Boston-Area Cities Join Forces

From the southeastern edge of Somerville, Massachusetts, it’s less than two miles to the heart of downtown Boston.

“If this was the New York metro area, we’d be Brooklyn,” Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone said by phone on Wednesday. But, in terms of working together on economic development, it can sometimes seem like the two cities are more distant than they appear to be on a map. And similar disconnects are not uncommon with other nearby municipalities in the region.

Curtatone notes: “You’d think we were countries, hundreds of miles apart.”

A new initiative aims to change that.

Leaders from Boston and five neighboring cities, including Somerville, announced on Wednesday that they’d forged a new “compact.” The initiative is meant to provide a way for the cities to address issues related to regional economic development.

“We’ve had a history of provincialism and parochialism that we collectively agree has held us back,” Curtatone said. “We stated clearly today that those provincial boundaries are gone.”

In addition to Boston and Somerville, the other cities joining the so-called Greater Boston Regional Economic Compact include Braintree, Cambridge, Chelsea and Quincy.

The initiative will involve the participation of mayors and city managers from the municipalities, as well as city staff members. At regularly held meetings representatives from the cities will delve into issues that fall under the broad umbrella of regional economic development. Key areas of focus will include transportation, housing and environmental sustainability.

“The economy of the Boston region is too complex for each of us to identify ourselves by the community in which we live,” Chelsea’s city manager, Thomas Ambrosino, said in a statement on Wednesday. The city of about 38,800 is located just north of Boston’s Logan International Airport.  

John Barros, chief of economic development in the office of Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh, discussed the compact during a phone interview on Wednesday.

“City competitiveness is really regional competitiveness,” Barros said.

“We’re competing nationally, but also internationally,” he added. “This is a global conversation for companies, corporations, on where they either choose to startup, where they choose to grow, or where to choose to relocate.”

Although Boston itself has a population of 655,000 residents, Barros pointed out that the number of people living across the broader region that includes the city—which extends well beyond the half-dozen cities included in the new compact—is now upwards of 4.5 million people.

Curtatone explained that the six cities in the compact are at the region’s core. He expressed optimism that the partnership “should be just the beginning of a larger regional collaboration.”

Each of the six cities has committed to looking into whether they can budget the money to hire a full-time staff member to work on the initiative. And a “Regional Compact coordinator” will be hired to help hammer out an economic development strategy.

Barros said that the mayors and city managers from the municipalities have agreed to quarterly meetings, while staffers plan to meet once a month. A meeting is currently scheduled for January, and the group’s near term goals include establishing subcommittees and a work-plan.

In metropolitan areas that are more accustomed to regional planning efforts, the compact might not sound earth shattering, but Curtatone said: “We don’t have regional government here.”

“We’ve done things piecemeal in Massachusetts,” he added. “The only incentive was to think about what’s within your own borders.”

Region Is Economically Strong

Overall, the economy in the Boston metropolitan area has thrived in recent years.

“We’re having clearly, probably the third-biggest development boom in the city’s 400 year history,” Barros said.

In terms of real estate, he added: “We are seeing record numbers of residential units being approved and built. We are seeing record numbers of commercial square footage being built.”

In the area in and around Boston, gross domestic product, a key indicator of economic health, grew steadily between 2009 and last year. Inflation adjusted year-to-year increases averaged about 2.46 percent in the area, according to U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates.

That figure outpaced the average annual GDP percent-increase for the entire U.S. during the same years, which was 1.98 percent.

Job growth has also seen an uptick. An area that includes Boston, as well as Cambridge and nearby Newton, which is tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, saw its total number of estimated non-farm employees rise in recent years to just over 1.7 million, as of October. That’s up by about 100,000 from the estimated 1.6 million employees in the area during October 2007, just before the onset of the Great Recession.

The finance and insurance industry has proven to be a top-producing segment of the economy in the Boston area. It generated about $21 billion of the roughly $128 billion in personal income there in 2014, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis figures.

Despite the upbeat economic picture, Curtatone thinks that a lack of regional cooperation hampered the rate of job growth over the years in Somerville, a city of about 78,900 residents, and home to parts of the Tufts University campus. “For about a 20-year period, from the early ’90s until several years ago,” the mayor said, “our employment rate had flatlined.”

‘Part of Our History and Culture’

Barros said that while he expects individual cities in the region to continue to fight for businesses and jobs, the idea going forward would be to not undercut one another, and to have more open lines of communication between municipalities. If Boston isn’t the right place for a business, maybe officials there will suggest the company take a look at Somerville, or Quincy.

Why have regional planning efforts taken so long to gain traction in the Boston area?

Curtatone offered a partial explanation. “It’s part of our history and culture,” he said. “We have a lot of pride in our local communities, our local governance, home rule.”

But, eying challenges on the horizon that will involve providing enough housing for a growing population, upgrading transportation networks, and attracting new employers to the region, the mayor believes that it’s time for cities in the area to take a different tack.

“I’m praying and hoping it will change, before we really lose out and we fall behind the rest of the country and the rest of the world,” Curtatone said, referring to the more insular approach cities around Boston have leaned toward in the past.

Barros stressed that the compact was not intended to erode the identity of individual towns.

“This is not about creating some sense of: we’re all the same,” he said. “This is, in fact, saying we can all be stronger together.”