BILLINGTON

PAWTUCKET — Developer Lance J. Robbins is a real estate lawyer based in Los Angeles. Tourism director Robert D. Billington is Blackstone Valley born and bred.

The two men live thousands of miles apart, but both have had a major impact on the city and its redevelopment.

In recognition of that impact, the Pawtucket Foundation honored them at its fifth annual awards celebration, which took place in the Pawtucket Armory last night.

Billington, 57, received the foundation’s Heritage Award for his leadership of the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council. Robbins, 60, was named the foundation’s Person of the Year.

Robbins’s company, Urban Smart Growth, is carving Hope Artiste Village, a hip urban community, out of the sprawling Hope Webbing complex on Main Street in Woodlawn.

Richard C. Davis, executive director of the Pawtucket Foundation, said Robbins is poised to begin an even bigger project –– redeveloping the mill complex on Pine Street that contains the old Paramount Card company. A group of investors that Robbins assembled bought the card company out of receivership last year.

Billington was honored for the more than 20 years he has spent making a tourist destination of an area that “when he started must have looked like an old, frayed-around the edges industrial landscape,” Davis said.

Billington’s efforts on behalf of the Blackstone Valley have been so effective, Davis said, that people who live here now identify themselves as Valley residents. He has taken the vision behind the John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor, Davis said, and made it real.

The Pawtucket Foundation is a group of local civic and business leaders seeking to encourage the city’s redevelopment.

Billington, who is on the foundation’s board of directors, has been active with Davis on a number of foundation-backed initiatives, including the effort to beautify Broad Street and the campaign to persuade the state Department of Transportation to consider an attractive design for the soon-to-be replaced Route 95 Pawtucket River Bridge.

“Of course, we’re thrilled” to receive the Heritage Award, Billington said. “It’s not just to me. It’s also to the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council” whose staff members deserve a lot of the credit, he said, working diligently behind the scenes.

“I’m the guy that they can identify, but it’s really been a group effort,” Robbins said, referring to the Hope Webbing project.

To date, about $12.5 million has been spent on redeveloping the 600,000-square-foot former mill complex. The space is already about 75 percent spoken for, according to Robbins..

“It’s worked out,” he said, “in terms of creating a community where people want to be.”

jcastell@projo.com