Markeshia Ricks Photo
State panel co-chair Patricelli hunts for ideas in New Haven.
Monday felt like Groundhog Day for Matthew Nemerson, as he watched a parade of government and business leaders assembled in New Haven pitch how to move Connecticut’s economy forward.
So he decided to change the script.
The leaders talked about the need for a better trained workforce. They talked about the need to have towns and cities work together. (Holy grail: “Regionalism.”) They talked about dramatically improving the state’s transportation system. They talked about keeping underfunded cities vibrant, and money flowing into state coffers.
Nemerson, New Haven’s economic development chief, heard all that Monday as a state Commission on Fiscal Stability and Economic Growth brought its roadshow to York Street for a hearing leading up to a report it’s supposed to provide to legislators on how to “achieve state government fiscal stability and promote economic growth and competitiveness within the state.”
Nemerson: We’ve been here before.
Nemerson has heard people in similar positions make the same point for decades. In fact, as the former head of New Haven’s Chamber of Commerce, he made the same point at similar forums 20 years ago. So did Oz Griebel, back then drafting a strategic plan as head of the MetroHartford Alliance. Griebel was also back making those points Monday, now as a third-party candidate for governor.
The question after Monday’s hearing: With the state facing persistent crippling deficits and losing big employers to neighboring states, will the words translate into action this time?
And will it welcome new ideas? If so, Nemerson and Mayor Toni Harp offered the commission some.
The commission, which was formed in December, held the hearing Monday at “Yale on York” —a meeting space on the bottom floor of a parking garage between Chapel and Crown— to gather ideas it can share with lawmakers. Commissioners will deliver a report to lawmakers in March.
Actually, it was just four days before Groundhog Day. Close enough for Nemerson to feel like he was in a scene from the famous Bill Murray movie about the day that keeps repeating.
“Every issue that’s come up this morning, that has come out in most of this hearing,” has already been submitted to the state in previous plans, Nemerson noted in his testimony before the group. “Everything I was going to say has already been said.”
So Nemerson decided to cut to the chase. In short order, he told the commission, it is time for Connecticut to be different. Different about how the state sees itself as a place between two booming metro areas. Different when it came to its taxes and development incentives. And different by not continuing to hamstring its cities.
“We have to stop making mistakes that we’ve made,” he said. “Doing the same things over and over again doesn’t work. We have to change governance. We have to let cities contract with their suburbs to provide services. We have to look more like other places that have looked at the world — looked 20 years ahead — and been strategically responsible for changing how they do business.”
Among his new additions to the script: Tax commuters to cities. Have a local city department provide services to neighboring towns. Have the University of Connecticut invest more in the Stamford-to-Bridgeport economy.
Redeker: We’re working together.
And he challenged state Transportation Commissioner James Redeker, a commission member, to stop defending bureaucratic turf and let New Haven build a new second garage for Union Station.
“So I would say, Commissioner Redeker if the state doesn’t have the money to let New Haven build its parking garage, give us the chance to do it,” Nemerson said. “Let us work with North Haven to build its train station. There are ways we can create civic infrastructure, and that’s what Bruce [Katz author of New Localism] said. Sometimes cities and metro areas can do things that states and other places can’t.”
Mayor Toni Harp testified about the need to overhaul CT Transit’s outdated bus routes, which make it take hours for people to reach jobs —- if they can reach them at all after 5 p.m. or on weekends.
“Looking inward, New Haven will benefit from a revised approach by Connecticut transit and rerouted bus lines no longer favoring the hub and spoke ridership but adding concentric orbits around downtown New Haven to help match workers with jobs and shoppers with stores,” Harp said. “Hand-in-hand with these improvements New Haven will benefit from an intermodal transportation center at an enhanced Union Station with a new parking garage where buses and shuttles can meet trains and connect New Haven with the shoreline and Fairfield County along with Boston, New York and points beyond.”
Harp: What about Tweed?
Harp praised the upcoming expansion of the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield train line. She said a similar forward effort should be focused on making sure that Tweed Airport is part of the state’s transportation agenda.
She also put in a plug for a less obvious type of transportation: the information highway. She said statewide one gigabit Internet access would help fuel the state’s research and technology sectors.
“Connecticut must do all it can to embrace the emerging public utility of the 21st century and make it as universally available to residents, businesses, schools, and governments as running water and electricity are,” she said.
She also noted that given that cities like New Haven have more than 50 percent of the property on their grand list exempted from taxes but “are relied upon to host and bear the cost of a broad range of regional services.” In absence of a county government, “the current system of state aid to Connecticut cities is simply unsustainable,” she said. The most recent numbers show that 54 percent of the city’s property is tax-exempt, Harp noted. But the state has cut its reimbursements to the city under the PILOT (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) program.
Virginia Kozlowski, CEO of Economic Development Corporation of New Haven, said the Greater New Haven region is home to health care, bioscience, higher education and advanced manufacturing but it also is home to a growing hospitality industry. New Haven has more than one million visitors each year, many coming for business conferences and association meetings because of Yale, medical-related travel to Yale-New Haven Hospital and educational tourism.
“Our inherent strength is threatened by an aging transportation infrastructure including rail unreliability and highway traffic congestion,” she said. “Many residents in South-Central Connecticut are employed in the hospitality industry and their jobs depend on robust transportation services for both business and leisure travel.
“If we are not prepared to provide an outstanding experience from beginning to end another state will,” she added.
City Transit Chief Doug Hausladen, the only self-admitted millennial to testify Monday, said as he talks to his peers who are just starting families and considering whether they can raise their children in the city, access to a quality education comes up. Maintaining competitive wages and family and medical leave comes up. The ability of a spouse to obtain a job that doesn’t have more than 30-minute commute comes up.
He encouraged commissioners to have the state reconsider actions that “spite our future” such as cutting public financing, cutting the government transparency provided by the Connecticut Television Network, and not having conversations about redistricting. When it comes to transit he sees value in getting the commute to New York down to an hour, but it’s a plan that has to be funded to happen. He also said he sees CTfastrack rapid transit line as a model for the state of how government can “put our heads together” to develop “good affordable plans.”
“I look forward to redesigning our bus system down here to realign with our investment in Shoreline East — to realign with our investment in the Hartford line,” he said. “We’ve got to get away from this notion that TOD [transit oriented development] is building a parking lot next to a train station rather than redesigning your bus route to get to that train.”
DOT’s Redeker said after meeting that for him, too, much of the talk sounded familiar — in his case, the ideas he has rejected from New Haven on transportation. He noted that his department and New Haven are working together on a transportation study that is part of a statewide effort to get a handle on the needs and how to best address them.
Robert E. Patricelli, one of the commission co-chairs, said the group will hold a couple of more hearings before making its report in March.
He welcomed the tight deadline. “It focuses the mind,” he said. “We’re already starting to see how a handful of ideas might change things.”
The fact that thousands of cities have built tens of thousands of miles of protected bicycle lanes over the past decade, but Connecticut as an entire state has built just one mile-long stretch alongside I-95, is a good indicator of how behind our ConnDOT and state government are.
It is almost as if nobody at these state meetings has ever gotten around the state by means other than hopping into an expensive car and parking at a downtown parking garage or office park.