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Viewpoint
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Business New Haven
5/1/2000
By: BNH
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Rising Tide Lifts Some Boats
As many of the industry surveys in this, our annual Industry Review, illustrate, the Connecticut economy is by and large delivering for Connecticut business.
To an extent, it's also delivering for many area municipalities, some of which find themselves in the unfamiliar position of being flush with cash - even in an era of rising school enrollments. (Memo to local and state government officials: budget surplus = overtaxation.)
So, who isn't the economy delivering for? Not the urban poor, many of whom find themselves on the outside looking in at the New Economy, trapped on the wrong side of the so-called digital divide.
Also, not students in urban schools, cheated of opportunity by a system that resists change and rewards incompetence.
In an April 26 keynote address to the Greater New Haven Chamber , Gov. John G. Rowland said, "If we can't turn New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury and Hartford around now, we'll never be able to do it."
It's hard to argue with that logic. What's easier to argue about is how.
To date, the recipe for curing the ills of Connecticut cities has been: If we throw enough public investment at them, they'll get better. Thus massive projects such as Adriaen's Landing and New Haven's Long Wharf mall become magic pills obscuring the need for much more prosaic but long-lasting therapies.
In New Haven, Mayor John DeStefano Jr.'s solution to public-education woes has been to build more buildings. The city has embarked on a ten-year, $650 million program to rebuild New Haven's public schools.
Sure, kids learn better in an environment that's conducive to learning. But what counts most is what takes place inside of the school buildings. It's not a money issue: Last year New Haven teachers earned an average of $51,726. It's an accountability issue - and the New Haven system shuns accountability the way a cat shuns water.
On the economic-development side, surely projects such as the Long Wharf mall and Adriaen's Landing promise stupendous economic benefits to a few companies. Why not undertake some fiscal measures that might benefit thousands of businesses?
State and local governments talk a good game when it comes to small business. But when it comes to targeted government incentives, it's always the big boys who get the bennies.
Instead of stores for rich people (staffed by $7-an-hour poor people), why not personal property tax relief for small businesses in the state's largest and most distressed urban areas?
As it becomes ever more difficult and less affordable for small businesses to provide health insurance for their employees, why can't the state begin to explore creative ways to ease or shift that cost burden, as neighboring Massachusetts has done?
Now that would truly be a rising tide.
Puck Stops Here
We don't know the team's name, who will coach it, or even how many people will come to see it. Still, we're heartened by the return of hockey to Veterans Memorial Coliseum beginning this fall.
New Coliseum head guy John Burnap has already done much to change public perceptions of an unloved building - new lighting, signage and a repaired escalator all come on line (thanks to the city) during his watch, which certainly helps.
Activity begets more activity, and the best way to show people that you've changed is to give them lots of reasons to come to your building. The new United Hockey League franchise gives us 37 reasons (that is, home games) to come, and Burnap has been trying to extricate the CBA's Connecticut Pride from the dreaded Hartford Armory.
We bet he'll succeed. But even if not, we welcome the new sense of energy and direction that Burnap and SMG have brought to the Orange Street pleasuredome. They should have privatized the darned thing years ago.
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