See, I made it back;-)

For those wondering what the heck has been going on with the Intruder, read on below for more details.

Now, on with some updates and observations:

MGM Trumps Penn National
Yes, not exactly shocking news to hear that MGM won out over Penn National to be selected by the City of Springfield as their (our?) choice for a western Massachusetts casino resort site. The city’s unions seemed to warm up to MGM early on, and Peter Picknelly’s “we are the local choice” rah-rah speeches never took hold. And I’m sure his attempt at what amounted to redevelopment blackmail didn’t go over well with Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno, either. I’m still skeptical that a so-called resort will be successful in the impoverished ghetto that is the South End of the city. But what the heck, it can’t be a ghetto forever, can it?

Can it?

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea of a happy couple coming to Springfield to stay at a casino hotel whose spectacular view includes Bondi’s Island, a slew of used car lots, and Hooker Alley (aka the Main Street-Locust Street Corridor).

Crazy stuff.

In the meantime, let’s not be cracking our egg shells before they’re hatched. We still have an all-important city referendum scheduled for this summer, where the residents get to have their voices heard. MGM recently lobbied for a July vote – heck, they gotta be tired of plunging money into their marketing blitz these past few months. Let’s get on with it!

All referendum votes aside, for my money I’m still thinking Mohegan Sun has the better deal for the state, with loads of expandable acreage in the cozy backwoods of Palmer. In the end, though, the winner of this race will depend on how the state views the contenders. If the state is looking at the casino resort as an urban renewal project, then Springfield and MGM will win. If the state is instead looking for the best long-term investment with the most opportunity to grow, it will side with Mohegan Sun.

But if MGM does win, it would be great to see how my earlier story on how downtown Springfield would fare under its influence will pan out.

Where’s the Beef, Part 2
A couple weeks ago, just days before MGM was announced as the city’s choice to go before the voters as their choice for a casino resort in Western Massachusetts, work began at last on clearing out the old Visitor’s Center on West Columbus Ave to make room for a proposed Luxe Burger Bar. As I’ve written here many times before, it’s been a looong time coming. Are we finally going to see what the city swore we’d be getting all along?

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Yes, there is fencing around the property and a couple dumpsters sitting in the parking lot. But we had that too a few years back across town at the former Chestnut Junior High School building. And today that property’s still sitting there in the North End, rotting in place.

Something may well be going in at the former Visitor’s Center – but it doesn’t have to be a Luxe Burger Bar. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be a restaurant. Last time I checked – admittedly a while ago – they still didn’t have a bona fide manager in the fold to run the place. Raipher Pellegrino’s employee/helper/friend/placeholder was still on deck as manager. And you can’t run a restaurant with a retirement advisor.

How to Spend the Winnings?
With a casino in downtown Springfield one step closer to becoming a reality, the debate is on again over what to do with the city’s share of the booty in any Host Agreement. And once again, City Councilor Tim Rooke is proposing putting it towards residential and business tax relief in the city.

“The indirect cost and new monies realized are estimated to be about $25M on a yearly basis,” wrote Rooke in a recent email to the Intruder concerning the Host Agreement. “This [...] over 40 years would be $1 billion.”

The last time he proposed such a plan, Rooke received a somewhat less-than lukewarm response from his colleagues and the mayor. This time around, though, things appear to be looking a little brighter. Lot’s of “off the record” interest is supposedly being tossed around for the idea.

Behind The Black Curtain
And finally, what have I been up to that has kept me away from writing at the Intruder?

Well, as some people who read this blog already know, I have lately been getting back into writing my fiction stories from about twenty years ago. As I mentioned to one reader who asked why “I wasn’t writing anymore,” I have actually been writing more in the past six months than I have in the past several years. It just hasn’t been for this blog.

This past fall-to-spring I started and finished a novella that I began shopping around last month. In between this project, I’ve also been working on a rewrite of a full-length manuscript I first penned back in the mid-1990s. As things turned out, I’ve completely revamped this story with some new characters and a new working title (“Friends and Enemies”). I’m still working on the first draft of this one, so there is a long way to go, yet.

So it’s actually been a very busy past few months for me. And as I told a few people who’ve asked, I’ve found it very difficult to focus on my fiction projects while at the same time continuing to write regularly at the Intruder. For me, the two are an entirely different kind of writing, and it hasn’t been easy trying to switch back and forth. Something had to give.

So while I’m not ready to say I’m taking a hiatus at the Springfield Intruder, I also don’t want to lead people on into thinking this blog is my primary focus in writing these days. It is not.

But who knows how things will be two months from now?

Walking around downtown, I took note of these lamp-hung banners installed all along the streets these days. Notice the very small QR code that I circled in red in the above photo. That banner is about 12 feet in the air at its lowest point, so how anyone is going to actually be able get their cellphone QR reader to focus on that little thing is beyond me. As users of QR codes know, you pretty much have to be standing right in front of it, with your phone’s reader pointed directly at it, in order for it to work. Fairly poor planning there.

Photo taken April 6, 2013

Peter Pappas, president of Alliance Group Real Estate Development and owner of the next-door LA Fitness complex (and former Basketball Hall of Fame), was the only other bidder on the Visitor Center property back in the fall of 2011. His bid fell about a quarter million dollars short of what Lustra LLC offered for the site – but then again, he actually intended to put a business there. It seems more clear now than ever that Pellegrino’s group is simply sitting on the property as the casino issue plays out in the city.

It was early last year, in May of 2012, when the Republican reported that Lustra had financing in place and construction of the Burger Bar would probably start that summer:

Pellegrino said Tuesday that financing is in place, and construction is planned this summer. Lustra is ‘shooting for’ a fall opening of the LUXE Burger Bar, which is patterned after a successful Rhode Island restaurant, he said.

Summer came and went. Fall came and went. Winter came and went.

A year-and-a-half after the city proclaimed Lustra LLC the winner on December 6, 2011, the former Visitor’s Center remains a tattered, dust-laden vacant building, entirely untouched by anyone with either a broom or shovel. There were signs early on, of course, that the bid to put up a Luxe Burger Bar there was perhaps a ruse.

First there was the $450,000 bid itself – double the amount of Pappas’ own $223,000 bid. At the time, Lustra said they intended to invest $2 million to build the Luxe Burger Bar. But for a company that had plunked down a half-million bucks last year, they remain strangely uncommitted and unrushed in earning a return on their investment. (This also brings up the alleged financing that Pellegrino said was in place. One would think their financer might be getting a little anxious about the business plan thus far.) In fact, Lustra LLC has yet to meet a deadline they themselves have publicly proposed, just as they missed the original preferred developer status deadline early last year and at least one extension thereafter.

Then there was the listed resident manager of the proposed burger joint, Jennifer Stefanik. Stefanik is not a restaurateur. Instead, she is – or at least was up until 2010 – an employee of Pellegrino’s working as an administrator for his company’s retirement benefits plan, the Pilgrim Group Employee Retirement Plan. It’s fairly safe to assume these days that her name is just a placeholder for the would-be (and perhaps not-going-to-be) restaurant.

Next we have the Rhode Island-based Luxe Burger Bar’s own website, which has a page in its “About Us” section that proudly proclaims a Springfield Luxe Burger Bar coming to Springfield MA in the spring of 2013. When they made the page late last year they probably thought the “Spring 2013” date was a safe and distant date to put there – and it coincided nicely with the City of Springfield’s plan for a referendum vote on the casino. But spring is here now, and there is still no activity on the property. One would also think that by now the supposed Springfield Luxe Burger Bar would have its own website in order to attract both future customers and employees.

Pappas, meanwhile, continues to write to Springfield Chief Development Officer Kevin Kennedy, inquiring about the lack of progress at both the former Visitors Center site and the former Court Square Hotel building in downtown Springfield, which he also bid on, losing out to local developer and Peter Pan Bus Lines CEO Peter Picknelly’s OPAL Real Estate group back in June of 2011. City officials, however, reportedly told Pappas back in May of 2012 that they were “satisfied with the efforts” of Lustra LLC – this despite the fact that no physical activity seems apparent at the site.

Springfield’s Chief Development Officer, Kevin Kennedy, repeated that vote of confidence after reportedly telling Pappas last October that “significant and satisfactory progress has been made on both projects.”

The City of Springfield must be aware by now that something is up with the Visitor’s Center property. (The latest story from the Republican on the Burger Bar has the developer now saying construction will be “begin soon.”) Not that they would be able to do much about it anyway, as the city sold the Visitor’s Center property to Lustra back in June of 2012.

Related Posts:

• Springfield Riverfront Gets Pellegrino Touch
• Where’s the Beef? One Year Later, Springfield’s Long-Vacant Former Visitors Center Remains Deserted

This weekend’s podcamp marked the event’s 5th anniversary and second year being held at the Kittredge Center.

Like in its previous years, this years podcamp offered sessions covering topics from social media to mobile tech. There were tips and tricks on how best to use Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Google+, and, mixed in between, attendees caught up on the latest in third party and mobile applications to help streamline their use of social media.

The conference – or “unconference” as it’s called – had a fairly even mix of podcamp veterans and first-timers in attendance. Organizers call it an unconference because of the unconventional format if the sessions, which invite a back-and-forth between the session speakers and attendees themselves, all of which results in an exchange of ideas and knowledge that is hard to come by in the more traditional conference formats.

First-time attendees may have benefited more from the more structured, speaker-to-audience sessions that resembled more of a teacher-to-student experience. A lot if the podcamp veterans, meanwhile, found value in the back-and-forth group sessions, where the speakers acted more as moderators for the attendees as they exchanged ideas and knowledge.

With the latter sessions (which this writer preferred), attendees picked up tips on social media and writing tools such as Bundlepost, Buffer and Evernote. Some other interesting and useful tools included:

• NetVibes (real-time social media monitoring and analytics)
• Mailstrom (email inbox maintenance)
• Wordle (Create a stylized “word cloud” by typing in keywords)
• PicMonkey and Fotoflexer (Web-based photo editing)
• Animoto (Web-based video editing)
• CamScanner (turns cellphone pics into PDFs)

Throughout the day, the question was routinely asked by both session hosts and attendees: “What do you use to make your social media experience better?” And there were a lot of answers.

Me and my colleague, Lisa, attended this year’s event.

In the very next session I attended (a group session), not one – but two such apps were brought up by attendees. I didn’t catch the second one because I was too busy downloading and installing the first one that was mentioned, called CamCard.

CamCard scans a business card and tracks the card owner’s name, phone number, email and any social media handles. The software isn’t perfect – for one scanned business card I had to edit the information – but CamCard records the information not only in its own proprietary contact list, but also gives you the option to store it in any other contact list connected to your cellphone.

Besides the knowledge gained during the sessions, there was also the invaluable networking experience at podcamp to look forward to. And if you didn’t pick up a contact or two at the event itself, there was always the “After-Party” being held just down the road from the conference, where attendees continued their discussions over drinks and snacks.

At over a hundred twenty attendees, this year’s PodCamp WesternMA was one of the best attended annual social media events in all of New England and the largest in western Massachusetts. This year’s event also made it the oldest-tenured podcamp in the New England region (as the Boston Podcamp took a break).

Podcamp WesternMass holds it annual event at the start of each spring. For more information on this year’ event, visit the 2013 event page.

According to a story in the Republican by Jack Flynn, Shefsky & Froelich attorney Cezar M. Froelich informed the committee that the Host Agreement currently being drafted by the city would have casino developers providing a lump sum payment to the city, as opposed to the alternative that many had previously in mind, a dispersal of funds to various community projects directly.

“The [requests for funding] were 30 or 40 when we stopped counting,” said Froelich of the individual requests for funding, according to Flynn’s story.

Instead, the city is going with a lump sum payment by developers (upon approval of a license) that would then be disbursed by the Mayor and City Council, said Froelich.

According to the article, many city councilors were taken by surprise by the decision, since several specific projects that had previously been earmarked would now be omitted from the Agreement.

City Councilor Tim Rooke, meanwhile, took the discussion a step further by proposing that instead of the city spending the monies on pet projects, the funds go instead to providing tax relief to the city’s taxpayers.

Said Rooke in a follow-up email: “I suggested that the most equitable distribution of any indirect funds from a casino developer should go directly to lower the tax burden for each of the tax payers and not to special interest projects of any elected official or group.”

That’s sure to stick in the craw of more than a few city councilors who surely have other, more needy plans for pot o’ gold on the horizon.

Only Mohegan Sun’s Palmer bid, it seems, stands to have a shot at toppling Springfield’s Big Money! dreams. (You can forget about Hard Rock’s option at the Big-E in West Springfield. That candidacy is DOA.)

Here in Springfield, we have two options: MGM Resorts and Penn National Gaming. Of the two, it looks like MGM Resorts may have the upper hand these days, and they have it backed up by support from both the Springfield Police and Springfield Firefighters unions.

Both developers are touting their willingness to support local venues and help keep law-and-order in their respective zones of business. I suspect neither promise will amount to much, though. MGM has said they plan on a 160-member security team, which is commendable, but they won’t be patrolling the city’s streets away from the resort grounds. Additionally, politicians can dream all they want, but neither MGM nor Penn is going to be showing people the way to the exit so they can spend their money elsewhere. Of the two developers, it seems more likely that MGM will use the MassMutual Center as a dump-off for some of its entertainment. But I suspect the price of doing business with MassMutual will be quite low.

If MGM Resorts does win out and they do get their casino in the South End of the city, it goes without saying that the map of Springfield’s retail downtown district there will change dramatically. Look for restaurants and nightclubs all around the vicinity to either adapt, move, or die in the months and years that follow a casino’s arrival in our midst.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the varying degrees of doom that some of our local establishments will be facing.

As this post’s accompanying Google Map shows (click on image to enlarge), there will be a distinct Red Zone of Death for any restaurants or bars in the area immediately around MGM’s resort. Other retail outlets may be adversely affected – primarily because of traffic woes (real or perceived) – but I suspect only those businesses that have to directly compete with MGM will penalized. (This also takes into account Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno’s past crusade against bars and nightclubs in the downtown district, seemingly “clearing the way” for a casino to do business.)

First, I color-coded the planned MGM resort grounds in green, using an MGM Resorts depiction found on Masslive for reference. A number of local businesses are currently located in this green zone, including the recently-repaired Dave’s Furniture (from the 2011 tornado) and Glory, Inc., so whether they remain at their locations or are relocated elsewhere remains to be seen. (It’s also possible the “green zone” of property allocated for MGM could change.)

I painted the property where the Red Rose Pizzeria is located (#1) in pink because, frankly, I think it’s rather obvious they will be in MGM’s way. In MGM’s “flyover” video (linked here), viewers can see that a single-story building remains where Red Rose and the Caring Health Center are currently located. Conspicuously, though, there is no name on the building in the depictions.

Also in pink, the former Visitors Center (#2) located to the west of the proposed casino is where Attorney and former Springfield City Councilor Raipher Pellegrino’s Lustra LLC investment group is allegedly planning to build a Luxe Burger Bar. They bid nearly half-million dollars for the property – more than double the next highest bidder – over a year ago (Dec. 6, 2011), yet as of February 2013 they have not put so much as a broom to the site, which they purchased from the city last June. According to this Republican article, the group plans on investing another $1.9 million into rehabilitating the existing property. It seems incredibly bizarre, though, that Pellegrino’s group would put up such a huge investment to open a restaurant in an area where three others – McDonalds, Pazzo, and Onyx – failed. And then to sit on the property for months, in no apparent hurry to start earning a return on their investment. Could it be that they have had other plans for this site all along, depending on the outcome of the casino issue in Springfield?

To the south of the former Visitors Center I put the LA Fitness and Mama Iguana’s property in orange (#3). Orange signifies that the business may survive, since it has a service that may not compete with MGM.

It’s worth noting here that the owner of the LA Fitness property is Peter Pappas, who was the second-highest bidder on the Visitors Center property mentioned above. (There were only two bids total for the site.) He placed a reasonable bid of $223,012 on the property, which makes sense if one assumes the developer will also be putting considerable money into the development of the building itself (which currently has only restrooms for plumbing and no existing kitchen facility). It doesn’t look like the City looked at it this way, though, and instead decided to take Lustra LLC’s money up front and then just hope for the best. What we’ve ended up with, predictably, is a still-vacant site.

Other properties in orange include businesses that I think stand a good chance of retaining local clientele – such as Frigo’s Market and Deli over on William Street (bottom of map, #4) or even the Sheraton and Marriott hotels (#5), which should do okay with visitors continuing to come to both the MassMutual Center and the Basketball Hall of Fame . It helps that besides the casino (wherever it may end up), both hotels will still be among the few larger hotels in the region.

Speaking of the MassMutual Center and Basketball Hall of Fame (painted in blue, #s 6 and 7 respectively), they should both do okay with the casino in their midst, since the Hall in particular will not be competing for visitors.

The third property painted in pink is the old Court Square Hotel complex (#8). OPAL Real Estate Group, headed up by Peter Pan Bus Lines President Peter Picknelly, was awarded preferred developer status of the site back in July of 2011. I gave this the pink because I think it may be useful as housing space for employees at MGM. The site is also supposed to provide office space as well as a selection of retail shops on the ground floor. (It is possible, too, that this may be bought up by MGM if things pan out.)

The downtown’s current “Entertainment District” (#9) will not benefit in the slightest from a casino coming to town. No one is leaving the comfort and safety of a casino resort building to venture down Worthington Street. Of all the businesses along this area, only the Mardi Gras strip club stands a chance of seeing any residual business flowing in. And grandpa and grandma aren’t coming to town with their social security checks to see Shawna show off her stuff.

Next, we come to the area between MassMutual and the Springfield Museums at the Quadrangle (#10). Some people might think that since MGM has said they want people to visit MassMutual and the museums, these businesses might benefit since the old Pynchon Park stairway may come back into use. No chance. If MGM comes through on its promise, they will be trolleying people from place to place, and they will always – always – end up back at the casino.

And finally we arrive at the riverfront (#11). God, just how this city managed to completely ignore –and even shun – this piece of real estate for generations-on-end I have no idea. But in order for this under-utilized property to be better used in the future, people and businesses will have to invest in a presence there – and it will have to be convenient for people to go there, as well. MGM says they will do this. We shall see.

Of course it’s not all doom and gloom on the horizon if either MGM or Penn National gets their casino in Springfield. Both options would provide hundreds of jobs, either directly or indirectly – although I doubt they’d be the kind of “quality” employment opportunities they’re being touted to be. And they both would no doubt breathe new life – for however long or short a time – into communities seemingly stuck in the doldrums. One has to admit, too, that a stroll through a redeveloped MGM resort grounds in the South End would be quite a bit cheerier than the current experience there.

It’s also important to note that none of the proposed casino developers should be cast in a dark light simply for wanting to do business in Massachusetts or Springfield specifically. Both MGM and Penn are in business to do business, after all, and it’s only common sense that they should make an effort to open a casino here when the opportunity is rife for them to do so.

For years, all the political talk has been about increasing low-income housing, providing vouchers, and giving the region’s poorest a seat at Springfield’s sparse dinner table.

Decades of this mindset has resulted in Springfield’s already struggling local economy having to heft a large portion of residents who neither work nor pay taxes. A poverty rate that once stood in single digits hovers at around 26% these days, as people from miles around come to Springfield not for its employment opportunities, but rather its cheap housing and easy access to social services.

Starting in about the 1980s, entire communities in Springfield began their slow but inexorable transformation into low-income ghettos, where shops today do business with bars on their windows and only the most naive would go out for a stroll after dark.

The original plan for Section-8 housing vouchers was to place poorer – and decidedly less-optimistic – residents in with middle-income residents, where it was hoped such exposure to a more upscale standard of living would have a positive impact.

But that plan quickly deteriorated as politicians saw easy votes in their eyes and began passing out vouchers like candy to children, and voucher recipients first began getting packed into large apartment complexes (“warehousing”) and then later – as the city’s multi-family homes began to be bought up by absentee landlords – inundating the city’s former home-owned residential neighborhoods.

In less than forty years, Springfield went from a “Can-Do” city to a “Can-You-Do-It-For-Me?” city, where many residents today routinely asked not what they could do for their city, but what can their city do for them.

Not much, it turns out.

Springfield continues to hang on the bleeding edge of bankruptcy, with tax hikes on what is left of the city’s homeowners and small businesses the only seeming way to keep the city above water. The City Council last year even co-opted the trash fee – which used to be in place to raise revenue to help pay for the city’s trash service, but now also helps to pay for the city’s struggling library system, which itself has been on life support for over twenty years and simply cannot continue into the 21st century with the same mid-20th century mindset it’s been running on – even as activists and soft-hearted city officials insist that it should.

And then of course we have that $800 million elephant that is looking all the more like it’s about to land squarely on your crotch. City officials are swooning over how great things will be once we get a “casino resort” erected in the heart of the city’s ghetto-ized downtown. We’ll apparently have none of the problems every other city on earth has had with casinos in their midst. Springfield, you see, is different.

The fact that this mindset flies square in the face of a preponderance of evidence that shows otherwise doesn’t appear to bother our local leaders in the slightest, either. After all, they have their own futures to think about.

I once thought it would be great for Springfield to have an arts-based economy. What a fool I was. Really, what city official is ever going to make a dime painting landscapes? It used to be that our distinguished municipal hacks found jobs working for the state, thus padding their already-generous government pensions. Now they’ll be working for The Man at MGM (or Penn). That’s where the real payoff will be.

And then, ten or so years from now when our casino masters pull up their stakes and move on, we’ll be left with a vacant hulk in our midst and wondering to ourselves – forty years after the Baystate West fiasco – how the hell did we fall for it again?

Well, at least maybe we’ll have some spiffy-new market-rate housing projects to show off to our kids.

If, somehow, our fearless leaders don’t manage to transform that one into a state-funded cash cow, too.