News Source: Providence Journal Bulletin

Date Publised: 01:00 AM EST on Friday January 5, 2007

By Richard Salt, Journal Staff Writer

Note: All newclips are extracted in their editorial entirety and are not altered by
Marforth Group in any way.

Providence Journal East Bay Edition

Middletown - The town has decided to hire a consultant to help develop the local economy, with an emphasis on retaining businesses already here and bolstering the defense-related industry.This week, the Town Council approved spending $30,000 to hire The Mayforth Group, a consultant with offices in Providence and Washington and which is headed by a former aide to Rep. Patrick Kennedy.

“This will help us understand our business trends,” Chairman Paul Rodrigues said before the council’s unanimous vote. The study, he said, would provide an “opportunity to retain our exiting businesses” and to “potentially attract new businesses.”

The consultant will identify what the town can do to foster economic development and create a marketing and advertising plan. The work is expected to take six months.

The Mayforth Group has been a consultant to other Rhode Island municipalities, including Cumberland and North Providence. It was founded by its current principal, Rick McAuliffe, a former district director for Kennedy and legislative assistant for U.S. Sen. Jack Reed. Other Mayforth clients include the Newport County Chamber of Commerce, Johnson & Wales University, the United Food & Commercial Workers, Professional Records and American Sail Training Association.

The hiring of Mayforth grew out of a 2005 “build-out analysis” by Pare Corporation and Ninigret Partners that indicated that the town had almost 1 million square feet of office space available, with more than three-quarters of it in the Aquidneck Corporate Park. The space is valued at roughly $1 per square foot.

The analysis also showed that the town stood to gain more by retaining local businesses and helping them expand than luring companies from outside the area.

“The study suggested … that we should not expect to be able to compete with other areas in New England for large-scale tenants due to the availability of high-quality, reasonably [priced] office space elsewhere and the lack of any speculative building of office space in Middletown. The study concluded that it is important that the town attempt to address the needs of our existing business community in order that they will stay and grow in Middletown,” newly elected Councilman Robert M. Silvia wrote in a letter to the council in his capacity as chairman of the economic development advisory committee. “We must also promote our strengths, particularly our strong defense-related economy and quality of life to attract more small defense and high-tech businesses to Middletown.”

In the memorandum, Silvia noted that the commission was recommending The Mayforth Group over the only other bidder, Ninigret Partners, which proposed doing the work for $42,300.

Mayforth, as requested by the town, proposed a three-phase project as follows:

Phase 1 — A focus group made up of representatives of a dozen local businesses will attend a series of meetings to help identify trends and issues in Middletown. These topics will become the subject of a survey to be mailed electronically to every one of the 800 businesses in the Chamber of Commerce database. A report on the survey findings and recommendations of Mayforth will be presented to the Economic Development Advisory Committee.

Phase 2 —Mayforth will create a prioritized list of capital-improvement projects aimed at stimulating economic development and seek grants and other federal and state funds to finance them.

Phase 3 — Mayforth, working with the Chamber of Commerce, will develop a marketing and advertising strategy to “highlight the changes and enhancements to the local business environment as well as attract new businesses to the area.” The effort will result in pamphlets that can be distributed and advertising spots and news releases.

While the study is expected to take six months, “it is understood that the actual fundraising component of the implementation phase would be an ongoing effort,” Sylvia wrote in the memorandum. In regard to the proposed capital improvements, Rodrigues said he expected that landscaping and other aesthetic improvements would be made to the Aquidneck Corporate Park.The park, he said, “is something we take for granted. … No improvements have been made there in years.”