Milling about in Woonsocket

<b>Photo by Frank Mullin</b><br>Woonsocket's newest target for future industrial development sits at the city's entrance on Hamlet Avenue - 17 acres of waterfront land, mostly the old ACS Industries mill complex. The heavily contaminated site could cost $3 million to clean up.
Photo by Frank Mullin
Woonsocket's newest target for future industrial development sits at the city's entrance on Hamlet Avenue - 17 acres of waterfront land, mostly the old ACS Industries mill complex. The heavily contaminated site could cost $3 million to clean up.

City set to reinvent industrial properties

The irony is inescapable: Woonsocket, one-time hub of manufacturing, is almost out of good industrial space. Dozens of mills line the waterfront; they’re scattered all over the city’s hilly landscape. You could almost toss a stone at random and know you’ll hit a mill.

But modern manufacturers, said city planner Joel D. Mathews, like flat, single-story buildings with big, open spaces uninterrupted by columns. They want big parking lots, and good loading docks, all the modern amenities.

Woonsocket’s leaders have known this for a long time, so in the 1980s they bought an old farmstead – the city’s last big piece of developable space – to create the Highland Industrial Park. Anchored by the CVS headquarters, the 60-acre park allowed for a slew of new commercial and industrial development that’s brought more than 4,500 jobs and millions in new tax revenues to the city, and helped keep the tax rates down.

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Next door, in Cumberland, Highland Corporate Park has also done well, with about 40 of the 120 available acres sold. On Woonsocket’s side, however, the pace of sales accelerated in the last year and a half – Autocrat, Gutter Helmet, Birks Jewelry, Summer Infant – so while there’s still some undeveloped land, it’s almost all slated for construction.

The last big parcel, 7.25 acres, was sold in early fall to developer Jennifer Cookke’s F.H. French Co., owner of Blackstone Center in Lincoln. Cookke said she’s planning a $10-million project, four buildings to serve as “incubators,” industrial and office space for a variety of high-tech companies. About 60 percent of the space is already taken.

There’s a chance that one other parcel of about that size will become available again, economic development director Jeffrey Polucha said – it’s been held for a company that has yet to complete the deal – but even then, Woonsocket’s future industrial job growth will depend on finding more developable land.

But is it worth it?

For all the talk of U.S. manufacturing being dead, Polucha said he gets plenty of calls from companies looking for industrial space. One recent caller wanted 30,000 square feet on one floor – “I don’t have it.” Another wanted 10,000 square feet, to move a plant that’s now in Plymouth; again, not available. And an aerospace company recently asked about getting 100,000 square feet of modern space. “It doesn’t exist,” Polucha said.

If the parcel is as versatile as Highland, Polucha noted, the city could also put a mix of industrial and commercial buildings there, and hopefully attract Landmark Medical Center as well, since the Landmark campus is “pretty much built out.”

“We have had no problem here in selling land or helping to broker buildings that are newer,” Mathews agreed. “In fact, we wish we had another Highland Park. Our problem is that we have a number of older buildings that are obsolete.”

Many of the old mills are partially vacant, Mathews said, and the tenants they have are usually on the first floor. Last year, the city approved the creation of two housing units on the second floor of one mill that the owner said he had vacant for a decade.

Several mills and mill complexes are now going entirely residential; Woonsocket’s waterfront, especially, is abuzz with redevelopment, and there’s plenty of demand for the increasingly high-end condos being carved out of the old buildings. A few other mills are finding new life with commercial and nonprofit tenants.

Altogether, both residential and commercial/industrial property values are growing healthily: from $610.4 million and $207.0 million, respectively, in December 2001, to $806.5 million and $259.7 million as of last month – a 32.1-percent and 25.5-percent gain, respectively.

But that still leaves plenty of property, mostly industrial, that’s not suitable for adaptive reuse, and may be too contaminated. Such is the case with a 17-acre waterfront stretch off Hamlet Avenue that is Woonsocket’s new target for future industrial development.

You can’t miss the site: It’s the big brick hulk with the five green tanks right at the entrance to the city. Most of it is the old ACS Industries mill complex, almost entirely vacant since ACS moved its operations to Mexico. Part of the mill burned down a year ago, and that parcel has already been cleared. The city has also acquired other sections, and it’s negotiating with ACS to buy the rest for $1.

The site is heavily contaminated, and will require a cleanup expected to cost $2.5 million to $3 million, Polucha said. The redeveloped land couldn’t be sold for anywhere near that much, he and Mathews said, but the city hopes to get federal brownfields and urban development grants that would substantially offset the cost. Polucha is particularly enthusiastic, envisioning a waterfront campus of modern manufacturers and businesses, built in partnership with a private developer.

“The way we look at it, if we don’t do this, for the next 50 years, that’s what you’re going to see when you come into the city,” Polucha said, pointing to the ruined mill. “How many opportunities do you have to do something like this in this state?”

Mathews, a planner in Woonsocket for the better part of three decades, calls the Hamlet Avenue project “very ambitious,” with about a 60- to 75-percent chance of the funds coming together. He also sees it as a potential model for other obsolete industrial sites.

“If we can do this at ACS and be successful, I would hope that we could do this anywhere in the city, because the magnitude and cost would be much less,” he said.

That said, new industrial development is clearly not going to be Woonsocket’s main source of new jobs and tax revenues in the coming years. So along with the mill condos and the plans for Hamlet Avenue, the city is working on more retail development, with a large project in the works on the North Smithfield line.

“We’re no different from the rest of the country,” Polucha said. “There’s not a giant manufacturer that’s going to move in here. We’re moving to a service economy.”

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