Approximately ten years ago, Mayor Murray commissioned a task force on PILOT run by, at the time, State Rep Leary (now works at UMASS). We did an incredible job. It resulted in the formation of the UniverCity Partnership, which was suppose to turn the inherent untapped potential of these colleges into dollars that that the host city could not only see, but measure. This was not a unique concept, but that had been repeated by numerous other cities with a high proliferation of colleges. The problem was the right person was not hired make any of the recommendations a reality.
As a result in Worcester, the UniverCity Partnership was an utter failure. Although some councilors actually praised the Univercity Partnership for all of its great work, when it was shut done (think 2008) some two years after it started? This never made sense, since the recommendation of the task force was that we needed this “partnership” to be an ongoing concern to turn the economic power of the colleges into “concrete” dollars and cents that the tax payers could realize and measure. The mere fact it was being shut down, if you read the task force report, meant that the Univercity Partnership was a failure.
The most ironic thing of the task force was that we read about a prior task force in the mid to late 90’s. Upon completion of our task force recommendations, I (as others) was struck by the similarities in the recommendations from these two task forces some ten years apart. In fact our task force suggested and strongly recommended that we meet again (I think a year later), to review and grade our recommendations to ensure that another task force was not convened five years laters to do again for the third time, what had been done then two times already. We never met again.
Today I read about a third task force will be convened and will recommend what has already been done the other two times.
