Paul Bass Photos
Carter Winstanley, Dick Blumenthal, Robert Alpern at Thursday’s “listening tour.”
Look out that window down below, the businessman told the senator: That’s where the jobs are coming. With your help.
Newly elected U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal got that nine-story view and heard that message Thursday as he brought his 2011 road show (aka “listening tour”) to New Haven.
Retracing his steps from last year’s election campaign, Blumenthal is asking people at other recession-plagued locales: How can we create jobs?
In New Haven, by contrast, he encountered a downtown biotech/ biomedical district that’s already stamping out high-tech jobs like pistons on an auto assembly line. So much so that its drivers needs his help as it seeks to build new space for more medical research and product-development jobs.
Blumenthal promised that help.
“I want to do everything in my power … to grow the critical mass,” Blumenthal said during one of several New Haven stops Thursday, the 300 George St. lab and office complex owned by Carter Winstanley. “We live in a knowledge-based economy … New Haven is leading the way to economic recovery … This is cutting-edge.”
Yale Vice-President Bruce Alexander, Blumenthal, Mayor John DeStefano.
Winstanley brought Blumenthal and assorted officials to the 9th floor of 300 George, to the office suite of Haskins Laboratories, which studies speech and reading to develop new products for problems like autism.
Over the past six years, Winstanley has filled the 520,000-square-foot complex with Yale Medical School research labs and private companies like Haskins. The tenants work on cures for such diseases as hepatitis, cancer, lupus, and multiple sclerosis. Some 1,100 to 1,200 people work in the building. Their companies are ready to grow but the building has no more space, according to Winstanley; 300 George is 100 percent occupied.
Which is why he led Blumenthal to a window looking down at the last exit of the Route 34 Connector mini-highway and the entrance to the Air Rights Garage.
Right now you just see highway and cars there. Soon Winstanley and the city hope people will see a new $140 million complex there called “Downtown Crossing”: an urban boulevard with bike lanes, safe pedestrian crossings, narrower streets, and a 10-story, 400,000 to 500,000 square-foot biotech-oriented office building called 100 College Street.
With the help of state and federal dough, the city plans to start filling in the mini-highway and redo the surrounding streets. Winstanley plans to put up the building. That’s where he’ll put the biomedical businesses and Yale medical labs that want to move in there or expand existing facilities, he said.
He can’t get some of them to move across town to his other biomedical complex at Science Park. They need to be near the Yale medical district, where many of their people either work or have people they do business with.
“The front door will be at the bridge,” Winstanley told Blumenthal, pointing to the College Street overpass.
“This is a very dangerous interchange,” he said, citing fatal accidents as well as a general disconnectedness between 300 George and the medical campus on the other side of the sunken mini-highway that bisected a continuous neighborhood during mid-20th Century urban renewal. Filling in the mini-highway will make the area safer and bring the labs and office space for new jobs closer to the medical campus that nurtures them.
Winstanley described a typical conversation with a tenant looking to expand but wanting to stay put downtown: “‘We have 24 months of financing. We are collaborating with a scientist right over there [at the medical school]. Our success depends on that scientist’s being able to walk over here for a sandwich or to look at some slides.”
How can a freshman senator like Blumenthal help?
Downtown Crossing’s plan envisions the continued growth of Yale’s medical school. That growth depends on federal research money not drying up as budget-cutting Republicans take over the U.S. House of Representatives.
Medical school Dean Robert Alpern said the medical school hopes to put new labs in Downtown Crossing. But it can’t commit to space until it finds out how Congress will allot money this year. The medical school receives around $350 million a year in federal government research money, he said; most of those grants run for around four years. So about a quarter of that budget is up for renewal each year. Alpern said the school needs to know that that revenue stream will remain stable.
“Institutional relationships with NIH [the National Institutes of Health] are very important,” Yale Vice-President Bruce Alexander told Blumenthal.
“I can help with that,” Blumenthal responded.
“That’s why I mentioned it,” Alexander said.
The 2011 Blumenthal Listening Tour then repaired to the first-floor “Cafe George by Paula” for a press conference. Asked what officials are asking Blumenthal for, a number of speakers mentioned the support for federal research. Mayor John DeStefano added another: transit. Private businesses will put up the money to create the jobs, he said. He said government needs to support them with better train service between New York and Boston and plane travel through Tweed New Haven Airport — “playing the role only the federal government can play.”
Tweed was also on the minds of business leaders who gathered next with Blumenthal for a private buffet-lunch powwow hosted by the quasi-public Economic Development Corporation inside the Quinnipiack Club’s third-floor “Board Room” (a contrast to where Blumenthal had started the day, at Whalley Avenue’s Athenian Diner).
And Tweed came up at Blumenthal’s last public stop of the day, at Science Park at the crossroads of the Dixwell and Newhallville neighborhoods.
Uma Ramiah Photo
Carter Winstanley (pictured with back to camera) was the host there, too; his family development firm has been rebuilding abandoned old rifle factories there. Blumenthal got the tour of 25 Science Park, which is filled with tenants like Higher One, the Yale-hatched financial services company that employs 170 people, and counting. Blumenthal heard about how Higher One will grow into a new space across the street, where Winstanley is turning an old Winchester factory into a mixture of offices and stores and homes.
The city needed millions from the state to help Winstanley convert that property, in part because of old pollution that needs to be cleaned up from the rifle-making days. That’s called “brownfields remediation.” Blumenthal heard a pitch Thursday for federal support for more brownfields remediation.
Tenants like Higher One have visitors from all over the country, who rely on air service. And they have workers and other regular visitors who ride the trains.
“All of that becomes increasingly important as these guys expand,” Winstanley told the senator.
Blumenthal had a question for Higher One Chief Operating Officer Miles Lasater: “How can I make your life easier?”
Regulatory certainty, Lasater responded. “If you know what the rules are, you can follow them.”
Uma Ramiah helped report this story.
A lot of white people sitting around a table trying to figure out how get more taxpayer/homeowner money. Scary.