Company Notebook

United Bank Named Area’s Top SBA Business Lender

WEST SPRINGFIELD — Richard Collins, president and CEO of United Bank, announced that the bank was named the top business lender in Western Mass. by the U.S. Small Business Assoc. (SBA). The Lender of the Year designation honors United Bank’s fiscal 2012 performance in the SBA’s 7(a) loan program, which helps startups and existing small businesses with financing guaranteed for a variety of general business purposes. SBA does not make loans itself, but rather guarantees loans made by participating lending institutions, according to Collins. “At United Bank, we’re doing everything we can to help improve the economic environment in the markets we serve,” he said. “Small businesses and startup companies are the key to the future; their success is everyone’s success.” With total consolidated assets of approximately $2.4 billion, the bank is the 11th-largest publicly traded bank headquartered in New England.

South End Citizens Council Endorses MGM Springfield

SPRINGFIELD — MGM Resorts International announced recently that its MGM Springfield proposal has received the exclusive endorsement of Springfield’s South End Citizen’s Council. Bill Hornbuckle, MGM Resorts president and chief marketing officer and MGM Springfield president, said, “we are extremely proud to have received the exclusive endorsement of the South End Citizen’s Council. MGM believes in being a good corporate citizen, and this begins with working hard to earn the support and trust of those people whom we hope to soon call our neighbors.” Leo Florian, president of the South End Citizens Council, added, “we have had an open and honest dialogue with MGM from day one. The South End Citizen’s Council voted to exclusively endorse the MGM Springfield project because of the benefits the project would bring not only to our neighborhood but to the entire City of Springfield.” MGM officials have been meeting with South End residents and business owners for months to discuss the MGM Springfield proposal and answer questions. MGM hosted a neighborhood dinner prior to its August 2012 announcement detailing the uniquely urban and integrated downtown Springfield resort-casino proposal. The dinner was followed in November by a formal presentation to the South End Citizen’s Council. In addition to the South End, MGM Resorts executives and the MGM Springfield team have met with 11 other neighborhood councils across the city over the past several months. They plan to meet with the remaining councils in the weeks ahead. These neighborhood meetings and presentations have been a way to inform, educate, and hear from different communities throughout the entire city to better understand their needs and priorities. “We would never come into a community and presume to know what’s best for them,” said Hornbuckle. “By investing this time in listening to residents, business owners, and community leaders, we believe we’ve put forward a project that is worthy of this city and its people. Added Florian, “MGM has created a proposal that is respectful of our neighborhood’s unique fabric and history, and also will bring 3,000 much-needed permanent jobs, revenue, and vitality to this entire city. Their level of community engagement across this city has been unprecedented, and it clearly shows in the amount of care and detail that has gone into this proposal.” The endorsement was made official prior to MGM Resorts submitting its detailed response to RFQ/P Phase II of the city’s casino selection process. A copy of the endorsement letter was submitted earlier this month as part of MGM’s response and was kept confidential until the city made the Phase II responses public. MGM Springfield is proposed for about 10 acres of land between Union and State streets, and between Columbus Avenue and Main Street. MGM is seeking the sole gaming license in Western Mass.

UMass Astronomer, International Team Make Unique Observation

AMHERST — Just-forming stars, like growing babies, are always hungry and must ‘feed’ on huge amounts of gas and dust from dense envelopes surrounding them at birth. Now, a team of astronomers, including Robert Gutermuth, a UMass Amherst expert in imaging data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, reports observing an unusual ‘baby’ star that periodically emits infrared light bursts, suggesting it may be twins — that is, a binary star. The discovery is reported this month in Nature. The extremely young (in astronomical terms) object, dubbed LRLL 54361, is about 100,000 years old and is located about 950 light years away toward the Perseus constellation. Years of monitoring its infrared with the Spitzer instrument reveal that it becomes 10 times brighter every 25.34 days, Gutermuth and colleagues say. This periodicity suggests that a companion to the central forming star is likely inhibiting the infall of gas and dust until its closest orbital approach, when matter eventually comes crashing down onto the protostellar ‘twins.’ Gutermuth, who surveys star-forming molecular clouds with Spitzer to search for protostars, said, “the idea that this object is a baby binary system fits our data, so twins fit our data. In single protostars, we would still see matter dumping onto the star non-uniformly, but never with the regularity or intensity of the bursts we observe in LRLL 54361. The 25.43-day period is consistent with the orbital period we would expect from a very close binary star.” The protostar twins, embedded in a gas cocoon many times larger than our solar system, offer an unusual chance to study what looks like a developing binary-star system, he added. Because dense envelopes of gas and dust surround embryonic stars, the only detectable light to escape is at longer, infrared wavelengths. “Spitzer’s infrared camera is perfect for penetrating this cool dust to detect emission from the warm center,” said Gutermuth. “When you have two young stars feeding from the same circumstellar disk, the gravitational influence of the secondary companion can cause hiccups, an inhibition of infalling material from the disk. But when the orbital paths approach closely, that material can rush in, triggering feeding pulses for both stars and releasing a bright burst of light. The flash moves out from the center, reflecting off the disk and cavities in the envelope like an echo reverberating out from cave walls. We’ve seen the light flashes with Spitzer and have imaged the echo-tracing cavities in its envelope.”