Opinion

There Were Some Bright Spots in 2008

A Boston Globe sports columnist was writing recently from Seattle. He was trying to describe just how bad things are for the sports teams and their fans there, and he summoned this phrase: “reading the sports page here is like reading the business page everywhere else.”

Ouch.

That says a lot about how last place has become the mailing address for most teams in that city — but also about how painful it was, and is, to turn to the business section. It has been replete lately with stories about layoffs, failing banks, climbing mortgage-foreclosure rates, stocks tumbling hundreds of points on a regular basis, businesses closing, car dealers posting wretched numbers, and retailers having lousy months, quarters, shopping seasons (take your pick, they all work).

Locally, residents were treated to all of the above, with specific examples ranging from the collapse of Skybus and the closing of its operation at Westover to the loss of SunEthanol (now Qteros) to the Worcester area, the closing of several car dealerships, and even Springfield’s ranking among the fastest-dying cities in the U.S.

It wasn’t all bad. It just seemed that way.

Amid the gloom and doom there were some bright spots, and in an attempt to maybe get 2009 off to a decent start, BusinessWest thought it would recount five of those positive stories. In no particular order:

  • A blueprint on workforce development. Toward the end of 2007, regional economic-development leaders initiated a program to improve the quality and quantity of the region’s workforce for the long term. Called Building a Better Workforce — Closing the Skills Gap on the Road to Economic Resurgence, the endeavor took its first major steps forward in ’08 with programs to put workers in the pipeline for the health care and precision-manufacturing sectors, and also increasing access to preschool. Perhaps more important, the first steps will get a number of businesses and institutions actively engaged in an issue of vital importance to the region’s future
  • The emergence of YPS. That’s the acronym for a group called the Young Professional Society of Greater Springfield, which, while only a few years old, seems to possess enormous potential to not only keep more young people in this region, but also help prepare them to be leaders — in business and the community.
  • New life for an old mill. Westmass Area Development Corp. announced plans to acquire the old Ludlow Manufacturing Associates complex in the center of that community. This is a 20- to 30-year proposition that looks to transform the nearly 1 million square feet of mill space and 79 acres of adjacent undeveloped land into a business and industrial center. At a time when the inventory of traditional greenfields is shrinking, the Ludlow development is an imaginative attempt to give companies more opportunities to move to and grow within the Pioneer Valley.
  • The start of a ‘green’ wave. Yes, the region will lose Qteros, one of the best emerging ‘green’ stories in Western Mass., but there are some other signs of potential growth in the realm of ‘green jobs.’ In Wilbraham, a company called FloDesign is making progress on a prototype that may revolutionalize the design of wind turbines. Meanwhile, in Greenfield, there are the makings of a ‘green’ cluster. And everywhere, there is a commitment to creating jobs in what looks like a sector with enormous promise. Stay tuned.
  • Liberty Mutual brings hundreds of jobs to Springfield. With what seems like a big assist from Gov. Patrick, Liberty Mutual announced that it would locate a call center in the Technology Park at STCC. Cynics will say that these are just call center jobs and that the company would have done the city more good if it had located downtown. The bottom line is that these are new jobs, and decent jobs, coming in a year when there weren’t many gains in that department. Meanwhile, a big part of this good story is the fact that Springfield triumphed over many other job-hungry cities in what became known as Project Evergreen.
  • There were other somewhat uplifting stories from 2008 that, while they didn’t obscure all the bad news, generated some hope for 2009 and well beyond. Let’s see if the region can build on this in the year ahead.