By Susan A. Baird
PBN Web Editor
JOHNSTON – FM Global broke ground Wednesday on a $60 million headquarters complex off Central Avenue near its current offices on Atwood Avenue.
The complex will include a three-story parking garage and four-story, 340,000-square-foot office building behind the AIPSO building on Central Avenue, plus a day care center near the employee entrance to the site.
The new building will have a smaller footprint than the company’s current leased offices, but make better use of space, FM Global said when it unveiled its plans on Dec. 13. (READ MORE) It is designed to accommodate future expansion, and to meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) “green” building standards.
FM Global’s lease on its current headquarters – purchased in April 2007 by Capital Lease Funding Inc. (NYSE: LSE) – expires in July 2009. The company had been exploring possible alternatives for about a year before it settled on the Johnston property, a 93-acre parcel the company already owned.
“Determining a convenient location for a new headquarters and campus – and being mindful of the needs of our 800 [local] employees – were key factors in the decision,” Shivan S. Subramaniam, FM Global’s chairman and CEO, said in December. But, he added, “securing approval of our plans and cooperation from state and town officials also was important in our evaluation process.”
State and city officials had teamed up to expedite permitting for the process through a rarely-used economic development program that involves the granting of a Certificate of Critical Economic Concern (CCEC). The process “showed how, when we bring the whole power of the state together in a highly coordinated way, we can keep and grow high-wage jobs,” Saul Kaplan, executive director of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, told Providence Business News. (READ MORE)
The program was so important to retaining FM Global – already the state’s largest private employer, the company last year expanded its local work force by 13 percent (READ MORE) – that the EDC decided to expand and revise the program.
But now, in an appeal filed with the Johnston Planning Board, FM Global’s current landlord is contesting the permits the town granted for the project, NBC Channel 10 reports. “The bottom line is, we haven’t been afforded an opportunity to make comments in a public forum,” lawyer Edward Pare told the TV station. Other concerns, he said, include “traffic, storm-water runoff and the impact on wetlands.”
Johnston Mayor Joseph M. Polisena stood behind the town’s decision, however, telling Channel 10 “We feel our Planning Board followed everything to a ‘T.’ There was no violation at all.”
FM Global – a commercial property insurer with roots in Rhode Island that stretch back 170 years – employs 4,700 people around the world, including nearly 1,700 in southern New England, at its Atwood Avenue headquarters, its research campus in Glocester and its offices in Norwood and Waltham, Mass. Additional information is available at www.fmglobal.com.
