By Linda Scott
Watertown Resident
This is the second part of three looking at the impacts of the Life Science Industry on Watertown. Part One focused on the impact on housing and the environmental impacts. In Part Two, we’ll look at the costs to the City of Watertown to maintain safe control over the Life Science industry and its effects on our community.
Let me repeat the quick caveat from Part One: In bringing these issues up, I am, myself, presenting an unbalanced scenario, in response to that 100% positive view of Sam Ghilardi’s report on bio labs in Watertown, so please keep that in mind.
Watertown Building Inspections:
Another note: given all of the construction planned and in progress, do we, in fact, have the adequate City resources to assure that construction regulations and procedures are being followed and inspections and checkins are frequent enough to catch scofflaws?
Infrastructure Costs:
Costs of other infrastructure expenses that are supplied by the City would be good to know about as well. Again, these are the results of construction projects as a whole.
I’ve been at meetings where these new developments come to request and receive street redirecting and new sidewalks, a common complaint/need of City residents and taxpayers, by the way.
And, in a related matter, is there an unseen, unbalanced and unrecognized cost of City time spent devoted to responding to the needs of big businesses? How much city council and city staff time is devoted to dealing with powerful, demanding developers, who, for example, want to install a huge neon sign on their property? Does this take an unfair amount of time away from attention to small businesses and neighborhood matters?
More city costs (and taxpayer bills):
Watertown Fire Department:
The fire department is fully on board. They even caught an illegal, unregistered lab! It would be good to have an estimate of what it costs the City per year for their (very necessary) lab inspectional work and for any other fire department expenses incurred by the labs.
For instance, we have fire fighters who have had many hours of extra training to be prepared for any emergency at a lab. They can receive assistance from the Massachusetts Hazardous Material Response Team, which has been formed for emergencies like these.
Police Department:
According to Sam Ghilardi’s report, 1,736 (life science) jobs have been added to Watertown over the last decade. This comprises 11% of our entire Watertown workforce. I’m assuming that all of these large buildings get a fair amount of clients and vendors as well.
Have we had a significant uptick in traffic and safety issues over the past ten years? What policing expenses have increased as the numbers of life science firms’ employees, business clients and vendors have increased?
Again, these are unmentioned issues related to bio lab construction and operation in Sam Ghilardi’s report, but are well known to Watertown residents.
Possible Overbuilding for One Industry:
We’ve already seen the potential dangers of being a “one-industry town.” One example is building vacancies as that industry falters. According to Sam Ghilardi’s report, Watertown has a 45% vacancy rate in life science buildings as of the end of 2025, or in Sam’s words “availability remains elevated at 45%” in life science buildings as of the end of 2025. See an example here: real estate listing.
In Watertown, these bio lab buildings are plentiful, very expensive to build, very specific to a purpose…scientific research, and not easily adapted to other purposes. In my opinion, it’s sort of like building a strong house on shifting (financial) sands.
Here’s an article written just days ago (February 20, 2026) by STATNews, an arm of the Boston Globe which covers health, medicine, biotech and life sciences, on the cuts to scientific research. The title: “With Federal Research Funding Uncertain, States Debate New Science Initiatives.” See: STATNews
And here’s Crunchbase News, a digital publication that follows investment in tech: The title: “Biotech Share of U.S. Funding Hits Lowest Point in Crunchbase History.” See: Crunchbase News
My experience attending Watertown Bio Safety Committee meetings is that even in the financial “good times,” it was the wild west. When it was time for companies to re-register yearly with the Watertown Health Department, many companies hadn’t kept the city up to date with important changes. Manager names sounded familiar, for instance, but only because they worked at a different company than they had the year before.
It was hard to get in touch with companies…they’d moved, closed down, changed names, or were under new leadership, etc. It was a bit of a nightmare. Perhaps with the fragility of the current economy more people and companies are staying put for now.
Perhaps Sam can provide us with the answer to these questions: What is the average stay of a bio lab business in Watertown? What’s the shortest and longest stay so far? And how about the percentage of volatility in the workforce? If Sam could share those numbers (I’m guessing he has them), I’d appreciate it.
Here’s a recent (February 2026) example:
According to “Watertown Bio,” written by Sam Ghilardi:
“Orna Therapeutics to Be Acquired By Eli Lilly Last week, Orna Therapeutics (headquartered at Arsenal Yards) and Eli Lilly announced a definitive agreement for Eli Lilly to acquire Orna for $2.4 billion including incentives and milestone payments. Orna is using their circular mRNA and lipid nanoparticle delivery technology to develop cell therapies for a range of diseases. Its not clear if the merger means Orna will be leaving Watertown for Lilly’s Fort Point headquarters, and neither company responded to inquiries from Watertown Bio.”
Bio labs are very volatile businesses, opening, closing, being bought out or merging with other companies, moving. So far, the concept of settling in for the long term is foreign to this industry, which makes depending upon them as your tax base a tricky business.
In his report, Sam Ghilardi credits the life science industry with keeping our property taxes in line. I believe that we’ve been very consistent with that for many years before bio labs were being built in Watertown.
Sam might want to speak with owners of small single-family homes in Watertown, whose property taxes went up as much as 20 percent this year, even with the advantages of the life science industry, and there may be more to come!
In a 2021 Watertown News article (see link below), Councilor Angeline Kounelis called the tax increase on homeowners despite the development in town “a difficult pill to swallow.”
She goes on to say: “It is difficult. We as Councilors must be able to communicate to the general public, as they see all of the growth and development going on all around the community and all the associated distresses,” Kounelis said. “It is not easy to tell folks, well, it is a formula and even without this money coming in the formula tells us we are in fact going to see major real estate tax increases and to see this is not going to change within the coming years.”
And here’s what Council President Sideris had to say: “I want to echo what Councilor Kounelis said, and touch on what Tony said. For those of us who have served for a long time we always thought all this growth would bring some relief to the residential tax payer, and it’s not doing that,” Sideris said.
To understand this situation more fully, I encourage you to read the entire article, entitled: “Council Upset that Property Taxes will Rise Despite Big Increases in Commercial Industrial Tax Revenue: https://www.watertownmanews.com/2021/11/24/council-upset-that-property-taxes-will-rise-despite-big-increases-in-commercial-industrial-tax-revenue/
Tomorrow see: It’s All a Balancing Act, Part Three: Linkage Fees and Taxes … They’re Going Up How Much??
A couple of small quibbles. One, police support is a perk to all businesses, isn’t it? Not exclusive to the life sciences industry? The traffic cop who managed quittin’ time at Tufts Health had a huge job keeping busy lanes moving. But it was a necessary expense for the city to provide. (And not much worse than the massive 18-wheelers trying to turn into the driveway at Newlywed Foods just down the street. What a mess that can be.)
The other point is that it’s state law that limits the commercial tax burden, not city regulation. I don’t understand the reasoning behind the limit, but why should that necessarily make commercial development problematic? Maybe because municipal services don’t recoup their investment in taxes? Is that it? (I add as an aside that my Belmont friends were always envious of Watertown’s commercial tax base.)
I absolutely believe safety is a concern, industry standards notwithstanding. As you make abundantly clear, this is an industry that almost defies regulation. Who has the expertise to oversee their work? It sounds like more of a federal job (OSHA?) than a local one.
More thoughts after part three. And MAJOR credit to you for attending all these meetings and following up. “Thank you”doesn’t seem enough. Not that I’m offering more.
I get your point, Josh. Yes, all businesses get this necessary “perk,” but an industry that already comprises 11 percent of the City’s total workforce add to that visitors, vendors, and hazardous waste trucks, etc. coming and going all day long, must singularly represent a high percentage demand on those services all day long (and they’re only half full) …just a thought.
I also see where you’re going on inspections. But the City makes the regulations, the City’s Board of Health is tasked with approving these companies and looking at dangerous/problematic behavior (when/if caught).
To be clear, I am not accusing any company of dangerous wrongdoing. But here’s a simple and ridiculous example of how out of control this can become: a few years ago, our lab fire inspector was doing his job in one lab building, when he noticed a name on a door that looked unfamiliar.
He went back to the Health Department and asked, “Do we have a bio lab named….? I don’t have that name on my list.” No we did not. It seems that one business had broken off into two and had neglected to tell the Health Department. And no one thought this was a problem??? The City Health Department informed them that this was indeed a problem.
Personally, I’d prefer to have a City consultant hired to do these inspections that has bio lab credentials and has worked in a lab themselves, because they’re more likely to take a nuanced look and have productive conversations that will be listened to and followed. We could bring in “the big guns” if behavior doesn’t change.
I look forward to your thoughts on Part Three.
Thank you again Linda for bringing these important topics to light. I wish we could continue this conversation in an open forum that includes the city manager and the health dept. which is underfunded and understaffed, and the staff is underpaid for the immense amount of work they have done already.
Ken Thompson. If you know, you know.