Yesterday, the Connecticut Economic Resource Center issued its report, Benchmarking Connecticut’s Economy: A Comparative Analysis of Innovation and Technology. Cheryl Grisé said, “This report shows that our state’s economic prosperity will not be sustainable without an infusion of new ideas and a sense of urgency around encouraging business expansion and job growth”.

Mayor DeStefano has been traveling around the state talking about how we need new ideas and a sense of urgency around encouraging business expansion. He often talks about how jobs historically have grown around transportation corridors. He has also spoken how one of Connecticut’s strongest export products is innovation and new ideas. Ideas travel on a different transportation corridor, they travel on the information highway.

Connecticut needs to be building out its communications infrastructure the same sort of way that it needs to be rebuilding its highways, railways and ports. This is why Mayor DeStefano, together with Mayor Perez of Hartford wrote this Op-Ed about their efforts to build municipal wireless infrastructures in their cities.

It is why we are so pleased to announce the endorsement of people on the front lines of the effort to enhance our information highway, the Communication Workers of America, Local 1298.

Connecticut needs a governor with the policies and leadership style to compete and win in the global economy.  As the gubernatorial race moves forward after Susan Bysiewicz’s departure, our candidate will continue his focus on Connecticut’s sagging economic performance.  This graph illustrates that since 2000, the jobs that will be crucial to our growth in the global economy and to protecting our middle-class security have been disappearing at an alarming rate.  We simply can’t lose one sixth of our manufacturing and information industry jobs and remain a secure, middle-class state.

We need a governor that can make tough decisions to boost competitiveness.  State government must play a role in matching and exceeding what other American regions and foreign nations can offer in the marketplace.   We need a governor that feels comfortable in using public policy to blunt the edges of globalization.

At the Enfield Democratic Town Committee meeting last week, Mayor DeStefano commented about how Governor Rell’s approach to the problems of the state are a press release and a band-aid. I visualized that as a graphic, a thumbnail of a Rell press release with a large band-aid over it. I think it portrays pretty effectively problems with the Rell administration.

So, when I read this press release, I wondered how is the DeStefano campaign different from the Rell administration. So, I thought I would compare the press release to Milken Institute report.

Connecticut is ranked as the fifth most expensive state to do business, based on their calculations. The cost of doing business in Connecticut is 22% above the national average. Is it a surprise that we are at the bottom of the list for job growth?

In these times of stifled job growth and discouraged business, Connecticut should be focused on harvesting our state’s homegrown talent to fulfill our most important tasks. In today’s New Haven Register, there is a story about the Mayor’s recommendation that the Gateway Community College project in New Haven be given to Cesar Pelli and Associates, whose offices are located right on Chapel Street, 2 blocks from Gateway’s proposed Ninth Square location.

Cesar Pelli is internationally renowned for his design of Manhattan’s World Financial Center, Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers and many other famous buildings. Their status and their interest in taking on New Haven’s Gateway project would insure that those jobs and ideas created for Gateway come from the hard work and innovation of Connecticut’s best. We should be helping extremely qualified Connecticut firms get Connecticut’s biggest projects – which would help our communities grow and create new jobs. Exporting important projects such as Gateway to New York firms is not a “bad” choice, but is it the best choice? When fractions of “points” separate competitors, shouldn’t a world-renowned local business be given an edge when they are equally qualified?

Mayor DeStefano introduces the New Haven Port Authority's renovation plans for the old New Haven Terminal Warehouse.

We don’t create jobs with convention centers. We create jobs by encouraging business and improving transportation. The Mayor held a press conference yesterday to announce a renovation project for the New Haven Port Authority designed to address these issues. You can read more about it in the Hartford Courant and the New Haven Register.

It’s important to recognize that these issues are all connected. Inadequate roads and ports lead to traffic congestion. Traffic congestion discourages business. Discouraged business leads to job loss, and all of a sudden, Connecticut becomes dead last in the country in job growth. 

Creating jobs will be the Mayor's top priority as Governor.

He strongly opposes two revenue-generating aspects of the budget signed into law this week precisely because they drive jobs out of Connecticut. They are the levy of the personal property tax on manufacturing equipment and corporate income tax surtax. I'm going to talk about the former.

Connecticut remains one of only a handful of states in the nation that levy the personal property tax on manufacturing equipment, making us one of the least competitive places in the country for manufacturers to invest. The tax brings in only $70 million a year from manufacturers, which is less than one half of one percent of our total revenues each year. But the tax's effect on manufacturers is incredibly potent, adding an expense that no bordering state shares in an already expensive state.

Manufacturing jobs are critical to our economy because unlike many service sector jobs each manufacturing job results in at least four jobs in other industries. Between 1998 and 2004, we lost 54,400 manufacturing jobs and an additional 108,200 jobs in other industry sectors due to the loss of the manufacturing jobs. This resulted in the loss of $3 billion in wages and the loss of an estimated $92,200,000 in state income tax revenue.

Although there were ominous clouds in the sky the rain stayed away for the members of the Local 743 Machinists Union who gathered with friends and supporters at the capitol for the one thing we all need — JOBS. It was exciting, I got to wear my first union jacket — a union member in the crowd who declared "shivery is not dead" lent it to me. He was one of the about fifty people who gathered to deliver a message to the governor that we need to protect our jobs.

The mayor was one of the featured speakers. Although as we drove up I saw him put a line through the list of facts that we had assembled for him it was a truly wonderful speech. One of the things I love about the mayor is that he is always authentic, always genuine and always on point.

He got up before the crowd and rattled off different facts. That since the beginning of 2005 we have lost nearly 5,000 jobs. And what did Jodi Rell do? When we lost the sub base she called a press conference, when we lost the jobs at Travelers she called a summit and when we lost the jobs (I forget which one he said) she had a lunch at the capitol. Then he asked those assembled. "What do you want, a press conference or jobs?" JOBS! "What do you want, a summit or jobs?" JOBS! "What do you want lunch at the capitol or jobs?" JOBS!. The mayor left the stage by asking one more thing: what do we want to make our lives stronger for our families? He left to a chant of JOBS! JOBS! JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!

Usually when there's a story in the paper about jobs going to businesses owned by women and minorities, it's bad news. That's why it was so encouraging to read in the Hartford Courant this morning that not only has Hartford met its goal of providing 15 percent of the contracts for ongoing school reconstruction to women- and minority-owned firms; the city has exceeded that goal by 17.9 percent.

Mayor DeStefano is dedicated to making sure that kind of achievement becomes part of a state-wide trend, rather than a city-by-city exception. In New Haven, he's started business mentoring programs with the goal of providing more support to businesses owned by women and minorities so they will be able to compete for city contracts.

In 1998, four years after the city's set-aside ordinance, Section 12, expired and was taken to court, an ad-hoc committee chaired by the Mayor presented six major recommendations for increasing the participation of women- and minority-owned business, including the creation of a Regional Contractor's Alliance to open up the old-boys network among firms.