Local, state and federal officials and various tenants gathered in the foyer, and praised the restoration of the downtown Springfield building. The property was purchased by MassDevelopment in 2009 for $2.5 million, and the agency invested approximately $3.6 million in renovations.
My new assignment as Senate Chair of the Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies brings home the daunting challenges facing our region but also offers great opportunities to overcome them.
Anzovin was one of the panelists Thursday at “Digital Games: Playing in the Valley”, an afternoon-long symposium at Hampshire College aimed at fostering the Pioneer Valley’s videogame and digital animation industry. The event was sponsored by Hampshire college, the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council and MassDiGI, the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute.
Housing and Economic Development Secretary Gregory Bialecki said his office is facilitating relationships between western Massachusetts companies and large companies, like Raytheon, which specializes in military defense products. “We’re actually going to start by talking with some of our big companies that are here about, first of all, locating some of their business units out in Western Mass or other low costs parts of the state,” said Bialecki.
Smith & Wesson has more than 1,200 employees. Monday, Smith & Wesson announced that it has already created 217 jobs and expects to hit 227 jobs by the end of February. The 160-year-old Springfield gunmaker has also invested more than $19 million in capital improvements at its sprawling Roosevelt Avenue plant through the end of December 2011.
I have heard Governor Deval Patrick present two keynote addresses in the last month. The first was at an international business conference at Brandeis University and the second was at the Associated Industries of Massachusetts (“AIM”) Annual Meeting, both coincidentally in Waltham. On each occasion, the Governor wove in advice to the primarily Boston-area firms in the audience to look at western Massachusetts in lieu of North Carolina or Texas when seeking a lower cost alternative to the Boston market.
