in upending a planned 300-acre biotech park, Fall River Mayor William Flanagan picked a fight with the governor, angered the state university, junked a decade’s worth of planning, and endangered a $23 million development project. He did it all for a roll of the dice with the Mashpee Wampanoag, who promised to bring a casino to the land that was supposed to become the biotech park. And he’d do it all again tomorrow.
“We didn’t lose anything,” says Flanagan, who ended his dance with the Mashpee and went back and cemented a deal with the biotech park’s anchor tenant, UMass Dartmouth, earlier this year. “My responsibility is to go after every economic development opportunity. My constituency would expect nothing less.”
Flanagan shocked the state last May, when he called a press conference announcing a deal to sell 300 acres off Route 24 to the Mashpee. The tribe promised to abandon plans to build a resort casino in Middleboro, and instead erect a $500 million gambling palace on the Route 24 parcel.
Fall River’s deal with the Mashpee immediately ruffled feathers inside Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration—and not just because officials first learned of Flanagan’s deal with the tribe when they began receiving phone calls from reporters.
A year before, the state had sold the 300 acres to Fall River’s economic development arm for a scant $2.5 million. The land transfer capped a decade of planning, which envisioned the creation of a new commercial park in the jobs-starved region. Patrick opened up the potential biotech cluster for development by committing $33 million in federal stimulus funds to build a new exit linking Route 24 to the park. Patrick also promised state funds to the park’s anchor tenant, a new $23 million UMass Dartmouth biomanufacturing facility.
The administration tried to back Flanagan down by threatening to demand repayment for the Route 24 roadwork. Inspector General Gregory Sullivan warned that the sale to the Mashpee could run afoul of state bidding rules, and would violate a deed restriction explicitly banning casino development on the 300-acre parcel. Flanagan didn’t blink, even after legislation legalizing casinos failed on Beacon Hill. “This is not a bridge to nowhere or a folly,” he insisted. “This is a $500 million project.”
Pressure from a rival Wampanoag tribe and UMass ultimately forced Flanagan to backtrack. In November, weeks before the first round of the $21 million land deal was supposed to close, a group of 10 taxpayers sued to block the sale. That group was led by the chief of Fall River’s Pocasset Wampanoag tribe. The Pocasset saw the Mashpee land deal as an incursion into their territory. The group also included several environmental and anti-gambling activists. “To me, the whole thing smelled,” says Lesley Rich, the attorney for the Pocasset and the taxpayer group. “It was obvious the mayor had cut a deal and he just lunged forward and tried to ram it through.”
Flanagan bristled at the lawsuit. He characterized it as “a war on jobs.” But he reversed course after two judges blocked the land sale, and UMass Dartmouth said it would rather not build its biomanufacturing plant at all, rather than settle for a site outside the 300-acre park. That was enough for Flanagan. He told the Mashpee the deal was off, called up UMass and the Patrick administration, and got them to recommit to building at the park.
“I always thought we were walking a very tight rope,” Flanagan says. “It would be too detrimental to lose the casino and lose the tech park, given the unemployment in the region. The goal was to entertain both. Once I saw signals that we were close to losing both, it was time to huddle back up on the definite project.”
Rich says the mayor had little choice. “Politically, the mayor realized it was a dead end, and if he didn’t do something, he’d be sitting empty-handed the next election,” he says.
Paul Vigeant, vice chancellor for economic development at UMass Dartmouth, says that by building the $23 million bio plant in a pad-ready green field off Route 24, rather than downtown or on campus, the university hopes to spur private biotech and pharmaceutical manufacturing in the park. Those linkages weren’t available anywhere else, he argues.
“There’s efficiency to the real estate transaction,” Vigeant says. The new facility will let Cambridge researchers test-manufacture new drugs at dramatically discounted rates. “When their product is ready to go and they need a site for manufacturing, they’ll see these sites are available, and they’ll compare the costs. The reasons why people leave the state don’t evidence themselves here.”
The UMass facility, which is being built with a $15 million state grant, should be ready for construction bids by this fall. Flanagan calls it “a game-changer.” So does he regret putting it on hold for a year while he chased a casino? “Not at all,” he says. “The casino is still a possibility. Once the Legislature passes a gaming bill, we will be at the table for that, too.”
