BDCC celebrates 50 Years

Vermont Business Magazine, Aug 01, 2004 by Edelstein, Art

The Brattleboro Development Credit Corp celebrated its 50th anniversary June 24 with gathering at the new Windham County Career Center in Brattleboro.

Attending the event were luminaries from BDCC's past, a number of current tenants of the BDCC-owned Cotton Mill, and guest speakers including Governor Jim Douglas and former Vermont Commissioner of Education Ray McNulty. Over 100 members of the Windham County business community attended the late afternoon event where they visited with Cotton Mill businesspeople and shared memories of the development of BDCC.

BDCC's creation was, in many ways, the model for Vermont's other economic development agencies, said executive director Kurt Isaacson. Back in 1954, according to a recent BDCC history, economic events in Brattleboro were to lead to the creation of a new economic funding entity. The Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation, BDCC as it is commonly known, was created that year to help the community retain a local business in need of a new plant.

Using a state-created organization, attorney John Kristensen and others helped build the local corporation. As the first local development credit corporation of its kind in Vermont, BDCC has paved the way for other communities to use this type of structure to help them finance local projects.

As one of several guest speakers at the BDCC celebration, Kristensen, now in his 80s, reminisced on how Brattleboro in the 1950s had been a printing town. The initial reason for BDCC's creation, he said, was to help the George McKibban Co, a Brooklyn based printer with a Vermont subsidiary, Alan S. Browne, remain in Vermont. That company wanted to expand and build a new plant and was also looking at a Connecticut site.

Through a number of exploratory meetings, recalled Kristensen, local business leaders decided to set up a separate corporation, which would buy land and build the plant and then turn it over to the Browne Company.

According to Kristensen, "What we did in Brattleboro was to set up a new corporation to buy and build the plant."

To do this the parties followed the state's model. By 1954 Vermont had set up the Vermont Development Credit Corp. The group Kristensen was working with on the Browne project applied to the governor, the state attorney general, and the Vermont Department of Banking and Insurance to set up a similar corporation, which would be named the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation.

"We were able to set up a Vermont approved development credit corporation of our own," Kristensen explained. BDCC was officially incorporated July 19, 1954, and Harold Putnam was its first president.

The goal of this non-profit arm of the local Chamber of Commerce was to encourage "new enterprise in the industrial, agricultural and recreational fields for the general welfare of the people of Windham County."

BDCC, as this new entity would become known, had the right to issue bonds and the interest paid on these bonds would be tax free to the bondholder.

At this time BDCC began a bond drive in Brattleboro to raise $225,000 toward the $625,000 plant expansion expense. Bankers pledged they would lend money to anyone who wanted to buy a bond. Local businesses set up payroll deduction plans for people who did not have the ready cash to invest. Bonds were in $500 and $100 denominations.

Eventually over 150 bondholders signed up and the bond drive was oversold and $11,000 was returned to investors. Local papers published information about the bond drive to bring attention to the bond drive.

The building, now known as the Book Press, was fully financed and completed in August 1955.

According to Kristensen, BDCC had created a model for project financing that would have other states and other Vermont towns querying as to how it was done. As he pointed out in an interview, "in 1955 this was a new concept for funding projects - raising money on the streets of a town to keep a business in town."

In the early years, the Board of Trustees ran BDCC. In those years BDCC had no paid staff and all work was done voluntarily.

According to former BDCC president Jim Roberts, BDCC "was a driving force" in local business financing. By 1984, the 30th year of BDCCs existence, 75 percent of the industrial jobs available in greater Brattleboro were created with the assistance of BDCC. In the late 1950s and early 1960s BDCC helped Boise Cascade, now FiberMark acquire land on Justin Holden Drive and construct its current building. Stowe Mills, a natural food wholesaler, built its facility on property across from today's C&S Wholesale Grocers.

According to former town manager Corwin "Corky" Elwell, who served from 1960 to 198 9, "We were changing from an old economy to a new economy. We were in a state of change losing old businesses like Estey Organ and Birkshire Spinning. Those industries were going out and there Was a great need to fill that void. Fortunately BDCC came on board as those industries were leaving."

Brattleboro was the first Vermont community affected by the construction of I91. By 1960 Exits One to Three had been constructed and this had a strong impact on the area. According to Elwell, the interstate "really opened up Vermont similar to when the railroads came through a century earlier. It was the transportation link of the day."