New Businesses

Let me clarify. I feel all the new restaurants and bars in the Canal/Shrewsbury Street are a great addition to the City of Worcester. That said what concerns me is the shrinking commercial tax base that has caused all of our property taxes, water bills and other expenses to skyrocket.

Specifically the lack of development in places like:

• South Worcester Industrial Park
• Airport Industrial Park
• Wyman Gordon Parcel

There are many many other parcels that I could list. My point here was not to diminish the benefits of the restaurants and bars, but to point out we are losing much of our commercial base and we need to do something to:

1. keep and
2. attract businesses back to Worcester.

We need to aggressively targets areas for commercial use and:

1. lock in current assessed value for a certain period of time (5 or 10 years)
2. waive all permitting, water/sewer hook-ups

We can call it the Hanover Theatre Treatment. So everyone understands where I am coming from. The restaurants/bars are great, but we need to make the City of Worcester attractive for business.

This goes with out saying, but we need to stop funding the CDC's yesterday.