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Nemerson: City Hall’s next development chief?
Democratic mayoral candidate Toni Harp revealed her economic development vision Wednesday — surrounded by some familiar faces.
The faces were especially familiar to people who experienced the development policies of another mayor: Not John DeStefano. Not John Daniels, the mayor before him. But the late Mayor Biagio “Ben” DiLieto, who ran New Haven in the 1980s.
New Haven went through a development boom in those years. Four of the people who took a leading part in high-profile development deals at the time, or helped DiLieto chart his development strategy, resurfaced to surround Harp at the head of a sixth-floor conference room table Wednesday morning.
They showed up to help Harp unveil a 10-point economic development plan for the city. Harp is running for mayor against independent Justin Elicker in the Nov. 5 general election.
The 10-point plan is full of specific ideas, such as urging Metro-North to institute a one-hour express train to New York, extending the bike- and pedestrian-friendly “Complete Streets” program to more neighborhoods, opening walk-in and mobile “small business centers” as well as a “‘one-stop-shop small-business incubator” geared to women and minority-owned businesses; and opening city jobs to New Haven Works participants.
Click here to read the whole plan.
The plan also calls for “appointing an advisory committee to work with prospective developers to include local businesses in their plans, and encourage partnerships between major investment groups and local developers.” In response to a question Wednesday, Harp said that would not mean a replay of the efforts of the DeStefano administration to require international bidders on the prospective (and never-built) Long Wharf mall project to hire the Fusco Corporation (major mayor campaign donors and fundraisers) as a partner. She said she would pursue a “non-prescriptive” policy of generally encouraging local involvement in development projects. (Click on the video at the top of the story to watch her remarks.)
The event highlighted not just the specifics of the plan, but the people who put it together. They were assembled around Harp in a conference room of the Granite Square project at the corner of Audubon and State streets. Harp used the event to present the 22-member team she put together to help her chart economic development policy.
She said she brought together leading business minds of different points of view. “We need to work with the brightest and the best,” she said.
From left: Pearce, Harp, Sklarz, Avallone. At rear: Campaign staffers Maya Welfare, Andrea Scott, and Jason Bartlett.
Four key members sat beside her at the front of the room:
• Matthew Nemerson, a co-chair of the committee. At Wednesday’s event, Nemerson detailed Harp’s development plan in a PowerPoint presentation. Nemerson ran the Chamber of Commerce in the 1980s and 1990s. Before that, he helped found Science Park. He currently chairs the city’s parking authority. Nemerson ran for mayor earlier this year, then dropped out of the race to endorse Harp and serve as one of her campaign co-chairs. He is a leading candidate to serve as the city’s next development administrator if Harp wins the mayoral election.
• Barbara Pearce, Harp’s other committee co-chair. She heads Pearce Real Estate, developers of the successful Whitney-Grove office building and townhouses during the DiLieto era. Pearce was an influential voice on development during the DiLieto era. She has served on, and led, the boards of many civic organizations since then, from Long Wharf Theatre to the Chamber of Commerce.
• Mark Sklarz, who developed the Granite Square project along with Starter Sportswear founder David Beckerman. The deal for the project was struck during the DiLieto administration. It included a 25-year (which turned into a 27-year) parking subsidy, which led to taxpayers paying for empty parking spaces at the building for years.
• Anthony Avallone, a former state senator who left office in 1992 after years of scandals involving his conflicting roles as zoning attorney, legislator, development commissioner, and developer. He developed a lucrative, go-to zoning practice during the DiLieto ‘80s, regularly appearing before the zoning board to win clients relief at the same time he served as both a state senator and city development commissioner. The administration gave him and a team of fellow politically connected developers a tax break on a development project in the Hill that Avallone simultaneously had to vote on as a development commissioner. He represented developers in disputes with his state senate constituents; he also was hired by banks to evict tenants who happened to be his constituents.
Brain-trusters Avallone & Scott.
Harp’s team includes new faces on New Haven’s business scene as well, such as up-and-coming Realtor Roberta Hoskie, Newhallville inventor Fitz Walker, UNITE/HERE researcher Mandi Jackson, and limo-service owner and idea-popping city development commissioner Antoine Scott. Others on the committee include CEO Michael Giordano of Giordano Construction Company of Branford and Michael Barbaro of the New Haven Realtors Association.
Her campaign has emphasized her longstanding ties to different constituencies in New Haven, portraying her as the candidate better able to bring all parts of New Haven together in order to govern.
Times Change
The Granite garage’s top deck.
After the press event Wednesday, Nemerson spoke about the Granite Square garage as an example of how development ideas evolve as times change.
The Granite Square deal was struck in the late 1980s.
To lure Sklarz and Beckerman to build the (eventual) two Granite Square glass office towers on top of State Street surface lot, the city offered taxpayer sweeteners, a common practice in the DiLieto ‘80s. The city agreed to pay for much of the parking for a quarter century. It agreed to pay 43 percent of the developers’ mortgage to build the garage (the mortgage was refinanced at $8.9 million two years into the project, in 1990); and to pay on top of that to lease and run the garage, in effect guaranteeing that the developers would make money on the parking spaces whether or not anyone ever parked there.
For years hardly anyone parked there. The developers got their money; the parking authority ate the cost. Today most of the spaces are filled.
The parking authority’s lease expires on March 31, 2015, at which point the mortgage will be fully paid. The authority’s annual payments have varied; it paid $625,276 in total expenses for the garage in fiscal year 2013, according to Chief Financial Officer Brian Seholm.
Nemerson argued Wednesday that the deal made sense at the time. City officials felt they needed to preserve the parking that would disappear when the new building went up on surface lots. So it subsidized the developer’s costs for those spots in the new garage.
On top of that, Nemerson said, the city wanted to induce developers to build in the city. That’s why officials agreed to cover the cost of the developers’ clients’ parking as well.
As it turned out, the city didn’t need those lost parking spaces after all. Other parking was built nearby. And a recession hit the city.
Fast forward to 2013. The DeStefano administration has taken a different approach to parking: Rather than subsidizing parking spots, it is encouraging developers to build less parking that required by zoning laws. The idea is to build a denser city more reliant on walkers and cyclists and users of mass transit. That fits into a larger current trend toward “new urbanism.” Read about that debate here and here.
Nemerson (pictured speaking with the Register’s Mary O’Leary) said Wednesday he agrees with that new approach. He noted that the cost of building a parking space has increased from around $10,000 to $35,000 over recent decades. He noted that the 360 State Street parking garage has empty spaces.
“If a building doesn’t create enough demand for people to pay for parking spaces,” he now declared, then it doesn’t make sense to pass along to taxpayers the cost of building them.
Do we really want to go back to 1980s ideas about waterfront development?
Senator Harp's development statement is very weak compared to Elicker's 75 solutions - and it's also quite difficult to believe that it was written by her, given her many odd statements about development at the various debates over the past year.
For example, her comments about fitting more cars into downtown, and her claiming support for slower speed limits (something most other cities are doing) at one debate and then refusing to consider them when interviewed a couple weeks later on the same question by the New Haven Independent.
Also, where is Mr. Brancati in the picture here? He was key to Nemerson's campaign, which folded into Harp's.