Douglas, MA: Maintaining Small Town Life & Growing the Local Economy

The Town of Douglas, MA is maintaining the balance of small-town rural life with the need to grow the local economy to secure the revenues to support a high level and quality of service to residents.

Douglas is one of the smallest communities in Massachusetts that provides a full range of high-quality services to their residents. These include their K-12 school district, public water supply, public wastewater, 24/7 advanced life support ambulance service, a fully accredited police department, a public library and a social center for senior citizens.

In 2017 it became apparent that the limited tax base of the community was not able to keep pace with the costs of this service commitment. Douglas went through a very contentious process of increasing the tax levy, promising along the way that they would conduct a professional economic development effort to attract business investment and grow the tax base to pick up the financial demands of the services they provided to their residents. The final vote passed the increase with just 14 votes to spare out of 2,656 cast.

They kept their promises. They tapped into volunteer (at first) energy to build a great economic development function that kept persisting and learning despite falling short on their two efforts to attract a major commercial/industrial development. They built a collaborative effort with two neighboring towns and private landholders to redevelop two spent gravel pits next to a significant highway into a development zone. They worked together to achieve federal and state grants for infrastructure improvements necessary to make the development sites “pad ready.” Douglas fully executed the workload, adapting to and overcoming setbacks as they arose. They chose a private developer that did not seek any tax concessions and was willing to partner with them on their terms.

The result has been a 12.5% increase in their taxable value. They have 2 brand new, state of the art logistics centers (a total of 1.75 million square feet) built alongside a highway in their traditional industrial area. There may be as many as 3 more buildings (for another 2.5 million square feet of space) built that will benefit from their infrastructure improvements. One of the tenants that will occupy the smaller of the two buildings might have left the state altogether if they did not have the option to move to Douglas. Many of the jobs that will be created are high paying, mid-to-high skilled positions.

The fundamental character of the Town has not been changed. Douglas do expect a lot more vehicular traffic eventually. But the small-town character and built environment of the community are intact. One can still directly access nature in unspoiled form in the large state-and-privately-owned forest holdings in town. So far, they still have no traffic lights…. And very few streetlights.

They have kept our library open and re-built our capital asset base. Consensus, collaboration, persistence, decisiveness, integrity and a lot of hard work made all of this come together.