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To: Top area CEOs and political leaders
From: Business New Haven
Re: Southern Connecticut Business Expo
Boy, did you guys miss out.
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Business New Haven
10/15/2001
By: BNH
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Only three weeks after the September 11 NYC/DC/PA attacks, more than 6,000 people showed up for the Southern Connecticut Business Expo at Veterans Memorial Coliseum. That's a lot of people for an event that was dead and buried five years ago. We credit the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce for its renewed commitment to the event, Event Management, the company that actually produced it, and we even give ourselves at BNH a pat on the back for organizing the seminars, workshops and speakers for the event and ratcheting up the informational content.
But getting back to you, the local corporate and political titans: Please permit us to express our amazement that most of you did not find it important enough on October 3 to spend 30 minutes at the Expo in order to, as they say, "walk the show."
Your absence makes those who do much of the real work in this region feel that in spite of the rhetoric – entreprenuers are pretty low on your totem pole. It's not a confidence-building feeling.
It was nice to see a couple of you there. Barbara Pearce of H. Pearce Co., Realtors looks like she is ready for a 2:45 marathon any day now. UI's Nat Woodson? Good to see you. But we could use a little more leadership from you in dragging some of your peers along.
Maybe they sneaked in under the radar, but we missed most of the chamber's own Regional Leadership Council. They were invited.
Of the politicians, it seems to us that only a dunce would pass up a chance to press the flesh among a large sampling of the region's business owners and managers. John DeStefano Jr. and Rosa DeLauro, please pick up your T-shirts at the courtesy booth.
You talk a good game about attracting and retaining businesses. At one Expo seminar we had the Adam Winstanley of Winstanley Enterprises, which is investing $50 million at 300 George Street, David Beckerman, who is building the first major New Haven office building in a decade and a new new technology park, Bob Scinto, the commercial real-estate developer who has transformed Shelton from a backwater to a major corporate headquarters for companies such as Tetley, Prudential and American Skandia, and David Clem, the Massachusetts developer of Science Park.
There must have been a good $100 million on the table at that session. Do you think that might have been a good place for representatives of the city's development-administration arm to be, building relationships and talking up New Haven?
Many of you talk about biotech until you are blue in the face. Where were you when Wolfgang Pliscke, CEO of Bayer, which has invested $50 million in a local company (CuraGen), keynoted the event? Or when Gualberto Ruano, CEO of Science Park stalwart Genaissance, discussed the future of medicine?
By now, many of us who own and manage businesses in New Haven have figured out that:
1. Management of many of the large companies that traditionally supplied leadership - most of the utilities, the newspaper, the banks - have migrated far from New Haven, and regard this market merely as a deposit-only ATM.
2. The political leadership feels so invulnerable that it can ignore the business ground troops who do the economy's day-to-day dirty work.
In the end, business people with dollars and dreams will set up shop where they feel most wanted. Maybe that's not here, and political leaders should take care not to feel entitled to our presence here.
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