WESTFIELD – The creation of an airport industrial park took another step forward Tuesday morning when the members of the Westfield Redevelopment Authority voted to authorized their executive director, Jeff Daley, to make expenditures for the first stages of the project.
The city council had budgeted $83,700 for the project and, at their last meeting, authorized the mayor to negotiate a funding agreement to release the funds to the authority, a quasi-private developmental agency acting for the city on several development projects.
The vote by the authority to accept the agreement, coupled with the mayor’s assent, Daley explained, “will authorize the Westfield Redevelopment Authority to access and spend” the funds allocated in the budget.
The authority voted to hire the local law firm of Annino, Draper and Moore to perform pre-developmental legal work and the authority members voted to allow Daley to expend as much as $10,000 for that work.
Daley told the authority that “there’s quite a bit of legal work, title research, things like that” than needs to be done so that the law firm can “put together a good package for us to move forward with.”
He said that the job is complicated because it involves several parcels of lands purchased at different times by different agencies.
Much of the property, he said was acquired with funds provided by the FAA and thus has restrictions on its use.
Daley has said that one option may be to reimburse the FAA for the land so that parcels may be offered to prospective tenants of the industrial park for sale or lease.
The authority also authorized Daley to spend as much as $10,000 for pre-developmental engineering work.
The industrial park project is supported by improvements to the infrastructure of the area already underway as part of the Airport Industrial Road reconstruction project.
Daley has said that the plan of the authority is to bring the project to the point where potential tenants – ideally aviation related, manufacturing and commercial office businesses – may inspect the parcels, select a site and start to secure the needed permits.
