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The city of Somerville approved a tax increment financing deal on Oct. 23 that would offer a ten-year, $18 million property tax break to TransMedics — an organ-care technology company — in hopes of motivating the company’s move to Assembly Park.

Bringing a large industry player like TransMedics to the city is part of a broader plan to integrate Somerville with the greater Boston area, according to Rachel Nadkarni, Somerville’s director of economic development.

The move is also expected to support the city’s financial health by expanding their tax base, as well as bring at least 900 full-time jobs to the Assembly facility.

“It doesn’t make sense for us to stay in the northern suburbs,” CEO of TransMedics Waleed H. Hassanein said.

“We wanted to be closer to Cambridge and closer to Boston to attract the best talent from the Boston market,” he added.

The company intends to have their headquarters, manufacturing, and clinical laboratories all in one place. The Assembly Park location offers several advantages over their current Andover location, maintaining highway accessibility but adding public transport connections to the rest of Boston.

BioMed Realty, a Blackstone portfolio company that owns and operates life science real estate across the country, owns the 500,000 square foot property at 188 Assembly Park Drive into which TransMedics would move. The lease between BioMed and TransMedics has yet to be formalized.

Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne said during a city council meeting on Oct. 23 that the arrival of TransMedic would aid the city’s finances amid a budget deficit in the coming years.

Ballantyne addressed the potential for TransMedics’ move to ensure high quality jobs for the city and “fill an entire building that is currently vacant,” according to the City Council’s meeting minutes.

If TransMedics confirms the move, the city of Somerville can expect an additional $41 million over ten years in tax revenue from the company’s investment into the building, according to Nadkarni.

“We want the jobs, and we want folks living and working locally,” she said. “That’s people here day to day, going out, buying coffee, getting lunch, and supporting our small businesses during the daytime.”

“Somerville wants to be part of the ecosystem, and wants to be able to support the growth of that industry that is so vital to all of the greater Boston area,” Nadkarni added.

A confirmed move would be a significant development for the city, Mark Tang, a Boston commercial developer and the head of development and construction at Foxfield Construction, said.

“What’s exciting and heartening for me is that this is not biomed research and development, but this is actually biomedical manufacturing,” he said.

Many other biomedical or pharmaceutical companies in the Cambridge and Boston area are focused on research and development activity, typically contracting their manufacturing elsewhere in the country.

Tang drew a comparison between Somerville and Seaport in the late 2010s, when the city of Boston used similar tax incentives that enticed Vertex Pharmaceuticals away from Kendall Square.

“You go down to Seaport any given weekend now, it’s a completely new neighborhood of the city of Boston — and it really transformed that region from a sea of parking lots,” he added.

The goal of the tax incentives, according to Tang, is to help a municipality grow their economic base, but also “create something that has some lasting effects” — which often come in the form of community benefits from development projects like Assembly Park.

Somerville, and Assembly Park in particular, has a rich history of manufacturing dating back to the 1920s when the Ford Motor Company operated local assembly plants for its cars, and later, tracked vehicles for Allied forces during World War II.

“What better story than for manufacturing to come back and flourish, yet again in a region called Assembly Square. Historically, it was where Ford cars were assembled,” Tang said.

—Staff writer Stephanie Dragoi can be reached at stephanie.dragoi@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Thamini Vijeyasingam can be reached at thamini.vijeyasingam@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @vijeyasingam.