Our series One Square Mile Pawtucket continues with a look at the city’s mayor, Don Grebien. He’s led Pawtucket as it confronts a series of challenges, including the closing of Memorial Hospital and the impending departure of the PawSox. The question now is, how much difference can a mayor make in sparking a brighter future for a city like Pawtucket? 
“Now they’ve got the other runner, Acuna. He’s tagged out. PawSox might get a triple play! Look out, Carrera! That’s incredible!”
When many people think of Pawtucket they think of the PawSox. For 50 years, the minor league team has been a defining feature of the city. Considering that, a new PawSox stadium on the site of the Apex Building was seen as a way to attract people and spark nearby development. But now the team will be leaving for Worcester after the 2020 season. PawSox CEO Larry Lucchino put the blame last year on how Rhode Island’s top three elected officials failed to agree on a plan to keep the team in Pawtucket.
“Go where you’re wanted, not where there’s controversy and disagreement and opposition,” Lucchino said. “It’s as simple as that.”
Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien remembers that day this way: “It was like a bad breakup.”
As longtime Pawtucket City Councilor John Barry notes, Grebien was the loudest advocate for keeping the team.
“For the longest period of time, he was the main cheerleader for the PawSox,” Barry said. “He grew a great deal during that process, and they’re gone through no fault of the mayor’s. There were all sorts of other factors that played into that.”
The PawSox’ impending departure is just one of the tough issues facing Pawtucket and Grebien. Memorial Hospital closed in 2018, eliminating hundreds of jobs. Vacant storefronts fleck downtown Pawtucket. And finding the spark for new economic development remains a challenge.
Pawtucket resident William Lynch, a former Rhode Island Democratic Party chairman and the son of a former Pawtucket mayor, said the difficulty of building the tax base in an older Northeast city is a common problem.
“There’s a lot of challenges to being the mayor of an older mid-sized city and I think that Mayor Grebien is grappling with them as best he can given what he has to work with.”
Residents generally think Grebien is doing a good job since they see roads and school buildings fixed. Ethan Shorey covers Pawtucket for The Valley Breeze newspaper. He said the mayor is an aggressive salesman for the city.
“A lot of the smaller companies, and by smaller I mean the Guild and Pet Food Experts, have cited him as one of the main forces in getting them to come to Pawtucket,” Shorey said. “They’ve talked about him sort of selling Pawtucket as a great place – we have cheaper rents than Providence, more parking than Providence.”
It does seem to be working.
“For about three years now” said Korn Suom, “I’ve been saying, ‘I really want a loft space — I really want a loft space.’ “
Suom and her boyfriend, Josh Burgoyne, are moving into a loft building in Pawtucket, where the units start at $1250 a month. They run a food truck, Ming’s Asian Street Food, and they say the loft is a good fit for their lifestyle. And making their home in Pawtucket feels right for Suom and Burgoyne.
“It’s close enough to Providence and not as busy as Providence,” Suom said, “so we feel like we have a little bit of privacy even though we’re still technically in a city and if we want to pop into something busier, it’s five minutes away. So it’s convenient, it’s easy and …”
“… and to be brutally honest, it’s affordable, too,” said Burgoyne.
This is music to Mayor Grebien’s ears. He wants to welcome a lot more newcomers to the city like Suom and Burgoyne. After recent setbacks, Grebien is counting on a train station planned on Pawtucket’s border with Central Falls to accelerate a wave of economic development.
“The investment is going to happen,” Grebien said during a recent tour of the area. “It’s the right investment.”
There’s more than 2 million square feet of vacant or under-utilized mill buildings near the train station site. A few hundred loft apartments have already been created, and it’s not far from the Guild, an outpost of Pawtucket’s thriving craft-brewing sector. Grebien can imagine a day when the train station district is filled with loft dwellers and activities catering to them.
“We have easy access from the highway, we’re a much more affordable community and we have the space available,” he said, “so the commuter rail is going to bring the new generation, if you will.”
The new train station is expected to open late next year or in early 2021. But a boomlet of nearby development is hardly a sure thing. As Grebien acknowledges, this is due in part to how construction and rehab costs here are about the same as in Boston, but the rents that can be charged in Rhode Island are far less: “To get the development that we need and that scale of development, there’s a gap in the financing. So one of the tools that we’re requesting is TIF legislation – it’s a super TIF legislation – which would give some state dollars to help fill that gap.”
TIF is tax incremental financing. With a TIF, developers get a significant break on their taxes for a set number of years. Legislation to create separate TIF districts around the train station site and downtown Pawtucket has been introduced in the General Assembly. Tax deals are part of new development even in downtown Providence, so it’s not surprising that they’re considered a necessary part of creating growth in Pawtucket. But getting the incentives to spark growth is more of a challenge for communities outside Rhode Island’s largest city.
In the face of these hurdles, the 51-year-old Grebien is affable and outgoing. Pawtucket voters elected him to his fifth two-year term last year with more than 70 percent of the vote. Even with that level of support, Grebien keeps a framed photo in his City Hall office showing his two children holding a sign with the unexpected message, “Dump Grebien.”
“During the last campaign one of the candidates had put the ‘Dump Grebien’ sign,” he said. “It’s a reality check. We have some fun with it, too. So I had them take the picture and they gave me that for Christmas. It’s a reality that as much as we think we’re doing the right things, there are people out there who have concerns.”
Those concerns are real. One of the biggest looming threats is a possible move out of Pawtucket by toy-maker Hasbro. If Hasbro goes, Grebien has warned that could mean the loss of 15,000 jobs, and $60 million in earnings, for Pawtucket, East Providence and Central Falls.
This potential departure by a key business means more uncertainty for Pawtucket. But dealing with uncertainty while trying to nudge the city forward has become a familiar task for Mayor Grebien.
