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The Shoreline: Bedroom Or Hotbed?
Changing economic realities pose development dilemma for once-sleepy shoreline towns
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Business New Haven
7/10/2000
By: Michael Gomez
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The shoreline communities to the east of New Haven - East Haven, Branford, Guilford and Madison - can claim some of Connecticut's most breathtaking vistas in mile after mile of Long Island Sound coastline.
Coves snug enough to hide Captain Kidd and his pirate loot. Salt marshes so glimmering that they beckon an impressionist's brush. Sandy and rocky beaches and coasts that reel out fishermen's boats to set Crayola-colored lobster floats. And dozens of offshore islands that have been home to circus legends, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists, a cast of actors and other show people, media queenpins, a Classic Rock star, and just plain folks with lucky DNA or the money to buy bliss.
These towns are blessed by their beauty to attract people of means, accomplishments and dreams who want to live on or near the water.
Yet beauty demands a beast to complement and challenge its allure. And so the shoreline has its beast.
It is the fear of many of its residents that any economic activity on a scale beyond a small, quaint store or restaurant threatens the region's sublime beauty and, therefore, should be stopped dead in its tracks.
Or as Dean Troxell, chairman of Guilford's Economic Development Commission, pointedly puts it: “You can have any kind of business you want - so long as you can hide it so no one can see it.”
Since the Bat Cave, the Strategic Air Command's bedrock-housed operations center, and the Atlanta Underground are already spoken for elsewhere, slim is the chance of such a big but invisible boost to a shoreline town's taxable base.
Economics vs. Environment
To be sure, other regions in historic Connecticut are coping with comparable tensions of protecting community character while welcoming commercial activity. Yet the debate continues year after year in some shoreline communities, in a test of wills of economics vs. environment, or commercial vs. cute.
So far, cute is winning.
“There's a lot of tree huggers in Guilford,” observes Troxell.
The shoreline's growth debate involves several complicated issues including taxation, water and sewer lines and regional transportation infrastructure improvements - new railroad stations, high-speed rail right-of-way, widening of I-95 and enlarging Tweed-New Haven Airport.
Lack of business and industry - particularly in the wealthier communities of Guilford and Madison - places an enormous burden on property taxes. Town budgets along the shoreline typically receive upwards of three-quarters of their funds from taxes on residential real estate and personal property.
Yet these taxes are no longer enough to fund public schools, where per pupil expenditures - driven ever upwards by changing needs and government mandates - typically exceed the property tax received on the house in which the student lives.
Business development would lower that reliance on property taxes, of course. Yet businesses require such basic necessities as city water and sewer services. Guilford and Madison, however, adamantly refuse to give up their centuries-old reliance on wells for water and leaching fields for sewage treatment. Branford and East Haven, which provide city water and sewer connections, are better positioned for business growth, economic-development officials agree.
Transportation efficiency also governs whether and how much economic growth can take place. Government-funded expansions of the railroad stations in Branford, Guilford and Madison are to begin shortly. It is the hope of transportation and economic experts that roomier and more appealing stations will increase shoreline residents' use of the rail option for their commute into New Haven and points south. Station improvements likewise are needed to accompany installation of high-speed rail lines that promise to shave hours off a train trip to Boston.
“Rail is the most important component” in achieving sustainable development along the shoreline, says Robert Santy, president of the Regional Growth Partnership, a consortium of governments and businesses in 15 communities of greater New Haven - including the four shoreline towns.
“When you make appropriate investments in the transportation infrastructure, growth occurs,” Santy says. Other businesses follow to feed on the needs of rail travelers.
Tweed's Unfriendly Skies
Most businesses currently calling the shoreline home - and those looking over the area for possible
relocation or start-up - agree that a more robust Tweed-New Haven Airport is critical to growth.
However, recent legal chest-thumping by the town of East Haven over control of the regional airport that hugs the East Haven and New Haven town line suggests more delays in airport expansion efforts. The two-year-old Tweed-New Haven Airport Authority wants to make improvements to the airport facility and lengthen its landing strips to attract more airlines that could link greater New Haven to airline hubs and, therefore, smooth travel in and out of the region for business people.
“I keep hearing from members that there is a real need for the airport,” explains John Cushing, executive director of the Branford Chamber of Commerce.
Founders and executives of Branford's small cluster of biotechnology firms have long bemoaned the lack of a thriving regional airport that can bring big-company alliance partners, customers or potential key employees to the shoreline with little hassle. The longer the Tweed squabbles continue to delay tangible airport expansion, these business people say, the greater the inaction's impact will have on the shoreline's dreams of the right kind of business development.
(East Haven town development and chamber of commerce officials did not return phone calls to discuss the Tweed issue and other local economic development efforts and aspirations.)
Past as Prologue?
Part of the reason for the growth debate along the shoreline lies in the past, when the shoreline communities cropped up in the 1600s as a series of settlements fanning out from the New Haven Colony. These settlements were founded by visionary men who hankered for serious elbow room and had to move east from New Haven to establish their own turf.
The notion of “big fish, small pond” and the granite-like orneriness of some founding families - many of which remain active in local affairs to this day - may help explain the cantankerous objections to growth that some shoreline towns demonstrate.
Fueling the debate, too, is the inability of some communities to create a master plan for development and business growth.
“Absent a plan,” explains the Regional Growth Partnership's Santy, “developers will pass a community by. They know which are welcoming” and which are not. Guilford, for one, has yet to adopt a new plan of development, though development chief Troxell promises one will be issued by summer's end.
The importance of an economic development plan lies much more in the fact of its creation than in its specific conclusions. Santy suggests that plan development is a critical tool useful in polling and addressing a community's economic-development views. “It allows you to determine what is right for your community. And a plan creates consensus.”
Focus on Technology
The unending spell of the shoreline's beauty and its proximity to certain institutions - Yale University, for one - can and does act as a powerful lure in attracting “appropriate” economic development.
The hope of the coast's economic development policymakers is to promulgate business growth that tills the mind instead of the land. In effect, business advocates along the shoreline fantasize about the future of the region as a small-scale Silicon Valley, Route 128, or even a knockoff of the high-tech centers of Shelton and Fairfield County.
Or perhaps, “Pharma Farm,” coming soon out of a test tube near you.
Using Branford as the litmus test, the future of shoreline economic growth may lie in being a hotbed for start-up and development of genome-based businesses that hope to discover and make new drugs that will enable humans to conquer their fears, anxieties and fat cells.
With its 20 miles of coastline, Branford's greatest asset is its connection to the water. There are 19 yacht clubs and marinas, the picture-postcard Thimble Islands off the Stony Creek shore, and a meandering coastal road that suddenly unveil views that take one's breath away.
Primarily a residential community - like all the shoreline towns - Branford nevertheless is adopting a sophisticated approach to business growth.
Two of the darlings of the biotechnology industry - CuraGen and Neurogen - in the 1990s chose Branford as their laboratory for business discovery and growth. Other biotech firms followed, creating a mini-cluster of technology and medical-research businesses. Branford's business and development leaders want to build on those biotech beginnings.
The Branford Chamber of Commerce has created a 30-page business relocation guide that provides businesses seeking a new home with town demographics, environmental data, community information and resources, as well as information about criteria for permits and approvals.
A Bridge Too Far
“Branford sells itself,” argues chamber head Cushing. “We have businesses coming to town that we don't have to wine and dine.”
Companies have determined that the town's two main appeals - quality of life (read: shoreline) and “not having to cross the Q Bridge,” laughs Cushing - make it easy for them to attract employees.
Economic Development Commission chairman Al Mignone doesn't want to take any chances that Branford might miss a newbie technology company looking for its first home. That's why he has successfully argued for funding to staff a town economic development position.
“We need to meet with and introduce ourselves to Yale and [its] School of Management” and other technology company incubators, Mignone says, so that scientists with a marketable idea or technology who are ready to grow “know where to go.”
“I'd like to see more biomedical and Internet companies,” says Mignone. “Branford having sewers is good for research companies and their labs. This type of business - clean, non-polluting, a quiet environment - won't disturb the neighbors.”
Branford also is considering exploiting the location of the former MIF ironworks foundry on the Branford River. Though it requires brownfields clean up and detoxification funds, the site has been proposed for development of a conference-type hotel and restaurant, and residential condominiums to take advantage of the location's water views.
Technology in the Wings?
Guilford and Madison have been bedroom communities linked to New Haven and Yale for more than a generation, home to downtown business executives, managers and college professors. Both communities also have sizeable summer populations - well-heeled families who take up summer residence in tony enclaves along the shore.
Beauty is historic and natural in each town, with scores of pre-Revolutionary War homes commanding the eye south of the Boston Post Road. Guilford also boasts arguably the prettiest town green in Connecticut, and the Madison shore road ambles past turn-of-the-century (i.e., 1900) cottages/mansions overlooking the Sound.
The economy in both towns is driven by the cash register. Most businesses are retail and/or service oriented. Until recent years the two communities have not shown much interest in planned economic development.
Lack of city water and sewers hurts their ability to draw technology companies. “Yes, that is a problem,” agrees Guilford's Troxell.
More problematic still is a political environment that appears too often - whether true or otherwise - to be unfriendly to business. Planned expansions of supermarkets in both towns have encountered denials or delays. Inquiries by biotech firms have been rebuffed by towns unwilling to cough up tax abatements or other development incentives, and by residents who don't want development next door.
“Realtors representing biotech firms have been down that road once too often,” explains Troxell. “Now they say, 'The hell with it.'”
Still, Guilford and Madison economic policymakers insist they want to roll out the high-tech red carpet. “We need to create a better environment for business,” Troxell urges. “We're not out looking for smokestack industries,” but Guilford hopes to entice corporate offices, research centers and the ever-popular biotech firms.
Madison, a section of Guilford until 1826, believes its charm can attract economic activity. “Economic development is not just dollars in and dollars out,” says Irving Drabkin, chairman of the Madison Economic Development Commission. “Esthetics have an economic value. People come to a town and, if they like the ambience, they spend their dollars.”
Drabkin knows that high-tech companies are continually looking for skilled workers. That's why he and the town have successfully petitioned the state to open a satellite campus in Madison for Gateway Community College. Working out of an office at Town Hall and available space at Daniel Hand High School, Gateway this fall will offer courses covering computers, laboratory technology, the Internet and other engineering and science issues.
“There's nothing between New Haven and New London in this area of training,” Drabkin explains. He hopes that the Gateway branch soon will grow into a “bricks and mortar” building in the Hammonasset business district, next to the state park and beach. BNH
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