The Worcester Courthouse will be for sale later this year. City officials hope it will be redeveloped for new uses to serve the downtown.
Case closed.
Seven months after the historic Worcester Courthouse was shuttered, the state is planning to sell the historic property.
The Patrick administration has filed legislation to authorize the sale of the 110-year-old building, as well as courts in Lowell, Salem and Cambridge, where new facilities are planned. The courthouse was replaced by the new $180 million Worcester Trial Court, which opened across the street last fall. The National Register of Historic Places property likely will be the first courthouse to face a potential reuse.
Worcester’s courthouse is one of a dozen buildings and parking lots that the city hopes will be rejuvenated or replaced to help revitalize the struggling downtown and nearby Lincoln Square. Among the properties slated for redevelopment are the Worcester Memorial Auditorium, the former Boys Club and the Worcester Vocational High School campus.
If successful, the initiative could transform the area into a vibrant district that would attract shoppers to the downtown, a place that empties after dark. The potential uses for the properties include a cultural center, a version of Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace, a hotel, incubation centers for start-up companies and housing.
“We seek uses that pull the surrounding neighborhoods into the downtown,” said Timothy J. McGourthy, Worcester’s economic development director. “Worcester has incredible potential and there’s a huge opportunity, yet the pieces are not falling into place the way everyone anticipates that they would.”
McGourthy admitted there is skepticism about whether the Bay State’s second-largest city can transform the downtown. CitySquare, the city’s signature project that promised to convert the failed Worcester Common Outlets into an urban village, has failed to attract a single commercial tenant. As a result, the proposed $564 million redevelopment of the former mall by Berkeley Investments has stalled. The mix of medical and office space, condominiums, restaurants, retailers and theaters within steps of the MBTA’s commuter rail remains a dream.
Still, McGourthy said he is convinced other projects can proceed without it.
“Worcester does not need CitySquare to be a success in order to move ahead on these others,” he said. “Every dollar that Boston office space rises per square foot makes Worcester that much more attractive.”
But there’s no evidence that high prices in Boston are pushing office tenants to Worcester. McGourthy could not name a single Boston tenant who relocated to Worcester even as prices in the Hub’s Financial District have reached $100 per square foot.
In fact, the vacancy rate in Worcester’s nearly 5 million square feet of office space increased to 12.7 percent last year, up from 10.6 percent in 2006, according to a report by the Worcester Municipal Research Bureau, a nonprofit organization that conducts independent research of public policy.
At the same time, while rents in Boston are reaching historic highs, Worcester’s office rents have been flat since 2003 with Class A leases ranging from $12 per square foot to $27 per square foot. In addition, a new office building has not been constructed since 1990, all signs of the lack of demand.
The report said the city needs to be concerned with “not just with attracting new businesses to downtown, but retaining those that are already here.” The lack of sufficient commuter rail services, a factor that is beyond Worcester’s control, also has hurt attracting new businesses, the six-page report noted.
‘A Fundamental Issue’
Roberta R. Schaefer, president of the bureau, praised Gateway Park, a project on which Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Worcester Business Development Corp. have partnered. At build-out, the development will feature up to 1 million square feet of mixed-use space for life sciences, biotechnology companies and housing just off Route 290. But she said the city faces many obstacles if it hopes to breathe life into the downtown and Lincoln Square.
“The problem here is that the cost of construction is the same as Boston, but we can’t get Boston rents and that’s a fundamental issue with CitySquare,” she said. “The prevailing wage law and the Responsible Employer Ordinance (REO) make it very difficult for nonunion companies to bid on Worcester projects. We maintain that those rules are discouraging nonunion companies and forcing costs up by as much as 20 percent.”
The prevailing wage statute is the minimum hourly pay for labor performed on public construction projects. REO restricts bidding to firms who participate in state-approved apprentice programs. Most nonunion contractors do not qualify, thereby eliminating them from consideration, she added.
In addition, the lack of commuter-rail trains to Boston and the reverse commute from Worcester discourages potential employers, Schaefer said. While the state is negotiating with CSX, the company that owns the tracks, to purchase the rail line, the talks have not been successful. If the state owned the tracks, the number of trips to and from Union Station could increase.
Strengthening Worcester’s transportation network could make the city more appealing for employers looking to locate their business and employees outside of the Boston area, Schaefer added.
The other piece of Worcester’s failure is its airport. Schaefer calls Worcester Regional Airport “the biggest underutilized tool for economic development in the entire central part of the state.” But until there’s a road that gets you there quickly from Route 290, “its potential will not be realized,” she said.
“Elected officials refused to take properties around the airport by imminent domain to make the road a reality,” she added. “It’s not a question of money. When Matt Amorello was highway commissioner he offered millions to build the connector, but Congressman Jim McGovern and then-Mayor Timothy Murray said no.”
And the one issue no one talks about is crime, an important consideration for potential tenants. Last year, the city’s police officers made 9,288 arrests, an increase of more than 6 percent over 2006, according to the Worcester Police Department. After several years of decline, the number of juveniles arrested soared to 647 in 2007 from 497 in 2006, a 30 percent hike. The major categories of charges behind the increase were property crimes, up 66 percent; assaults, up 32 percent; and disorderly conduct and trespassing, up 29 percent.
Still, McGourthy is undaunted. “Neither Rome nor Boston was built in a day,” he said. “It’s not an issue of revamping an entire area of the downtown. We are focusing on the little projects that create new private investments to go forward. You won’t see massive wholesale change here, but you did not see that in Boston. The capital city took decades to build momentum.”
