers participating in the program use their Greenfield Savings Bank card to swipe and sign – for everything from groceries to gas. “It all adds up,” said Cramer. All revenues are spent by school districts as they deem appropriate. Participating school districts include Amherst-Pelham, Franklin County Technical, Frontier Regional, Gill-Montague, Greenfield, Mahar Regional, Mohawk Trail Regional, Orange, Pioneer Valley Regional, Four Rivers Charter and Union 28. Union 28 serves the elementary schools of Erving, Leverett, New Salem, Shutesbury and Wendell.
Insurance, LLC Becomes Encharter Insurance Group
AMHERST — Neighborhood Insurance, LLC recently changed its name to Encharter Insurance Group. Blair, Cutting & Smith Insurance, the local office of Encharter Insurance Group, will continue to be known by its local name. As a member of Encharter’s group of agencies, Blair, Cutting & Smith Insurance will continue to improve its technology, and support its staff members’ increased involvement in community service projects. Both insurance agencies offer security against loss and financial services.
The following is a compilation of recent lawsuits involving area businesses and organizations. These are strictly allegations that have yet to be proven in a court of law. Readers are advised to contact the parties listed, or the court, for more information concerning the individual claims.
NORTHAMPTON DISTRICT COURT
Competitive Kitchen Designs Inc. v. Deer Hill Builders Inc.
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for goods sold and delivered: $18,015.15
Date Filed: Dec. 5
HAMPSHIRE SUPERIOR COURT
C & S Distributors Inc. v. Michelson Properties Inc.
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for goods sold and delivered: $40,692.98
Date Filed: Dec. 15
SPRINGFIELD DISTRICT COURT
New Penn Motor Express v. Randolph Products Co. a/k/a Randolph Products
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for goods sold and delivered: $9,954.35
Date Filed: Dec. 15
Thales Broadcast & Multimedia Inc. f/k/a Thomcast Communications Inc.
Ozark Wireless TV Inc.
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for services: $24,233.25
Date Filed: Dec. 19
O.K. Baker Supply Co. Inc. v. Jean M. Gendreau d/b/a Home Town Bakery
Allegation: Breach of contract — Failure to pay for goods sold and delivered: $14,577.13
Date Filed: Dec. 19
PFG Springfield Corp.
Michael Selicious d/b/a Michael’s Catering d/b/a Jitterz
Allegation: Breach of contract – Failure to pay for goods sold and delivered: $7,757.36
Date Filed: Dec. 28
| The following Business Certificates and Trade Names were issued or renewed during the month of January 2006. |
| AGAWAM Country Estates of Agawam D.A.M. Vending K.D.C. Landscaping & Snow Plowing R&M Distributors Inc. Twisty’s Old Fashion Restaurant Win Restaurant AMHERST The Acupuncture Works 1-800-Granola.com Tupotech CHICOPEE Dimson’s Siding Flynn’s Seamless Gutters Joy to the World Lorraine’s Soup Kitchen Northern Design EAST LONGMEADOW G & A Import Auto Repair Inc. Meadows Lawn Care HOLYOKE The Corner Store K & S Gifts & More Taylor Rental LONGMEADOW AZZ Hypnotherapy Woods Financial Group NORTHAMPTON Mike Florio Welding & Repair SPRINGFIELD All Stars Mechanical Andrew L. Hepburn Assoc. Barr Enterprises Colin Photography Craftman’s Corner F & L Oil Burners The Healthy Connection J.C. Services JXZ Productions KAT Transport Services Manilla Snach Machines Melissa’s Place Perfect Peace Ministry Precious Transport Sabor Hispano Super Auto Sales WEST SPRINGFIELD Ask for Success Advertising Bryant General Contracting & Construction C.H.I. Design Dependable Trustee Services Finishing Touch Home Improvements Good Dog University J.M. Snow Plowing LHQ Dance Force Unlimited M.G. Consultants Microtech Computer Services New Life Solutions Page One Productions LLC Rein’s New York Style Deli Welker’s Exxon WESTFIELD Axis Precision Inc. Cooper Excavating Gauntlet Games Inc. Starbucks Under Mountain Farm Trucking |
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