A Brief History of the EDCC
It a city-eat-city world, Worcester eats itself
Like most evil stories, this one starts in the 1980s.
By pure chance I’ve been reading a book called Banished while the drama over WPI’s hotel conversions dominated the past week. As we went over in the last post, the media event was the product of a stern letter written by Worcester’s little-discussed shadow government: the Economic Development Coordinating Council (EDCC).
But back to the book: Written in 2009 by a pair of sociologists, the full title is Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America. It details how cities’ homeless policies in the ~neoliberal era~ amount to a resurrection of one of humanity’s oldest forms of punishment—banishment! In the first chapter, authors Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert provide a summary of the modus operandi of city halls in the post-industrial landscape of 1980 to the present: Cuts to the social safety net, increases in the surveillance state and punitive responses to “quality of life” issues, a “free market” approach to housing that relies on a trickle-down ethos and tax incentives (not building housing), and, of course, urban renewal—the aspect of this ongoing race-to-the-bottom story that the EDCC is most intimately involved with.
The authors use Seattle as an example, but their subject could just as easily be Worcester. After detailing all the public spending on private developments like malls (i.e. the Galleria), convention centers (i.e. the DCU), and sports stadiums (i.e. Polar Park) they write:
Much of this development is aimed at making sure that downtown Seattle serves as a magnet for tourists and other consumers.
This large-scale, expensive effort at redevelopment is another implication of the postindustrial city that Seattle symbolizes so well: absent a robust industrial sector, municipalities seek to bolster themselves through commerce and tourism.
The point is that banishment of “undesirables” fits into this neoliberal1 mold as another public subsidy of downtown commercial interests. Another example of city hall existing solely for that specific set of interests. The spigot on the capital hose.
Neoliberal policies, then, drove governments at multiple levels to abandon the goal of providing affordable housing even as they continued to make it easier for wealthier individuals to purchase homes and shop at attractive upscale downtown stores.
So that’s the appropriate context to consider both the EDCC in general and the Gateway Park project that’s currently causing all the fuss. The primary difference between Seattle and Worcester that makes the WPI story goofy is that one has a real tourism industry and the other doesn’t.
Nevertheless, Worcester has operated under the shadowy auspices of its EDCC for a good long while now, plugging away at this dead-end tourism angle. The Gateway Park Project at hand was one of its early undertakings. But really, we don’t know a whole lot about what the EDCC does or why—for whom, for what reason, who benefits, who doesn’t. These are all unanswered questions. And that’s because they’re questions that don’t often get asked. And they don’t often get asked because there isn’t any profit incentive in asking them but a lot of disincentive in being marked as a ‘person who asks.’
So today we’re trying to fix that. We’re asking those questions.
A search of the Telegram archive reveals less than 20 hits for “economic development coordinating council,” the oldest being in 2012. In April of that year the paper published a story headlined “Report envisions new economic development corporation.”
Apparently, and entirely unsurprisingly, local lawyer Mike Angelini was the principal architect of this quasi-government body:
WORCESTER - Leaders of the city's key business and economic development groups say they are ready to sit down, and perhaps work together under the same roof to hash out strategies for marketing the city to the outside world.
But that willingness to talk or share space falls far short of the single, centralized, cross-turf organization envisioned in a white paper penned last fall by longtime business leader Michael P. Angelini.
The report was distributed to “an inner circle of about 20 business and government insiders, the major players whose roles he analyzed are still negotiating about what, if anything, will happen.”
In the six-page paper, Mr. Angelini envisioned a new nonprofit organization, the "Worcester Economic Development Corporation."
This is the same Mike Angelini that was the subject of one of my very first Worcester Sucks pieces, “Independent review, my ass.” It details how Angelini, a member of the Worcester Redevelopment Authority and then-City Manager Ed Augustus’ personal attorney, was chosen by Clark University to produce an “objective” third party assessment of how police handled BLM protesters on Main Street in June 2020. The idea being that the university chose quite possibly the least independent lawyer in the city to conduct an independent review.
Much like the EDCC, Angelini is a character always lingering just off stage in the moments that come to define this city. To learn that he was the architect of this entity was very ‘of course.’
Another ‘of course’: Tim Murray, who still sits on the EDCC, was an early supporter:
Today, Lt. Gov. Timothy P. Murray, a former mayor who is close to Mr. Angelini - Mr. Angelini was co-chairman of Gov. Deval L. Patrick's and Mr. Murray's first administration's transition team - is still a supporter of Mr. Angelini's original proposal.
"I think it's critical," Mr. Murray said last week, noting that he and City Manager Michael V. O'Brien co-wrote an opinion piece last summer advocating for just such an approach.
That’s the same Michael O’Brien who now has a high-level position at WinnCompanies, a developer directly named in a lawsuit over algorithmic rent price fixing. Also the first of three city managers hired in the exact same, anti-democratic way. Between the three men here—O’Brien, Angelini, and Murray—you start to see a power structure in this city which has little to do with democracy and even less with the city council.
Angelini’s 2011 white paper is, in itself, quite interesting. He prognosticates:
The current arrangements reflect circumstance rather than strategic organization, characterized by compartmentalization and inefficiency and the absence of collaboration. In addition, important economic development functions are not being undertaken, and opportunity is not being exploited.
The organizations he cited as lacking collaboration: the Chamber of Commerce, the Redevelopment Authority (WRA), Destination Worcester (now Discover Central Mass, more or less), the Central Massachusetts Convention and Visitors Bureau, Massachusetts Biomedical Initiative, and the Worcester Business Development Corporation (WBDC).
His comments on the WRA and the WBDC are worth consideration. The WRA, he said, has “extensive but underutilized powers and currently has no significant role in the city’s economic development.” In the past, it was responsible for the DCU Center, St. Vincent Hospital, and rehabbing Union Station, he said. Presently, much of the WRA’s prior role is now undertaken by the WBDC. But, the fact that the WRA “singularly has eminent domain power” makes it worth keeping in the loop, Angelini, a WRA member, writes. Eminent domain would later factor heavily in the viability and then the construction of Polar Park.
Angelini describes the WBDC as a “supply-side and management organization” that focuses on specific developments. He cites Gateway Park, cause of the current drama, by name. Then he says the WBDC “has recently been re-focused to emphasize development in downtown Worcester.” The hot young WBDC and the old, lumbering, but uniquely powerful WRA under the same managerial roof!
Angelini originally conceived of the EDCC as a more formal arrangement than the one we have: a non-profit called the Worcester Economic Development Corporation (“there is no magic in the name,” he writes, “I had to pick one.”) The organization would have a 15-person board and a CEO and a staff that carries out all of the work currently done by the disparate organizations he cites, including, he says, “the City.” It will do strategic planning, allocating “the City’s significant resources,” and produce an annual business plan.
Laughably, Angelini asserts that bringing together these entities will, among other things, “plan for promoting the development of small and minority businesses.”
“It will have a program for promoting small and minority businesses as well as large industries and service providers.”
The latter they would go on to provide for in spades, but the former? The small and minority businesses? That part seems to have been dropped along the way, if it was ever earnestly there to begin with.
Also dropped was the consolidating structure of a non-profit corporation, but the collaborative piece remained. The Development Corporation transformed into the Coordinating Council. With that transformation went any formal vehicle for public oversight. Really, any oversight at all.
“So people felt threatened by consolidation, but I think recognized the theme of what I was trying to say was that there needed to be some coordination. That is really where we’ve ended up, a more coordinated effort,” said Angelini in a 2016 interview with the Worcester Sun. Or, alternate theory: why subject your new shadow coalition to annual reports and tax filings when you could accomplish the same things without all the fuss?
It’s also interesting to note that Murray was not the Chamber president at this time. He was the Lt. Governor and, according to a 2012 Telegram article, in lockstep with former City Manager Mike O’Brien and Angelini in pushing for “consolidation of far-flung business groups.” The consolidation was less favorably received by the president of the Chamber at that time, Richard Kennedy.
No matter! A year later, Murray would assume control of the Chamber of Commerce. Right about the time the EDCC launched in earnest. Convenient!
So what have they done since? We don’t really know, unless they put their name on it in a news article. So here’s what we can glean.
In 2013, the EDCC launched a $1.2 million fundraising initiative for promotional purposes called the Economic Development Advancement Fund. Companies that contributed to an initial $300,000 include: Hanover Insurance, Bank of America, Benefit Development Group, Coghlin Electrical Contractors, Columbia Tech, Commerce Bank & Trust, Consigli Construction, Fidelity Bank, Gilbane Building, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and Polar Beverages.
In the same year, the EDCC launched an online real estate map in an effort to “coordinate activity and develop sales pitches to new, targeted businesses and site sectors.” The EDCC also conducted four tours for national chains, including Jimmy Johns, Atlantic Retail Partners (clients include CVS, Panera Bread, Papa Johns), and Distinctive Hospitality Group (Hilton, Holiday Inn).
In 2015, MBI President and EDCC member Kevin O’Sullivan is quoted as crediting the EDCC for the “CitySquare development, commuter rail expansion, courthouse renovation, Hanover Theatre district remake, hotels at both CitySquare and Gateway Park, residential housing at CitySquare and biomanufacturing at both Gateway Park and Union Street.”
Remember the goofy jump-the-shark moment of neoliberal municipal governance in 2017 when every city in the world publicly flogged themselves for Amazon HQ2? Yeah, in Worcester, that was all the EDCC.
"The Chamber, along with our Economic Development Coordinating Council partners ... are currently reviewing Amazon's bid proposal. We do think it makes sense for Worcester to respond.”
A few months later the city submitted an application and then-City Manager (and EDCC member) Ed Augustus told the city council fuck it we’ll do two applications.
"I'm for chasing every opportunity that is available to the city of Worcester," Mr. Augustus said. "We will pursue a second (application). Let's cover all our bases. I want every chance we can to get a piece of this, or all of this, for the city of Worcester."
Worcester, of course, did not get the bid. But they were prepared to offer up $500 million in tax deals and 98 acres of land. And they spent $11,000 on putting the proposal together.
Around this time, the EDCC gets some space in the Telegram business section to sing its own song.
Ask the cadre of new investors why they are pouring cash into downtown Worcester and they will talk about untapped opportunities to make money, the city's location, appealing demographic patterns and the 11 colleges that make their homes in Worcester.
They'll also volunteer it's easy to work with Worcester officials.
Though, the piece does note that “the EDCC is not a public body, and its meetings are not public. That makes it difficult to evaluate its effectiveness.” It then goes on to detail a time the EDCC lost out on Lake Pharma for a Plantation Street project.
Also around this time a Chamber higher up is quoted as saying that the Chamber “took the leadership role of business recruitment” and credited the Chamber as having “created” the EDCC.
The EDCC did the redevelopment of the 44-acre Worcester State Hospital property into the biomanufacturing campus.
Of course there’s Polar Park, a story we don’t need to spend any time retelling.
When Unum bailed on its downtown campus in 2020, it was the EDCC that pressured the company into “corrective action.”
In 2021, Tim Murray is quoted as using the EDCC to push for “downtown condos.”
"For any developer out there right now who's watching, the [Economic Development Coordinating Council] and team will presell half those condos," Murray said. "We need that pioneer investor willing to do condos in and around the downtown."
I don’t know what “presell” means but in context it sounds like a code word for public subsidy.
In a human interest profile, Stephanie Ramey, president of the Worcester Railers and member of the EDCC, said she’s “been involved in the creation and execution of the city’s cultural plan.” Previously, she ran Discover Central Massachusetts, a Chamber entity that got half a million from the city’s operating budget in this past cycle to “promote tourism.”
Earlier this year, the EDCC got together to blast National Grid for rate increases.
And then, of course, the WPI controversy of the present moment.
Throughout its existence, over three city managers, the group has met weekly—Friday mornings, it seems—in the city manager’s third floor city hall office.
Augustus described the private nature of those meetings, and the need for it, to Commonwealth Magazine back in 2018.
Augustus says the council is not a “star chamber,” but argued that keeping it private allows for more open, productive discussions.
“We literally bird-dog every important economic development project. It could be pursuing additional commuter rail or airport service, etcetera,” says Augustus. “In some places, it can be like going to the Balkans where the chamber has one set of priorities and the city has a different set and these legislative folks over here have a different set. We speak with one voice.”
Speak for whom, Ed? That’s the central question. In the same article, Konnie Lukes is quoted sharing some reservations about the arrangement.
“I guess they can do anything they want,” says Lukes. “That could have its bad and good consequences.”
As a councilor, Lukes certainly had her problems, but she was also reliably one of the only people in Worcester politics willing to publicly speak out against the power brokers that comprise the EDCC. Otherwise, the vibe has been quite deferential. The EDCC’s designs for downtown Worcester have been ushered into being with little resistance and even less scrutiny. So we’re left with a city beholden to an economic development strategy that is at the same time highly celebrated and little understood.
Worcester is “on the map,” if the pay-to-play Boston Globe articles are to be believed. But meanwhile, the enforcement of exclusion zones has led to rampant harassment of the unhoused, manifestly increasing the size of the homeless population, as an affordable housing crisis rages unabated and the school system has been made to suffer dramatic underfunding from both the city and the state while both entities pursue massive subsidy packages for private developers to build housing units that the vast majority of residents cannot afford.
Whose map are we on? And do we even want to be on it? These aren’t questions that local politics allows us to ask. They are perhaps the political questions, but, for some reason, they are the exclusive domain of people like Murray, Augustus, Petty, Batista, Angelini, etc. etc.
We don’t even know about the decisions they make until the ink is all but dried, and they are the most consequential decisions available to us. They aren’t just “deals.” A “deal” is not inherently a good thing. We have no forum whatsoever to explore that idea.
The perfect example manifests in the current WPI controversy. As I wrote in my last post, the EDCC is admonishing the university for reducing the city’s hotel capacity and in the same breath suggesting they reduce the city’s housing stock instead:
How much worse would it be if WPI decided instead to acquire several apartment buildings, reducing sorely needed rental housing inventory? In fact, the EDCC called on WPI to do just that:
Moreover, and even more perplexing is that WPI’s Board and former President had the opportunity to acquire with the closing of Becker College, adjacent to the WPI campus, residence halls that could house over 200 students as well as leases that Becker College held at the time that could have housed another 245 students. It is our understanding that WPI could have acquired these properties for approximately $3.8 million.
Why is that the preferable alternative? Why are lost hotel rooms more important to the EDCC than former dormitories which could easily be converted to general housing stock? Why isn’t the EDCC focused on brokering a deal to get those units converted?
It’s all a matter of priorities.
And there is no room for the public will in those priorities. Like their weekly meetings, the EDCC’s priorities are private.
Recently, Councilor Etel Haxhiaj took the unprecedented step of challenging the EDCC’s private and exclusive operating principle. In both her evaluation of the city manager last month and on Twitter this week, Haxhiaj challenged the EDCC to involve one of the city’s community development corporations, like Main South CDC or Worcester Common Ground. These are the organizations through which the majority of actual affordable housing gets built, and they are—surprise, surprise—chronically underfunded and neglected.
Haxhiaj writes:
Economic development is and should be community development. Our CDCs are the closest to our neighborhoods, critical to affordable housing and working with diverse populations.
The Economic Council does not represent racial or economic diversity. Their meetings should not be closed to the public and there needs to be transparency about the role they play in decisions made by the City Manager.
More transparency, and more economic and racial diversity, would make the EDCC an entirely different entity. If they were beholden in any way to the needs of Worcester residents, they wouldn’t be operating as they have been. They wouldn’t be able to show such reckless disregard.
It’s worth pausing here to reflect on what the system of beliefs undergirding the EDCC actually look like.
As established at the top of this essay, the EDCC was this city’s reaction to a post-industrial, neoliberal era that steered cities into the tourism game. Another defining feature of this era how it pits cities against each other in competition for resources from the private sector. To be competitive means to be willing to sell out your end of the bargain for “deals.” This was most obvious in the Amazon HQ2 moment, but Polar Park is just as good an example. We offered Larry Lucchino (CIA-trained?) the most expensive minor league ballpark project in history because we were worried that if we didn’t, New Bedford would. By “we” of course I mean the EDCC. They’re the only “we” in Worcester’s biggest stories.
In a 2016 interview with the Worcester Sun, EDCC architect Mike Angelini is clear-eyed about this city-eat-city world and what it calls for:
We are now in a situation in this country where states are in competition with each other for economic development. Communities are in competition. We are buying businesses. North Carolina is paying businesses to go there. Rhode Island is paying businesses to go there. We have an economic competition.
What he doesn’t say, though it’s between the lines, is that in order to become competitive, the city must itself become a commodity. The overall point of the EDCC is to define that commodity and trade on it.
Worcester is unremarkable in this regard, as in most regards. Every city that wants to be “competitive” has necessarily adopted some version of an EDCC. In geographer and anthropologist David Harvey’s 2002 essay “The Art of Rent,” he generally calls this practice “urban entrepreneurism”:
“Urban entrepreneurialism has become important both nationally and internationally in recent decades. By this I mean that pattern of behaviour within urban governance that mixes together state powers (local, metropolitan, regional, national or supranational) and a wide array of organizational forms in civil society (chambers of commerce, unions, churches, educational and research institutions, community groups, NGOs, etc.) and private interests (corporate and individual) to form coalitions to promote or manage urban/regional development of some sort or other.”
These are also called “urban regimes,” “growth machines,” or “regional growth coalitions,” Harvey writes. I prefer “growth machine,”myself, and have long argued that’s exactly what the EDCC is.
The goal of these groups, broadly speaking, is to create ‘monopoly rents’2 on their municipalities that global finance then swoops in on to extract the value. They make the milkshake, and then the hedge funds stick their straw in said milkshake and say “I drink it up.” Some of the milkshake creators, like Mike O’Brien, get nice jobs with the hedge funds. The rest get to shore up their status as provincial overlords (hence the “how dare you” tone of the letter to WPI).
Writing about an analogous organization in upstate New York, David A. Banks in The City Authentic puts it this way:
(T)he move from government provision of housing, food, and jobs programs to this network of semiprivate organizations introduced perverse incentives into life-sustaining institutions, The result has been a wealth transfer of public money to boards of directors staffed largely by local elites that are more likely to be responsive to real estate interests than those of the poor. This community development system is more accurately described as a community control system because while development (or growth) certainly happens, the main function is really control over land, resources, and labor.
It’s the simultaneous process of defining the commodity and claiming ownership of it. The need to package and profit off of it becomes cyclical. Harvey explains this in a way that’s oddly reminiscent of the WPI drama:
Such investments, particularly when they are of a speculative sort, invariably call for even further waves of investments if the first wave is to prove profitable (to fill the convention centre we need the hotels which require better transport and communications, which calls for an expansion of the convention centre...). So there is an element of circular and cumulative causation at work in the dynamics of metropolitan area investments.
And, when a city becomes a commodity, so does everything that happens in it. Our “culture,” “diversity,” “arts scene,” even history become bullet points on the proverbial brochure.
In that light, it’s instructive to look at how Angelini talks about public education in that 2016 interview. He says one of Worcester’s main problems is the perception it has a poor school system:
We are at risk [of] losing businesses and people to other communities that are perceived to have better public school systems. I think that piece needs to be part of our economic development agenda. In other words, think about that as part of our economic development agenda rather than think about that as the glory of having good public schools.
Good schools aren’t the point! The perception of good schools is the point. That’s what makes it part of the overall commodity: The perception affects the value of Worcester’s share price on the City Exchange. The actual education kids receive is, at best, ancillary. (Perhaps that’s the reason Tim Murray is fighting so hard for the MCAS graduation requirement. How are you supposed to quantify the value of perception without a uniform standard to measure it against others?)
Education is probably the most vital, necessary, noble service a municipality provides. At the very top, it is in the hands of people who view it in the cynical terms of commodity value. When you hear the mayor talking about the shiny new high schools, is he talking to you, city resident, or is he talking to this nebulous commodity exchange market that will happily step on you without even noticing, like the ant you are to them?
As established earlier, the second largest service provided by a municipality is the police, and the police are used similarly vis-a-vis the commodity exchange. Their job is to sanitize the areas of the city where the monopoly rents are established. The commodity value of the police is keeping up appearances. The city needs to look “safe” on paper via crime statistics and visibly “safe” in the parts that visitors are most likely to see, via the lack of “undesirable elements.” Neither have all that much to do with public safety.
The real danger presented by Haxhiaj’s request to open up the EDCC is having to justify any of this publicly. That is currently unnecessary and could prove problematic if enough people get hip to the EDCC’s priorities and policies. If anyone outside city hall or the jingoistic local media and non-profit industrial complexes knew about them, they might prove deeply unpopular. Best to keep a lid on it.
Of course, that’s exactly what makes it a good pressure point. In fact I think it’s more useful to hammer on the EDCC than on the city council. Problem is you know what’s on council agendas and don’t know what’s on EDCC agendas.
To accept that the EDCC is upstream from the city council and the city council is upstream of the political will of the public—all quite obvious—then what you’re seeing here is gentrification being a deliberate, calculated, and hard-won choice made by a small group of wealthy and politically connected people, most of them white men. The downstream effects—unreasonable rents, homelessness, and stripped-thin city services (besides the cops)—are made to seem like natural causes. What’s a boy to do? the city manager will say. These are ‘complicated issues.’
That choice is laundered through the council, composed of members happy to take credit without having to work, and then it’s foisted on the public via a media ecosystem that pegs critics as “naysayers” and does what it can to box them out of the club.
This is not local democracy. The 15 percent voter turnouts in local elections speak for themselves. Truly understanding the EDCC gets you a lot closer to understanding that.
Then, of course, the question becomes what to do about it. But we’ll save that for the hopeful day on the horizon when enough people give a shit that you can do something about it. Today is not that day.
Thanks for reading! I decided this essay was best to just release as is with minimal promotional interruptions, because I think it’s a good one. Hope you agree!
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Not liberal as in Democrat, liberal as in Ronald Reagan.
This is when you have sole ownership over something valuable, and thus get to charge a premium for the fact you own it. Real estate is the best example but also: think “Champagne” and the Champagne region of France. The Art of Rent does a great job explaining this important concept in detail.
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Sometimes Shaner's muckraking shines; he exposes power by observing, digging into archives, and reading broadly for context.
I'm hoping for more of the latter. The local scenery can only be unravelled so far without a broader political analysis of where we're at & how we got here.