Blight to Promise

Blight to Promise – Gardner MA

The City of Gardner Massachusetts has accomplished successes in turning Blight into Promise, including, but not limited to:

For decades, unused City Buildings in Gardner were not immediately evaluated for further use so that another use could be immediately found, or if not feasible, determining how the property could be sold to create taxable property. In order to create promise from blight, The City of Gardner has a current policy of continual evaluation of City property. Just in the last year, two properties used as Elementary Schools have been sold using the request for proposal process. Both were sold to private companies and the property owners will be paying taxes to the City. Other City properties have been analyzed and discussions are held within the City to determine if certain City properties can be even rezoned if needed to be sold and put to a use in the best interests of the City.

What Gardner has accomplished is creating an environment where critical thinking and reexamination of data is encouraged. When a City has an open mind to future endeavors there’s no limit to what it can achieve.

The City of Gardner has gone to great lengths to hold private property owners accountable for blight, even going so far as to enact a new City ordinances so that “junky buildings” don’t stay that way for very long. When buildings are sold and renovated, the City has benefited from the resulting increase in usefulness and obvious better visual appeal.

GardnerMagazine.com asked Gardner MA Mayor Michael Nicholson what Gardner has specifically accomplished in turning blight into promise. Here’s what he had to say:

Mayor Nicholson: I think the biggest thing weve been able to accomplish In terms of transitioning blight into promise is with our downtown. If you look, Twenty two buildings have been purchased by new owners within the last 12 months. And that’s saying something. And that’s only using 12 months of data on this. If you want to add another year onto that, you can add the Rome building that the city purchased over on the corner of Main Street and Willow. You can add other different properties that are there. But now these buildings have money being invested in them for the first time in decades. I think the last time some of these buildings saw money put towards them was when their deeds were filed in the 80s by an absentee landlord. So the fact that were able to turn that around now and have this positive future, not only helps our visual appeal and Gardner not only helps our tax base by improving the image of these. The valuations of these properties, but it also actually helps the city financially in the long term. One of the questions that gets asked every year by Standard and Poor and Moodys when they issue our bond rating, is what work is being done in the City. And how are you revitalizing your rundown areas? And if that is a factor that determines our bond rating, that determines how our citys finances go moving forward. Its something that should always be one of our top priorities, is transitioning blight to promise. Added on to that too is making sure that the city does not become our next absentee landlord. And that’s why one of the goals that I have had is as we take ownership of these problem properties, getting them out for sale as soon as possible through an RFP process. That we can make sure we know were going to get redeveloped through the contracts that come from those processes. But were not sitting on them and waiting for them to further deteriorate on our end. And we saw that with the factory over on Stuart Street, the old Prospect Street School in South Gardner, and several other properties throughout the City.

Mayor Nicholson explained how the City of Gardner partnered with one of the City Councilors in order to do something about blighted buildings in the City:

Mayor Nicholson: Absolutely. Councilor George Tyros and I jointly proposed an ordinance that gave our building department and our health department a little extra teeth to go after these properties. Not only to make sure that our problem properties are being addressed, but also to prevent the further problem properties from coming to place. And if we can prevent a problem from existing before it even comes forward, now, were burning that candle on both ends of the sticks, and really getting rid of that problem altogether. When I was in Washington DC, I mentioned this program when I was in a meeting with Congressman Jake Achincloss, and he kind of reminded me that when he was in graduate school, or, excuse me, when he was in college, one of his professors mentioned a, he jokingly called it a Paw Patrol activity. And Paw Patrol playing a name off of the kids TV show. Putting assets to work and finding ways to find these underutilized properties. And finding new ways to think outside the box to bring them back up to their full, most effective usage. Rather than a rundown place that people are embarrassed to see and talk about when they think about their home.

The Gardner MA Mayor explained how this gives the City of Gardner teeth when there is a problem with a specific building:

Mayor Nicholson: It gives the building department and health department, in certain cases, the authority to write a citation and require that a property owner fix certain things to certain standards, be it not boarding up windows for a certain amount of time, broken glass in the area, things of that nature. And if they’re not done by a certain timeline, there are fines that are issued on a daily basis until the property is fixed. And if the fines are never paid, we can then lean those against the property. And it basically becomes something that the City can go after the courts for that if it needs to. In the end, we can actually go after the property owner for ownership of the property, but that’s never our goal. Our goal is to hope that we have enough enforcement activity through the threat of finds and the fines themselves, that the problem just gets fixed.

The goal of Gardner Massachusetts is to avoid having blighted properties. Gardner Mayor Michael Nicholson explained this philosophy:

Mayor Nicholson: Yes, and that’s everything that’s in line with the current building code and the health code. So for instance one of the things that’s in there is if someone’s grass is over 6in long, excuse 6in long, the health department can site that property owner until the grass is mowed. And that’s because its mosquito mitigation policies within the state. When you have high grass you likely have more areas of pooling because the grass makes it so the water can evaporate as quick, which means more mosquito growth could happen. So those are some things that are actually in state law, in the state health code that we can cite for the local basis as well. Same thing with boarding up windows, over a certain amount of period. It becomes a public safety issue at times. If a brick wall seems to be falling, like we saw at the Rome building. Or before Candor Realty purchased the Aleksa Fashion building, the previous owner had some issues with scaffolding over there. Those are public safety concerns that the building department can cite for under the building code. So were just utilizing the tools that we have finally to our advantage here in Gardner.