How did this come about?Several years ago I remember watching TV, and it was either PBS or one of the public access channels, and it was a tribute to a local business doing well. And I thought, Wow, this is great—for once we’re getting news about someone in the manufacturing business doing well! Unbelievably, a month or so later, I got a call from the owners of the company. It was for a meeting. And I remember thinking, This is either going to be really good, or it’s going to be so bad. They came into my office downtown, and they were basically there to tell me about (a) the fact that they were closing their doors, and (b) to gauge my potential support for a zoning change for the purposes of converting that into a residential project. I was upset.
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I started thinking about the program I’d just seen a month ago, and I even asked them about it: ‘Weren’t you guys doing good?’ And they said, ‘Did you see the end of the program?’ And I said, ‘I didn’t.’ Apparently they’d been talking about their challenges with competing with China, and the Chinese had started producing the same quality lamps but for a fraction of the cost, and they were just no longer competitive.
Had you previously been interested in green business development?It wasn’t just the fact that Barry met with Baum that made me realize the potential of green—it was the manufacturing plant closing its doors, and the impact that can have in a community. There were about 110 employees at the Cooper Lamp plant, most of them Latino and eastern European; for many of them English was a second language. One day they’re working, and all of a sudden they get a notice that their job is gone. And the only thing they’ve ever done is work on some assembly line putting together a component that eventually goes to making a lamp.
This all sounds promising. But to move any of this along you’ve had to call a bunch of people and get them together—all the layers of politics and bureaucracy. Is this the only way it can happen, one block or project at a time?
Not that there’s any history around here of—what did you call it?—‘foisting.’
