Union Square Main Streets considers a change into fee-driven business improvement district – Cambridge Day

With millions of development dollars pushing lab and office towers skyward, a new green line T stop now just part of the background, a thousand homes projected to be built and another 150,000 square feet of restaurants, shops and services due, Somerville’s Union Square is transforming. The role of the Union Square Main Streets organization could too.

In the fall, USMS, which serves the square’s business community, launched a program to “learn what business model a nonprofit like ours can have that would best serve your favorite square businesses and your rapidly developing neighborhood.”

One of the more promising options based on community feedback is to become a business improvement district, according to the organization.

Existing in Massachusetts since 1998, the districts are a relatively common way for commercial areas to draw more business and enhance curb appeal. To establish a BID, property owners in the proposed area must sign a petition and submit it to the state. Once established, a district collects mandatory fees from its property owners and spends that money on improvements. Common services offered include events programming, districtwide marketing and street cleaning that supplements municipal services, among a variety of other options.

During its district pilot, USMS is offering a sampling of services that could be possible if the square’s property owners establish a business improvement district permanently.

Jessica Eshleman, left, executive director of Union Square Main, at a February event. (Photo: Carlos Ly)

One of the pilot’s most exciting components to Jessica Eshleman, executive director of USMS, is the street team, at work since mid-September and until June, which provides a variety of services to Union Square businesses. 

 The team’s outreach ambassador works to build community and help the unhoused and other vulnerable people, while hospitality ambassadors are on the street giving visitors directions, recommending restaurants and escorting passengers to train and bus stations at night. 

The team’s clean ambassadors supplemented the services of Somerville’s Department of Public Works, but after USMS learned about the ongoing contract negotiations between the city and the Somerville Municipal Employees Association, a union, it turned the clean ambassadors into the beautification team that now works to improve private property around the square.

“They’re washing the first-floor windows of storefronts. They’re removing weeds on private property like in alleys and parking lots. They can do graffiti removal,” Eshleman said, “very intentionally within a privately owned area to enable hopefully a swifter resolution of the contract negotiations.” 

In addition to deploying the street team, USMS published an insider’s guide to the district concept with resources, volunteer opportunities, an explanation of the pilot and a recipe from a local restaurant. The guide was mailed to 750 households around the square and has held a series of breakfasts to educate property owners on the workings of a business improvement district.

The pilot’s third big project is to install multilingual wayfinding signs, which Eshleman said will be installed later in the spring. 

The pilot runs through June 30.

Councilor has concerns

Scott

Not everyone is aboard with the BID concept, including J.T. Scott, a city councilor for the area whose Clubhouse CrossFit gym is in Union Square – which he has ordered off-limits to the ambassadors.

“I firmly believe maintenance of the public realm is a responsibility of the municipal government,” Scott said Monday. While he’s open to hearing more about the concept as USMS draws conclusions from its test, he has not been approached about a timeline or decision-making process and said he had “grave concerns.”

That’s not to a reflection on Union Square Main Streets, which he called a “great organization” that he wants to support. “I don’t want my opposition to the BID to be seen as being about its viability.”

But he has not made a secret of his wariness of the BID concept and the power of the square’s biggest developers to affect or control the public realm of Union Square, he said.

Three decades of history

The idea behind USMS’ pilot goes back decades.

The districts have been around since the 1970s. Developed first in Toronto as a way for neighborhood businesses to fight shopping malls, they spread across North America in the 1980s and 1990s, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

BIDs arrived in Massachusetts nearly 30 years ago in Springfield. (Ann Burke, who helped found the Springfield district and wrote the state’s enabling legislation, is a consultant to the Union Square group, Eshleman said).

Michael Monestime of Cambridge’s Central Square Business Improvement District leads visiting Somervillians on a tour April 12. (Photo: Union Square Main Streets via Facebook)

Since then, the districts have popped up around Massachusetts, including in Boston, Worcester, Hudson and Hyannis. In 2019, Cambridge’s Central Square established one about a mile and a half from Union Square. The leaders of USMS recently toured Central Square to learn more.

The concept of was discussed in Somerville about a decade ago in SomerVision 2030, a development plan that outlined long-term goals for the city such as improving transportation and strengthening local businesses. As one of its many suggestions, SomerVision recommended that the city’s planning board encourage the development of BIDs throughout the city. 

“In the future, business improvement districts are likely to be another organizational model through which business owners can work together to revitalize Somerville’s commercial neighborhoods,” the plan read. 

SomerVision recommendation

That recommendation had a simple rationale: BIDs increase the “financial self-sufficiency,” as SomerVision put it, of local squares and corridors. Unlike other nonprofits, the districts can collect mandatory fees from its property owners in their area as Central Square does – a base rate of $1.10 per $1,000 of assessed value, though the fee varies depending on the total property value. As a result, the districts have a much more reliable stream of income than nonprofits that rely on grants.

Reaching financial self-sufficiency is a key goal of USMS. In 2019, as it worked on preparing a strategic plan, the organization spoke with more than 500 community members, including residents, business owners and elected officials, Eshleman said, with leadership concluding that to best serve the community, the organization needed a new, more sustainable business model.

“Exploring an alternative business model was necessary in order for Union Square Main Streets to remain in existence, relevant and then to scale alongside the district it serves,” Eshleman said.

The organization contemplated a variety of alternative models, with a BID setup being one of the most promising. It got a grant of approximately $950,000 from Somerville as part of the $77 million received by the city in 2021 as the federal Covid-relief aid known as the American Rescue Plan Act. It gave the Union Square group a chance to pay for a district experiment which that became the current pilot.

“We’re looking to take the DNA of Union Square Main Streets with its economic empowerment and equity-based focus and put it into a new operating system that is the business improvement district,” organization leaders said.

What’s next in Union Square

When the pilot ends in June, USMS will host a “refine and reflect” event, as Eshleman put it, to share takeaways with the community and solicit feedback.

“We will conclude this publicly facing process with the refine and reflect event, which is basically an opportunity to say, ‘Here’s what we’ve learned together over the past several months. What else do we need to be thinking about?’”

After that event, the organization will enter its “analyzing phase,” looking at data collected throughout the pilot. This phase’s primary function, Eshleman said, is to determine what a permanent Union Square BID could look like and if it would be in the square’s best interest. During this phase, figuring out an appropriate assessment rate will be an important consideration.

Ultimately, the Union Square community will decide whether USMS moves forward with the project. USMS would need 60 percent of the square’s property owners to sign on. The petition’s signers would also need to own at least 51 percent of the square’s assessed property value.

There’s some uncertainty as to how long the analyzing phase will last, Eshleman said.

Feature image by Todd Van Hoosear via Flickr.