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New Year's Wishes
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Business New Haven
1/6/2003
By: BNH
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As we write this, 2003 has yet (barely) to rear its newborn head. So indulge us, if you will, a few wishes for the New Year.
• We wish for a state government that will not shy away from the difficult choices that need to be made in order to more closely align state government's expenses with what revenues it can really depend on realizing. Rather than try to sneak new or expanded tax levies past a beleaguered electorate (particularly in a non-election year), we hope lawmakers will begin to roll back entitlements and mandates that grew swollen and bloated during fat times.
In neighboring Massachusetts - whose economy arguably has weathered the economic downturn better than our own - incoming Gov. Mitt Romney observed that the Bay State's economy was under more pressure now than at any time since the Great Depression. Massachusetts' projected $600 million budget gap (the magnitude of which became evident only in the waning days of outgoing Acting Gov. Jane M. Swift's administration) exceeds our own, but not by much.
• We wish for a city economic-development policy that recognizes the Elm City's debt to local merchants and will not sacrifice their long-term well-being on the alter of out-of-town Chapel Square Mall redeveloper Williams Jackson Ewing. The little guys (many of which serve an urban customer base with limited transportation and retail options) were here before, and they'll be here when all the dust settles. Yet too often in the recent past they have become the whipping boys when the Next Big Thing comes along, whether it's development of a brand-new mall or redevelopment of an old one.
• We hope the wheels of government and commerce in Bridgeport don't simply grind to a halt as the trial of troubled Mayor Joseph P. Ganim unfolds later this month. Residents and businesses in the Park City deserve better than to have their futures held hostage to the largely self-inflicted (irrespective of his guilt or innocence) legal woes of their chief executive.
• We wish municipal and state governments would largely get out of the dubious business of “economic development” and clear a path for entrepreneurs who really want to do business here. Recent history is fraught with painful examples of what happens when bureaucrats stick their noses into the private sector by trying to pick winners and losers, gambling taxpayer money on long- or no-shots while businesses outside the designated development “clusters” are ignored or shown the door.
• We wish and hope John Rowland will spend 2003 becoming a Republican again, after eight years of doing his best impersonation of a Democrat by presiding over a vast escalation in the size and scope of state government.
• In that vain we likewise wish Rowland and like-minded state officials would find the political will to explicitly acknowledge that urban public education in the Connecticut is cheating our children, and that every alternative to the entrenched and politicized “educracy” must be encouraged and pursued, including charter and magnet schools and up to and including school vouchers for parents of children in non-performing school districts.
• We hope that state government will abandon its outsized “transportation dreams” and focus its attentions on the transportation infrastructure's real ground zero: automobile congestion in southwestern Connecticut. Unless and until this is addressed in a comprehensive (read: tackling both the demand and supply sides) fashion, the economic-development consequences will spill over far beyond the borders of Stamford and Norwalk.
Last and most important of all, we hope our readers have a happy, healthy and prosperous 2003.
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