|
|
|
New Haven and the Three E's
|
Business New Haven
1/10/2000
By: BNH
|
New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. sounded terribly earnest in his January 2 inaugural address. He spoke of the city's need to "discipline our fiscal house" and said that, in spite of the state's robust economy, much work remained to be done before urban areas such as New Haven can share in the general prosperity.
We believe the DeStefano administration would do wisely and well to concentrate for the next two years on the "three E's" - education, entrepreneurship and the environment.
Education
New Haven's public education woes are well-documented. City school children scored next-to-last among all the state's 164 school districts in the 1998 Connecticut Mastery Tests. Only Hartford was slightly lower.
Not slight at all was the difference in reactions by politicians and education bureaucrats in the two cities: In Hartford, schools superintendent Anthony S. Amato took the bad news as a wakeup call, and pledged that his schools would improve - immediately. In New Haven, DeStefano chose to blame the messenger.
New Haven's public-education bureaucracy has shown dramatic improvement in one area: spin-doctoring. Following a January 5 Hartford Courant report on improved preliminary CMT scores in the Hartford schools, New Haven leaked its own marginally higher results to the Register. But even single best result - eighth-grade reading scores - showed that fewer than one-third of kids (30 percent) met the state's goal.
Instead of pointing fingers or making data dance, DeStefano ought to be throwing down the gauntlet to his top education officials, as Amato did, and making clear that immediate improvement is the only objective.
While erstwhile backwaters like Wallingford attract major new corporate facilities, New Haven continues to lose companies for the simple reason that the city lacks an educated workforce. If the city were to concentrate on doing just one thing very well, public education ought to be the one thing.
It doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure that one out.
Entrepreneurship
By now it seems pretty plain that New Haven's political leadership fears and distrusts entrepreneurism - and, seemingly, most entrepreneurs as well.
Entrepreneurial activity is by definition messy and chaotic. Those qualities obviously rankle DeStefano, who has a command-and-control, government-knows-best mentality when it comes to economic development.
This was richly illustrated late last month when the administration convinced a troika of non-entrepreneur community leaders - a bank president, a lawyer and a Yale official - to head a new development corporation set up to, as the Register put it, "snatch key city properties from future speculators."
The group's first task would be to keep the Palace Theater out of the hands of selfish capitalists like Joel Schiavone and Brian Alden and "pull it back under community [read: political] control," as the mayor too candidly put it.
Entrepreneurs don't need or want bureaucrats telling them how to run their businesses. They vote with their feet, and obviously many of those feet have been pointing toward places like Orange and Branford over the past decade.
Real, lasting economic development comes not from City Hall but from business owners large and small willing to risk their families and fortunes to make companies grow. Sometimes they make a mess, and sometimes they fail.
But between the city's hostility to business activity it can't "control," and Yale's lack of willingness to lease Broadway retail space to anyone but out-of-town chain stores, New Haven feels and smells like a place real entrepreneurs would do well to avoid.
If this were untrue, every storefront on Temple Street opposite the Omni Hotel would be bustling with retail activity.
Environment
Without a doubt, downtown New Haven is cleaner than it was ten years ago. Violent crime is down here, as it is nationwide.
But negative perceptions of downtown still linger among suburbanites, and the city plainly needs to do better.
The Town Green Special Services District's mantra of "clean and safe" is on target, but we need to make downtown cleaner and safer yet - a place where middle class families, out of town visitors, office workers and Yale freshman stroll securely day and night. Mounted police patrols ought to be visible beyond 9-to-5 and Shubert nights, and panhandlers must be made to feel even less welcome than they are now.
That's real, grass-roots "economic development" at its best.
|
Go FirstGo PreviousGo
NextGo LastGo
to Index
|
|
