Two weeks ago, Evergreen Solar, located on Barnum Road in Devens, announced that it was abandoning its two-year-old plant and moving operations to China. Our area will lose 800 jobs, and the commonwealth will lose most of its $58 million investment in the company.
In 2007, private investment professionals who understood the economics of solar-power panel manufacturing knew that Massachusetts was making a bad investment in Evergreen. It was clear to these experts that, like so many industries, low-cost manufacturing was the key competitive strength necessary to be successful. And Massachusetts was not the place to achieve that objective.
A year ago, Evergreen opened an assembly plant in China, and began laying people off at Devens. The management must have made the decision at that time, that they would be moving everything to China. They didn’t make the announcement public, however, until after the November election. Could it be that the Patrick Administration had convinced them to hold off?
Governor Patrick first met Mark Farber, a founder of Evergreen, at a “green” political fundraiser in 2006. Farber got Patrick interested in the company and the governor spearheaded an effort to win the Devens plant away from some lower-labor-cost Southern states. Patrick later appointed Farber to the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund as an investment decision maker, a potentially lucrative job.
If the plant closing had become public as an “October Surprise,” we would now have Governor Baker. Even the far-left liberals would have had a hard time voting for a bone-headed administration that didn’t understand the economics of the industry in which they were putting $58 million of taxpayer funds.
In a newspaper interview last week, Patrick didn’t show any remorse for such a poor investment decision with very large consequences. He said, “I think we did what we could have and should have.”
This does not bode well for the future. Either the governor hasn’t learned anything from this debacle, or he is arrogant enough to believe that he can continue to make ideologically based, financial decisions without any consequences.
Anthony J. Marolda
Jacob Gates Road
