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Yes, Virginia,
There Is a Santy Cause
New RGP head wants region to focus on biotech, brain-power and infrastructure
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Business New Haven
12/14/1998
By: BNH
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On September 21, Robert W. Santy of Farmington replaced Everett Shaw as head of the Regional Growth Partnership. Previously, the 44-year-old Santy managed the Millennium Project in Hartford, and before that was deputy commissioner of economic development in the Weicker administration.
Coming from Hartford, did you have much sense of what was going on with the RGP down here?
Let's go through history a little bit. A lot of these regional organizations were formed because the state offered a carrot. That carrot was some money to help organize and more money to do major projects. In 1993 and '94 there was $100 million in bond funds for capital projects that could be accessed if there was a regional plan in place and an organization that could administer the funds. So the RGP really grew out of a planning process that was really pushed by the availability of these dollars. So a whole bunch of these organizations started around the state and now that there are no bond dollars available through that program there's a handful of them that still exist, most of them surrounding our major cities.
It seems to us that in two years the RGP has not really achieved much traction in getting the region's communities to work together on concrete issues. What have you learned from history here, and how might you approach the challenges of regionalism in a different way than has been previously done?
Let me talk about successes first. I think there have been two major successes for the RGP thus far: One was the creation of the [Tweed-New Haven] Airport Authority; the second was a very successful site-remediation program where, through the availability of state funds, we were able to reimburse property-owners for Phase I and Phase II environmental investigations. One of the critical issues for this region is the availability of real estate for development. You have a lot of owners who know they have [environmental] remediation problems, but they're not sure they want to find out what they are because they're sure they're going to be very expensive. So we're providing a motivation to property owners to take a look at the property and find out, through these grants. We've looked at 40 properties and we're now compiling data on how many jobs were created, what new buildings were built, what renovations were done, as a result of us providing that seed capital to do the remediation. The RGP became the applicant for a jobs-access program through the state - also referred to as 'reverse commute' - so we are also providing transportation for mostly urban residents who are looking for jobs in the suburbs. That's being run out of the Regional Work Force Development Board, but was originally a proposal put together by the RGP.
Where does this organization
need to go?
It needs a firm commitment of both public and private supporters, that means the Council of Governments, the chief elected officials and the Regional Leadership Council to heighten the profile and move forward with some things. One of the things the [RGP] board is very interested in is the development of the biotechnology sector in the region. We need to look at what's already happening in that sector and find a place where we can uniquely add value to what's going on. One of the things I've taken on is to try and do a real-estate development plan to create a biotechnology park in one of the communities in the region. We have companies that have been out there for five to eight years that are growing, that have gotten a new influx of venture capital and they are expanding. Many of them are located not in New Haven, but in the suburban communities, and are looking for a suburban location to grow. The one thing you hear from everybody - whether it is Bayer or Bristol-Myers or Curagen - is the lack of biology lab space in the region. If you take that demand and the growth of those companies and the capital they have, and then look at what the state has done and the fact that it now has a fund available through Connecticut Innovations Inc. to fund the development of lab space - we have a unique coming-together of these resources. Now we need to pick a piece of real estate and move forward on that. I've established four priorities for the organization that the board agrees with, and those will have do-able action steps.
Is there a value to trying to more concretely identify exactly what our 'region' really encompasses? For tourism it's one set of municipalities; for other things it's other permutations.
There are people who say, 'Let's consolidate all these regions and make them all the same.' The state's Office of Policy & Management had a group that looked at all these regions [and tried to draw more definitive boundaries]. They've done it three or four times. It never works. Our economy as a region operates independent of political boundaries. Most of the time when you're thinking about a company, and whether that company is competitive and whether the economy as a whole is competitive, you're not looking at Branford or Guilford or New Haven - you're looking at an economic region, and that region changes depending on what you're looking at. What affects the definition of the region? Well, high-speed rail may affect our definition of our region. Towns like Woodbridge which now send a lot of their residents to Stamford to work may be sending residents to New York to work if it's within an hour by train. That could change what we consider to be our economic region, particularly in areas of high technology and intellectual property. We are not an economy that will support basic manufacturing; we are an economy that can support high value-added manufacturing where you have a large research-and-development component. It's the brain power that will define our competitiveness in a global economy from now on, because we are already a high-cost place to do business.
How would you define the region?
I define the region most by commuting patterns. You look at how many people live in a town and work in a town, how many work in New Haven and how many work in other towns, and all of a sudden people understand how they're economically tied together. That's why I think the labor market area is the best definition from an economic standpoint, because it's the competitiveness of our workforce that's going to determine the competitiveness of our region.
Besides lab space, what would you identify as the top three or four or five economic-development challenges facing the region?
The second is that we are in a labor-shortage situation for many job categories - and yet we have labor surplus in our urban center. The new agenda item for the RGP, which I asked the board to approve last month, is a demand-driven, cluster-based training program where we will look at employer needs and try and match them with training programs that will meet those demands. We're going to start with pharmaceutical companies and look at a full range of job categories. They certainly have high demand at Bayer, for example, for Ph.D. scientists. But they also have high demand for lab technicians, and there are programs that need to be put in place to make sure that all of those job categories are filled. The challenge is to broaden skills to this urban population, to make sure that they are full participants in the economic growth that we're seeing.
What else?
Real estate availability. This was a surprise to. What you don't have in this region is large tracts of property available for development in communities where they want it to happen. Our goal is not to make every community alike; the fact that communities are different is actually our strength when it comes to quality of life in New England. But our goal is to look at properties that have development potential and try and bring them to market so that we can have larger pieces of land available.
Are there other challenges beyond those three?
There's a subtext to the real estate one, and that's brownfields remediation. We have a tremendous number of properties right over here off of River Street on the Harbor that could be cleaned up and made available, and we should make that a priority. We're looking a concept that we're referring to as the 'Quinnipiac River Development Corridor.' The idea is to look at the [Quinnipiac] River as the common asset in a four-community [New Haven, Hamden, North Haven, Wallingford] area, and protection of the wetlands is an important component to maintaining that asset. If we had a common sense of what the river meant to us from an environmental standpoint, and what development should be allowed along the river, we could have a tremendous new asset in the region.
What about transportation issues such as commuter rail between Hartford and New Haven?
I don't think I've been here long enough to understand all of the transportation issues. I will tell you that in the Hartford region they're doing a comprehensive strategy which has the endorsement and the financial participation of [the state's Department of Transportation]. I think that's what this region needs to do: It needs to look at all of its transportation issues and before you decide to put three lanes on I-95 between East Haven and the [Rhode Island] state line, maybe we need to look at other options and see what the are. I don't know if light rail works as an option in this region, whether there's ridership that would support it. You clearly have the Shoreline East...
Which requires a $5,000 subsidy
per passenger per year.
We look at infrastructure investments in rail differently than we look at infrastructure investments in highways.
How so?
If you look at highways there's a certain cost to building highways and maintenance of highways. How do we count that? When you say there's a $5,000 subsidy per rider on Shoreline East, what's the subsidy per car on the highways? That's the type of thing I think we need to look at, because the way the subsidy is calculated on rail the more riders you have the more expensive it becomes, as I understand it. I took a trip this year to Ottawa to look at the bus system. They have what they call dedicated busways where it's only buses. In many instances the road is under the grade level. You have stations that join the regular road system above. They also have land-use strategies that strongly encourage development in close proximity to bus stops. People would say that bus stops never attract economic development, because they're perceiving bus stops like in New Haven, as opposed to bus stops that look like transit system stops, subway stops. You'll going 15 miles outside Ottawa and there's a bus stop and there's about five high-rise apartment buildings all around it. You have green space and you have development that has been encouraged around the transit stops. But there is a middle-class cultural problem with buses in this country that doesn't exist in Ottawa. We have something like two percent of commuters riding buses in our metropolitan areas in Connecticut, and it's like 30 percent in Ottawa.
Who pays for your work here, a combination of state and private funders like UI?
In the beginning there were some considerable state funds that came through for operating. Those have been [spent]. This administration is not providing operating grants to organizations like the RGP. There are really two sources now. One is the 15 communities that make up [the] South Central Connecticut [Council of Governments]. They agreed to a per-capita dues, and pay that. Then the Regional Leadership Council, which is the CEOs organization in the region, also makes a joint contribution and each of the companies that belongs makes a contribution here. I would like to grow the organization, so I'll certainly be looking to the foundation community and maybe to companies individually if they have a particular interest. I'll also be looking for programmatic support, rather that just general operating support. If we do a major recruitment effort to recruit scientists to this region I would hope that Bristol-Myers and Bayer would find that useful, and support that.
There appears to be a lot of
overlap between many of these regional groups.
We need to be very clear about what our goals are and where we differentiate ourselves. A lot of people look at the Council of Governments, the chamber of commerce, the Regional Leadership Council, the RGP, and say, 'Do you all really know what your individual roles are?' I have a sense of it, but I don't think the community at large knows well enough and we need to do a better job communicating that. The chamber is a business organization; the Council of Governments is where the chief elected officials sit; the RGP, I think, provides the nexus between the two because we have both public and private representation. I think that makes it clearer.
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