Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone has decided to form a Future Economies Commission (FEC) with the goal of attracting growing industries to the City of Somerville, according to Somerville's former Director of Communications Michael Meehan.
The commission will serve as an advisory board to both the mayor and the Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development (OSPCD). It will be comprised of local business owners and entrepreneurs, as well as several of the mayor's chief advisors, capitalizing on the area's highly educated and diverse community, Meehan said.
"This is a fairly out-of-the-box idea for a municipality to engage in the business community at this level," he told the Daily.
The FEC's role is to identify industries that would be suitable to enter into a symbiotic relationship with the city, according to Meehan.
"The commission, thus far, has been doing mostly high-level brainstorming about industries that the City of Somerville should be courting," Larry Slotnick, a core member of the FEC and co-founder of Taza Chocolate, told the Daily.
The commission aims to address the economic and demographic transition that is taking place in the city, according to Slotnick.
"The problem is that Somerville is currently in the process of a long-term transition," he said. "It is moving from a fairly blue-collar community with a manufacturing base to an intermediate state, where those manufacturing facilities have not yet been replaced by offices or research and development centers."
Slotnick believes that Somerville has a lot to offer developing industries that choose to relocate to the city, and that it would also be advantageous to Somerville if these businesses called the city home.
"Somerville feels that areas like Assembly Square, the Inner Belt or Boynton Yards are prime locations where this new wave of employers could decide to relocate," he said.
Meehan added that the large population of highly educated people in the city would also serve as a suitable supply of workers for the industries Curtatone hopes to attract.
Both Meehan and Slotnick noted that currently many Somerville residents commute to work — either to an office park far outside the city or into Boston itself — instead of staying in the city, and this is one of the city's biggest problems.
"Mayor Curtatone looks at the daily commuting behavior of Somerville residents, and that is what is driving all this," Slotnick said. "A large number of the roughly 80,000 people who live in Somerville currently travel elsewhere for work, and we want to change this."
Meehan pointed out that there are notable benefits to being based in Somerville.
"One of the problems with a business being located farther away from the city is that a lot of the creative minds don't want to be locked into a cubicle in an office park," he said. "They want to be somewhere where they can go out and experience life outside the office. Somerville is able to offer all of that. It's just a matter of getting the larger business community to understand the advantages of our location."
Slotnick said that the FEC also aims to convince businesses to stay in Somerville even as they grow in size.
"Somerville's population of businesses today is incredibly weighted toward very small operations of one to four people," he said. "A lot of these businesses decide to leave Somerville when they reach a larger size or when they get an infusion of funding. The mayor wants to reverse this trend."
A crucial element of the plan to make Somerville an attractive place to do business is improving public transportation, a goal that will be helped significantly by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's plan to extend both the Orange and Green Lines, according to City of Somerville's Director of Communications Tom Champion.
"What you're going to see over the next few years is not only the construction of an additional Orange Line stop at Assembly Square but also the gradual expansion of the Green Line out towards Tufts and the Medford line," Champion said.
This expansion will make it easier for businesses and employees to take advantage of everything Somerville has to offer, he added.
