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Seeing the Big Picture
R. Nelson (Oz) Griebel is chairman of the Connecticut Regional Institute for the 21st Century, a group of the state's public and private leaders formed to develop regional planning for economic development. The group recently released the findings of its first study.
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Business New Haven
3/6/2000
By: George F. Garrity II
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The study says little about mass transportation. Why?
The general section in that report on transportation was to not focus on any one solution but rather to outline the issues, the challenges and the opportunities in a very broad context. There isn't any specific recommendation about expanding highways or building more bridges. The real point of transportation planning is to encourage a statewide view as opposed to carving the state up into sections. Rather than look at these sections as a series of unrelated actions or proposals, we looked at them in a coordinated way. We tried to look at all of this in the context of what is the most efficient and environmentally friendly way to move people and goods in the state of Connecticut, particularly looking at it in the context of how we link with New York and the rest of New England.
Why does the study suggest increasing the number of engineering and technical degrees conferred by Connecticut colleges and universities?
The study emphasizes that the economy continues to be more and more knowledge-based. The strength of Connecticut is in the sciences. If we do not turn out a sufficient number of people with quality educations focused in the sciences, we run the risk of cutting off the future pipeline of that type of talent. That talent is critical to the long term vitality and viability of the economy.
How will speeding up
technology research impact Connecticut's economy?
By continuing to focus on the development of business-to-business commerce, we will remain equal to or ahead of other parts of the country. This is critical to companies who make things in Connecticut and sell them elsewhere in the world. Similarly, the sharing of information on a timely basis is equally critical. We read about how work is done in some countries 24 hours a day. You are able to have people in one part of the globe working on the same project as people in another part of the globe because of what the Internet allows us to do. It's important for us to make sure we have both the talent and the resources to stay current with
technological evolution.
How does the designation of Connecticut as a key economic region lead to federal money?
The general understanding is that, much like the study does, the federal government looks at integrating and coordinating federal grants in a much broader base, as opposed to isolating given pockets in an area. The fundamental issue is that the state is broken up into 15 planning regions. That becomes very uneconomical and unfocused. It looks like a series of uncoordinated issues particularly when you look at it from a perspective as broad as Washington's.
In a recent interview you referenced recommendations
for air transportation. What
were they?
We have a number of airports in this region competing for federal dollars and, in many ways, competing against one another. That includes airports in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island - and not just the larger ones, but smaller ones like Tweed-New Haven. This is not exactly an integrated approach. It doesn't make sense for us all to compete against one another for airline dollars, and it doesn't make sense for us all to compete for Federal Aviation Association dollars. We need to take a hard look at the different purposes of Bradley and Tweed, for example. We visited Charlotte [N.C.] recently. They are evolving into a situation where all commercial traffic will go into the main Charlotte airport and all private craft will land at a smaller airport about 30 miles away. I am not sure whether or not something like that could work here, but the point is that airport management and the business community got together and at least talked about what might be appropriate roles.
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