Beverly Lures Peabody Manufacturer With Tax Breaks

PEABODY, MA -- Peabody appears poised to lose a manufacturing company to Beverly. Beverly is considering giving a ten-year tax-increment financing deal and tax credits Harmonic Drive Systems Inc., which currently operates a 46,000-square-foot manufacturing facility on Lynnfield Street in Peabody. The new facility in Beverly would be built on five acres of vacant land in Beverly and be 96,000-square-feet, with room to expand with a 35,000-square-foot addition.

"We’ve been working the last couple of weeks with officials from Harmonic Drive to understand what their needs are and help bring them to the City of Beverly," Beverly Planning Director Aaron Clausen told Wicked Local Beverly, which first reported this story. "There’s a lot of opportunity and upside to bringing more manufacturing and high-skilled jobs to the city."

In a tax-increment financing, or TIF, deal, the municipality floats bonds to pay for infrastructure and sometimes construction costs for a private sector developer. Those bonds are repaid used with the additional tax revenue from the higher assessment of the property.

Harmonic Drive Systems makes precision servo actuators, gearheads and gear component sets. Demand for those parts is expected to increase in coming years as companies look to increased use of robotics.

For more on this story, see Wicked Local Beverly. Subscribe to Peabody Patch for more local news and real-time alerts.

Photo by Harmonic Drive Systems Inc.

Dave Copeland can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).