Page 10 - BusinessWest August 31, 2020

Community Spotlight
Palmer’s Town Manager Sees Growth Potential
By Joseph Bednar
If there’s one thing capitalism doesn’t like, Ryan McNutt says, it’s uncertainty. And COVID-19 has certainly injected plenty of
that into the regional and national economic picture.
But unlike more densely populated areas like Boston, where the death toll — and accompa- nying anxiety — are higher, leading to a slower return to acitity, Palmer has seen only seven coronavirus-related deaths. Even now, only nine people are under some sort of quarantine order, following a long stretch of no cases at all.
How much Palmer’s low case count has affect- ed business activity is hard to tell, said McNutt, who became town manager last year. But there’s reason for cautious optimism.
“I’m encouraged that our busiest department right now is our Building Department; in fact, I’m going to add another building inspector,” he told BusinessWest. “And some other Western Mass. communities are seeing that as well.”
Local projects run the gamut from a bar on Main Street being converted to a pizza restau- rant to Adaptas Solutions adding a building to its complex in the Palmer Industrial Park.
“It’s a growing business — even in this pan- demic, people are still adding jobs, adding capac- ity, adding new product lines,” said McNutt,
noting that Sanderson MacLeod, which special- izes in manufacturing twisted wire brushes, has grown recently by shifting to new product lines, some of them medical, during the pandemic. “Capitalism is creative destruction. People are going to enter new markets, or enter existing markets where others couldn’t fill those markets, and Palmer will benefit from that.”
The cannabis sector certainly shows no signs of slowdown, with four businesses — Altitude Organic and Heka Health on the retail side and and MINT Cultivation Facilities and the WingWell Group on the cultivation side — getting ready to open in the coming months.
“This will be an amazing amount of unre- stricted local revenue,” McNutt said, though he was quick to add that most neighboring states still haven’t legalized cannabis. “Once those states or the federal government legalize, there will be diminishing returns. We’re seeing hun- dreds of thousands of dollars coming in from other states.”
That said, he expects the industry to be a net positive for Palmer’s tax base for a long time to come, even if it’s hard to predict the exact impact. “There’s obviously a floor of cannabis users, but what is the ceiling?”
It’s a question he can apply to many types of
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10 AUGUST 31, 2020
COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT
BusinessWest
Palmer at a glance
YEAR INCORPORATED: 1775 POPULATION: 13,050
AREA: 32 square miles COUNTY: Hampden
TAX RATE, RESIDENTIAL AND COMMERCIAL: Palmer, $22.80; Three Rivers, $23.42; Bondsville, $23.89; Thorndike, $24.16
MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME: $41,443 MEDIAN FAMILY INCOME: $49,358
TYPE OF GOVERNMENT: Town Manager; Town Council
LARGEST EMPLOYERS: Baystate Wing Hospital; Sanderson MacLeod Inc., Camp Ramah of New England; Big Y World Class Market
* Latest information available