nothin Alexion Flees Cheshire For New Haven | New Haven Independent

Alexion Flees Cheshire For New Haven

Thomas MacMillan Photo

Alexion CEO Leonard Bell points to his company’s new home.

History went into reverse Tuesday, as another major employer announced plans to cross municipal limits on I‑91 — but this time from the suburbs into the city.

The move was a homecoming of sorts for Alexion Pharmaceuticals.

Lured by up to $51 million in state aid, Alexion — which hatched in New Haven, then fled as it grew — is reversing the flight-to-the-suburbs trend and returning its corporate headquarters from Cheshire to New Haven’s new Downtown Crossing project.

In doing so, Alexion defied decades of job-movement out of the city into the suburbs. Just as Downtown Crossing — an effort to fill in an urban-renewal-era neighborhood-splitting mini-highway to nowhere — seeks to reverse decades of damage from suburban-oriented planning.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy (pictured) announced the Alexion news at a 10 a.m. press conference in the parking lot of 2 Church Street South, in the city’s medical district.

Alexion, which started in New Haven in 1992 and then decamped to Cheshire, will be the main tenant at 100 College Street, developer Carter Winstanley’s proposed biomedical building. The new edifice will straddle a mini-highway-to-nowhere that divides downtown from the medical district and the Hill neighborhood. Ten-story 100 College and the street changes surrounding it are the first $135 million phase of Downtown Crossing. The larger plan is to fill in the Route 34 Connector with streets and new development.

Alexion will create up to 300 jobs in New Haven in the first few years, said founder and CEO Leonard Bell. The company plans to relocate its entire Connecticut workforce of 350 employees to 100 College Street once the new building rises in 2015. Winstanley is also the landlord at Alexion’s to-be-vacated Cheshire facility.

The company will be the fourth to take part of Malloy’s First Five program, which grants tax incentives to companies that create jobs in the state. The state is offering up to $51 million in loans, tax breaks, and grants. The city will not have to provide any such incentives.

Mayor John DeStefano and Board of Aldermen President Jorge Perez said the city will continue to develop its jobs pipeline” to help make sure New Haveners are ready to take the Alexion jobs that will become available starting in 2015.

Cluster” Is Key

State Rep. Roland Lemar, Mayor DeStefano, and Alderman Perez.

The reversal of an historical trend was not lost on New Haven Mayor John DeStefano.

For half a century DeStefano’s predecessors watched jobs flee from New Haven to the suburbs for cheaper , more spread-out land, aided by highway access.

Now one of the companies that left, Alexion, is coming back to the center of the city, with hundreds of more employees.

It follows in the footsteps of the Covidien Surgical Devices, which moved its regional headquarters from North Haven to New Haven’s Long Wharf in 2010.

I think there is a pattern,” DeStefano said after the press conference. I think it has to do with the [emerging] medical cluster and the collateral growth that comes out of the cluster.”

Smilow [Cancer Hospital] happens. Then roughly 200,000 square feet of space at 55 Park and 2 Howe St. Then Covidien happened. Then 360 State [the 32-story residential tower, where many medical-related employees live]. Then this happens. I would guess within a year another med school research building happens, an industrial building.”

So the movement of jobs back to the city might have to do with New Haven’s specific economy rather than a broader reversal of regional urban-suburban trends, DeStefano said. This is not happening in Hartford.”

The reversal of fortune sat less well with state Sen. Len Suzio.

Suzio, a Republican who represents Cheshire, said he has a problem when the state starts doling out huge sums of taxpayer money, essentially picking the winners and losers.”

In this case New Haven is the winner and Cheshire is the loser. He said these deals to some extent are an admission that because Connecticut created an unfavorable business climate it must provide large incentives to retain companies.

It’s unclear if the company threatened to leave the state, and he doesn’t necessarily see a movement of companies from suburbs to cities. He said in this instance the company wants to be around other companies in a similar field of work. He said the same held true for Jackson Laboratories, which was given $291 million in state assistance to build a research facility near the University of Connecticut Hospital in Farmington.

Building On Strength

Alexion develops highly targeted therapies, often based on efforts to suppress or stimulate one part of the body’s immune system. It’s among a large group of cutting-edge companies seeking to solve medical problems with novel treatments. Alexion’s focus is largely on finding therapies for extremely rare conditions — affecting 6,000 patients in the U.S., or even fewer — that in many cases have no other treatments available.

The company’s best-known drug is Soliris, which is approved to treat paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria and atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome, rare diseases involving the blood. It’s currently being tested to see whether it’s effective in treating other diseases as well.

Alexion is also developing platforms to manipulate the body to trigger or suppress various mechanisms, which have potential in a wide variety of medical fields, from cancer treatment to metabolic disorders. In addition to the Cheshire facility that will be transferred to New Haven, the company has outposts around the world. They include a research facility in Cambridge, Mass., a manufacturing plant in Rhode Island and regional headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Its New Haven press conference Tuesday morning was held underneath a white canvas canopy in a parking lot overlooking the area where the new building will go up. State and city officials helped themselves to muffins and fruit skewers from tables decorated with the Alexion logo.

We need to build on an industry that we already have a strong foothold in,” Gov. Malloy told the crowd. Biosciences is a $284 billion industry that is primed for long-term and sustained growth in Connecticut,” he said.

It’s good to be back home,” said Bell, when he took the podium. After graduating from Yale Medical School, Bell taught at the school, before leaving to start Alexion in 1992. The company had its early days in a small space at Science Park, before moving to Cheshire 12 years ago.

In 2007, after 15 years of research and investing $800 million, Alexion came out with its breakthrough drug Soliris, in 2007, Bell said.

The company has grown to have operations in 30 countries, he said. Moving the Alexion’s global headquarters to New Haven will help to accelerate” the company’s continued growth, Bell said.

Bell said Alexion chose New Haven because of the opportunity to be near to the other science and medical institutions like Yale. He said later he was also drawn back by New Haven’s restaurants and hotels.

In his comments, Mayor DeStefano recognized a fundamental shift in the city over the last 50 years, from manufacturing to eds and meds” — education and medical services.

Jobs For Whom?

Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman chats with Bell.

Asked later about the new job positions Alexion will be filling, Bell said that Alexion has been hiring for more and more entry-level jobs as it has expanded. However, all of the new jobs will require at least a bachelor’s degree, he said. College degrees will be vital.” So will a background in science of biology.

That’s why the Board of Aldermen’s focus on the jobs pipeline makes sense,” DeStefano said later. According to Monster.com, two-thirds of the jobs in the area requires a bachelor’s degree, DeStefano said. The good news is, we have a future. The challenge is we have to prepare ourselves for that future.”

I think this has tremendous potential,” Alderman Perez said. He said it’s up to us” to spend the next three years working with Alexion to determine exactly what the company’s hiring needs are, and working to make sure New Haveners are prepared to meet those needs. Shame on us, if we can’t prepare for that in three years.”

The Package

The state aid to Alexion breaks down as follows:

” • A 10-year loan of $20 million at a rate of 1 percent with principal and interest deferred for five years. Loan forgiveness of $16 to $20 million will be based on the creation of 200 – 300 full-time jobs;
” • A $6 million grant for laboratory construction and equipment;
” • Urban and Industrial Sites Reinvestment Tax Credits of up to $25 million.”

Downtown Crossing won key votes from the Board of Aldermen last week; a final vote will take place at a full board meeting in August.

Christine Stuart, Gwyneth K. Shaw, and Paul Bass contributed reporting to this story.

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