Page 19 - BusinessWest January 6, 2025

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IN US
“I can’t even count how many presentations I made. I pretty much said, ‘anytime, anywhere that anyone wants one, I’ll go’ — and I did a lot of them.”
into the city’s new police headquar- ters, an intriguing conversion project that should be wrapped up next spring. There’s also the ongoing saga of the for- mer Games and Lanes property on Wal- nut Street Extension — a new use for that parcel remains elusive years after the eyesore was torn down — as well as the need for new housing of all kinds, but especially the affordable variety.
There are some new businesses, including a Starbucks just over the Mor- gan-Sullivan Bridge from West Spring- field that opened roughly a year ago, and some emerging ventures, includ- ing an urgent-care facility in a building now under construction just behind Starbucks.
As for existing businesses, the land-
scape is dominated — figuratively but
also literally — by Six Flags New England, the giant amusement park near the Connecticut border that is not only the city’s largest employer, but a good corporate citizen, the mayor said.
The park, now 25 years under the Six Flags brand, is adding a new roller coaster and undertaking other significant expansion and improvement efforts, said Park President Peter Carmichael (see related story on page XX).
For this latest installment of its Community Spotlight series, BusinessWest turns its focus on Agawam, where momentum is building — in every sense of that phrase.
Early Returns
The framed newspaper front pages on one wall of Johnson’s office speak to how much has changed over the past 24 years — journalistically, and in some other ways as well.
The large headlines trumpet three of his five election victories, starting in 1989. The masthead at the top of each declares that this
A architect’s rendering of the planned new Agawam High School.
is the Agawam/West Springfield edition of the Union News. The Springfield newspaper is now called the Republican, and there is no longer an Agawam/West Springfield edition. Meanwhile, the large headlines from the ’90s were all about Johnson because West Springfield didn’t have a mayor in those days.
But while many things have changed in a quarter-century, in Aga- wam, many of the issues are the same, and Johnson has been deal- ing with them consistently because he served on the City Council for 12 years in the interim.
At the top of that list is the high school, he said, noting that the original building, opened in 1995, has been renovated and expand- ed several times over the years, with the result being a sprawl-
ing, one-story complex that was in need of another facelift — or
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