Lets talk about the South Worcester Industrial Park (SWIP). If you want to know the timeline, check out this post from Nicole and her first post on the
timeline: August 7, 1994 –(SWIP)–initial proposal. We are coming up on the 20th anniversary!! To date not one building has been built and not one job has been created. Now take a look at Gateway Park, what a difference. Why am I talking about this now? In today’s Telegram there is a picture of a factory in Canada that has turned into a manufacturer of marijuana that maunfactures and provides marijuana products and by-producs to be processed into the likes of these cbd capsules Canada can provide, and the likes. Here is a the picture from the story. This almost could have very easily been a picture from SWIP – and with marijuana users constantly looking at how to increase your high, the chance to manufacture more products would surely have been beneficial for all parties.
About the only close thing that ever came to fruition was a company called Pharmasphere which won a Request for Proposal to build a factory on the corners of Gardner-Canterbury and Southgate-Gardner with a bid of $1, beating an abutter who bid $50,000. In January, 2008, they were touted as a start-up company that had “developed a way to grow cosmetics and health” and planned to invest $5.5 million in a state of the art 50,000 square foot facility. One problem after another then after waiting 3 years, they never paid the $1, never paid one penny of taxes and walked away.
It is not like the City of Worcester did not bend over backwards, we agree to guarantee a $2,500,000 HUD loan and we know how those work out. Check out the $5+ million dollar HUD loan that we guaranteed for Kilby-Gardner-Hammond that and are stuck paying that will reduce available CDBG funds moving moving forward as we continue to pay the annual debt service that have two huge (0ver a million) balloon payments. By the way nobody ever brings this up when HUD guarantees are mentioned.
Now what does the factory in Canada have to do with SWIP-Pharmasphere? Pharmasphere was acquired by Medical Marijuana Inc, click here for press release. Evidently the technology that 
they had is great to help grow “health” products which is perfect for the manufacture of Cannabis and cannabis products that could eventually end up on a site like https://statesidelansing.com/. How perfect would that have been in Main South– a state of the art marijuana facility that could produce many health products. For example, if you were to go and buy shatter online, you may find that the marijuana shatter has been produced in a facility similar to this one.
The irony of this is that we conduct the RFP process to make sure we don’t have “bad” developments?? How did that work out here?? By the way the City of Worcester still owns and controls this parcel that produces not one penny of tax revenue. We would have been better off taking the $50,000 in January 2008 and the property taxes the past 6 years. What is my conclusion?? Maybe it is me, but I think we have given the South Worcester Industrial Park task force enough time, 20 years, to make something happen here.
We need to strongly consider the WRA, WBDC or some other entity to take over. Better yet, why not just advertise the parcel and auction it off to the highest bidder?
