Timothy Brennan is Executive Director of the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, based in West Springfield. I sat down with him to learn about the agency’s role in the follow-up to the September Urban Land Institute panel visit to Springfield, as well as to explore how the agency operates, sets an agenda, and gets support for its regional work.
HB: I understand a tour is being planned for Springfield city department heads, trying to get everybody up to speed.
TB: Yes. The group that David Panagore convened [in preparation for the ULI visit] was immediately asked to stay together to help with the back end. So the group has been meeting, and there is a bit of a pause, awaiting the final report. Someone came into the last meeting and said there was some indication that the final draft of the detailed report would arrive in December. And that you could quickly turn it around, depending on how much in the way of feedback came out of the city. There’s all these department heads in the city—maybe it would be sort of useful to repeat the [ULI] tour, maybe condense it a bit; show the folks the same things that the ULI team saw, but concentrate on the things they recommended. So that’s in motion.
We were asked to make a first-run of DVDs of the WGBY video of the ULI presentation, and the Q&A that followed. That was to try to have another way of getting the word out to those folks that may never have come to the meeting, or read the paper, so they can get a first-hand sense of what went on. We need to build an army—of citizens, department heads, folks that are from inside the city, outside the city—that are all trying to roll up their sleeves and move ahead.
So the DVDs would go to city departments?
The idea was: only so many hundreds of people came to that presentation, and there are lots more folks that are interested. So we should get these to department heads; maybe the neighborhood groups; maybe business associations, like the Chamber, that have key members. We decided to continue to hone a list, but start making a first batch of copies, as one of our contributions.
It’s the best, most detailed explanation of what we have so far, short of the final report.
That’s what people keep saying. The report, presumably, is going to be much more detailed. I mean, there’s a sort of hunger for that, too. But we don’t want dead air, or dead space, between [the ULI] being here, making their presentation, and whatever number of weeks later, when their report arrives. There are more people to inform, more people to draw into the circle, to give a sense that this is something that’s not going to sit on a shelf. It’s going to move forward, right in the wake of the report itself.
The stakeholders you’re reaching are people who live in the city, people who are working in the city departments at the municipal level, and business leaders—those are basically the three categories?
Yeah: public sector folks; business types; and civic organizations, whether it’s a neighborhood group, or a non-profit, or anyone in the stew that can play a role. I also want to try to take responsibility for helping connect the city to some of the regional themes that [the ULI] kept bringing up: Springfield is a major city in a region. How those connections work, or don’t, can be reconfigured to hopefully mutual advantage.
Are there other agencies that work regionally, besides the Chamber of Commerce and the Economic Development Council, which are already part of the post-ULI steering committee?
Staying with those three groupings: the government side, the regional public sector, would be us. The business sector would certainly be the Economic Development Council of Western Mass. But it has all those subsidiaries or affiliates, too, that operate regionally—the Greater Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau—six of them, I think. Another key one is the Regional Employment Board, from the workforce side—that’s a non-profit [which on July 1 absorbed the Hampden County Employment and Training Consortium, and prompting other possible changes]. So there’s probably a half-dozen or so that are operating regionally that would have some role to play, directly or indirectly.
How much independence does the PVPC have in deciding where its resources go, given that it is regional? Where does the funding come from?
Municipalities pay a fee every year, called an assessment, based on 15 cents per capita: 15 cents times the most current federal population total. Springfield is, in round figures, the biggest community, and pays about $20,000 a year. Tiny towns pay less than $100. But that is a very small part of the overall budget of the agency. Altogether, that’s about $90,000 a year. That’s the lowest assessment rate in the entire state. We haven’t changed the assessment in 25 or 30 years.
What we do with that, which is quite unusual: money is collected from the cities and towns annually—that’s $90,000—and then we establish through our commission a pot, which we call PVPC special projects. We take $75 of $90 and put it in this annual pot, which becomes where our members, including Springfield, can draw from for what we call free local technical assistance.
If you come in as an official, and you say, we’re having problems with this aspect of our zoning; can you give us some advice? Or, we need a grant for fixing this bridge. They can call out that technical assistance, and they get essentially two days of staff time free. There’s no limit on the number of requests that can come in from the community, but they have to be different requests. In other words, you can’t say, we’re going to do a master plan; we’ll ask for chapter one this week, and chapter two next week. Otherwise we couldn’t possibly render technical assistance, because this stuff is coming in at us all the time.
The rest of the budget comes from competitive grants in spheres of activity: transportation, community development/historic preservation, land use and environment, economic development, and the data center. And then we have the GIS mapping center, where the graphic support comes from. Those divisions are all connected, but they have special expertise or focal areas. So [for example] the folks you find in transportation tend to be specialists in highways, transit, or air quality modeling. Same for people throughout the office.
Grant funding is specific to all those departments. You must have grant-writing staff?
No. Our philosophy is that people who write the best grants are the people that know the subject matter. I’ve never believed in having grant writers. We could use good writers all the time, but that’s different from grant writing.
Essentially, everyone is responsible for themselves, and their colleagues in their departments, so in a sense we’re a public business. We have to compete. We just put in an EPA grant, a nation-wide competition. We lost it by, like, two points the last time. The competition is very keen, and it’s the quality of the application, but it’s also the quality of the work you’ve done before, because you get a reputation. And if you’ve got a lousy reputation, your chances of success get more and more diminished. Each department—each individual—is empowered. You’ve gotta be thinking about things the region needs that connect with your sphere of activity, and always be looking for grant opportunities, new ideas.
State level as well as federal?
Yeah. We’ve done a little bit of work with foundations, and our localities contract with us, beyond local technical assistance. We just signed an agreement with Easthampton, which is doing a master plan. They solicited proposals. We responded to the proposal—we actually went in as a joint venture with a small consulting firm, who we thought had special expertise that fit nicely with the scope. And we won that contract. That’s a $40,000 job, so we’re actually getting work from our own members, too, or at least we bid on work that our own members are putting out. Sometimes we get it and sometimes not.
For the Urban Land Institute visit, was it like that?
Yes. David Panagore felt that the city didn’t have a thick data digest (PDF) about the innards of the community. That was a need for the city, for himself, and his colleagues, but also was going to be important and timely for the people coming from the outside, who may know absolutely nothing about the city. We talked to MassDevelopment about this, but it became sort of clear after a while that probably we were better knowledgeable, staff-wise, to do that piece of work. So there was a contract for the development of the marketing piece that became a huge part of the overall briefing document that went to the ULI.
I want to ask you about the PVPC’s vision or position. You wrote a piece (PDF) for MassBenchmarks. It is maybe a succinct and current summary of what you might call the agency’s positions. Would you agree with that?
Yes. It has—because of what MassBenchmarks is, as a publication—an economic development bent to it, but yes. My colleagues and I are responsible for 43 cities and towns: that’s our piece of Massachusetts real estate, and also the people inside those communities. Right now, Springfield is one of the members of the family in extraordinary need. It’s in trouble. Our job, and we’ve made no bones about it, is to be as helpful as we possibly can. We can’t help with everything, but we have knowledge and expertise which can connect and help.
Also, because we’re regional, connecting that city—the largest city in the region—in more mutually-beneficial ways, seems to be part of our obligation as well. That’s the way we’re coming at it. I report back to our board all the time. I’m not trying to cheat them out of knowing—I’m essentially telling them the same thing I’m telling you; we’ve gotta show up and be helpful. There’ll be a time when Springfield will be a healthy member of the family, and we can turn down the boost on our level of involvement and activity, and go back to normal. There’s always somebody out there with a problem or an issue that we have to spend more time and effort on.
How do you avoid partisanship, or affiliation that becomes uncomfortably close or distant with political entities?
This kind of organization, by its very definition, is intended to be nonpartisan. Our job is getting 43 cities and towns in New England, where local government is the most important government of all, to all collaborate. To me, collaboration is a lot easier said than done. It’s a very difficult, messy enterprise, but all-important. So that’s part of our mission day-to-day.
We’ve always tried to understand and balance that we have extraordinarily needy rural communities, too. They’re all important to us. We don’t have little favorites. Communities may be at different points of need, at a given point in time, a la Springfield, but that doesn’t change that our concourse is always about coordination, cooperation, collaboration, working together, not in our little silos.
We’re very actively engaged, and have been for six years, in trying to break down the political border that’s as artificial as anything else, with our neighboring state, and try to build this cross-border partnership, to get it out of just being superficial, get it to be substantive. It’s harder, but I think we have begun to build some really important cross-collaborations that are working, too. So I guess that’s the new geography. The existing geography is at least the Valley. The evolving geography, as I see it, is border-busting and connecting with the Greater Hartford capitol region, and trying to see that as the geography of the new century.
Up next, Brennan talks about the Springfield region’s vital connections to the south, and describes commuter rail as "the most important change agent for the better."
