PBN: Recently Wasserman Associates has proposed a retail development for the former cold storage building and Providence produce market, not far from the mall. Have you been involved in the Wasserman proposal at all?
SWEN: We had some discussion with them early on, but we are not involved. They have not come to us for any specific assistance.
Any sense of where that’s going?
I know they are looking at some retail. I haven’t had any direct conversations with them for some time.
You’re not surprised by what would be attracted there?
Not at all. Actually from what I understand it should be very complementary for whatever development there is in the mall. That’s what happens. When you look at Emerald Square Mall when that was built there were no shopping areas across the street. Now that’s filled. With this kind of opportunity it doesn’t surprise me at all that there would be complementary development, and I think it is a very positive sign.
One suggestion for the property, in a recent editorial in the Providence Journal, was that the site might still be an option for a Patriots stadium. Is that proposal dead?
I think that’s a safe assumption, yes.
There has really been no interest?
To be honest I’m not sure if the Patriots wanted to come to Rhode Island that a downtown site is feasible with all the development. That parcel has been purchased and I know there’s a lot of activity at the Foundry. So I’m not even sure that’s possible.
What kind of activity at the Foundry?
They’re signing up new tenants. There’s a lot of good things, a lot of new opportunities for them.
They’re doing office type tenants?
Yes.
From within state or people coming from outside?
Both, and I’m being a little bit elliptical because I know there is one discussion in process that is not public knowledge at this point that I’m aware of.
A major player?
Yes, that I’m not about to reveal yet.
How about industry-wise?
It’s a financial services company.
I thought Fidelity was first looking at the site.
They did look at that site, yes.
Was it the inventory tax that scared them off?
That may have been one of the issues; that was before I arrived, but also I think the cost of development is an issue there. If you want to build from scratch, obviously, there would be a lot of demolition required, and if you wanted to rehab those buildings, it was probably expensive as well.
Let me put one other issue to bed, Six Flags.
One thing people should understand: There was much more attention in the press than was warranted. We never got beyond the very preliminary discussion about the possibility of coming to Rhode Island.
The fact is those people wanted an awful lot of money from the state. The first time I met with them the expectations they had were out of the question. Frankly, they never got to any place that made any sense to me at all.
It may be early, but looking legislatively what do you see as the critical issues?
I think that one of the key things we need to do is take a real hard look at how we’re funding tourism. We had a lot of controversy last year with the CVB (Convention and Visitors Bureau). Because of that controversy we focused more on how we were going to split up the existing pie, rather than thinking about whether the pie is actually the right size for the potential for that industry in this state.
I would like to get the debate focused more on how we can take advantage of the beautiful assets that we have in the state. How can we grow that tourism pie so that we can create good jobs. We have a terrific asset to take advantage of and I don’t think we’re taking as much advantage as we could, even though we are experiencing growth in that sector compared to many other states. We don’t spend as much in promotion as many of them do and I think we have more assets. We’re closer to larger and more lucrative markets than many of them. We have a real opportunity there, but I don’t think we have been funding it at a level that I think has been appropriate.
Are you comfortable that CVB is over its problems?
Yes.
Beyond anything else, are there other major issues?
We do want to revisit some of the Sunday work issues, and we will do that in collaboration with George Nee and Frank Montanaro (secretary treasurer and president of the RI AFL-CIO). We do want to look at the promotion of the tourism industry. We will want to look at some of the issues around permitting. When DEM reorganization does occur we would like to see whether there is a way to make the permitting process clearer, simplify it and coordinate so each of the agencies so people trying to get permits don’t have to go to five different agencies and don’t get caught in the middle when agencies don’t agree.
Any other tax issues?
We are working right now on the legislative agenda. There are about a dozen other issues, including some tax things, that I’m not sure will be on or not.
John Warren of Washington Trust recently brought up an issue that Terry Murray of Fleet has discussed on occasion, and that’s the tax consequences to higher paid individuals here as a disincentive to moving companies to Rhode Island.
That’s an issue. We have looked into that in the past. It is an issue. If you want to attract companies that are run by the CEOs obviously, you don’t want to give them a big disincentive to go to Connecticut or Massachusetts or someplace else.
Do you hear that objection from people?
Yes.
Anything we should know about companies that are considering Rhode Island?
What people who are here are telling me, we have never had this number of opportunities. There’s a tremendous amount of interest. There’s a lot of interest stimulated in the region and the opportunities of what’s happening downtown are very attractive to some of the industries we’ve targeted over the last several years, financial services for example. So we have a very compelling package now, with some of the legislation we’ve passed, some of the quality of life amenities that are continuing; there’s an awful lot going on.
We hear there are discussions with Pfizer about potentially moving a facility here?
Yes, we had some discussions with them. They have had discussions with other states as well. I’d prefer not to comment on that now.
But they were fairly recent, right?
I don’t want to get into that because we have had some discussions with them. I think we are not close to any kind of commitment from them or anyone else. We have targeted pharmaceutical companies as having very high paying, high value jobs. They tend to be very good corporate citizens. We think we have a compelling story here with some of our intellectual property infrastructure and our quality of life, relatively low costs for some of those types of businesses. So we think that’s a great segment to target and we’ve aggressively pursued a number of those, but we don’t have anything to say yet.
