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January 22, 2020

DECD’s Lehman: Business indicators looking up

HBJ Photo | Bill Morgan Greenwich resident David Lehman brings Wall Street experience and a penchant for data analytics to reboot Connecticut’s economy as commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development.
By Michael C. Bingham

Unlike a certain U.S. vice president some years ago, he didn’t call Connecticut naysayers “nattering nabobs of negativity.”  But David Lehman, commissioner of the state’s Department of Economic & Community Development, did say that the state’s business critics are a step or two behind the times.

Connecticut’s economy, Lehman said, is looking up.

Lehman spoke to a gathering of some 50 business leaders Tuesday morning at an annual business breakfast get-together at North Branford Town Hall. In his 11 months on the job since being plucked by new Gov. Ned Lamont from a lucrative private-sector career with Goldman Sachs to head the state’s economic-development efforts, he has observed a pervasive negativity, especially among members of the business community.

However, “Recent [economic] data is not as negative as people think it is,” Lehman told the business group.

Reasons to look on the bright side? For one thing, based on 2019 data Connecticut’s economic growth has improved from near the bottom of the nationwide barrel to closer to the U.S. median, Lehman said. Connecticut’s median income growth of 3.5 percent in 2019 still underperformed the U.S. figure of 4.5 percent — a rising tide, “but we’re still not performing at the income-growth level we need to,” Lehman said.

Part of the solution lies in making Connecticut a more desirable place to live — and work. The dearth of trained manufacturing workers in the pipeline to replace the “silver tsunami” of industry retirements is a major drag on economic growth, according to Lehman. The average annual manufacturing wage in the state exceeds $90,000, Lehman said. Addressing that workforce deficiency is one of the four planks of the Lamont administration’s economic-development platform, along with fiscal stability, transportation/infrastructure improvements and injected renewed economic vitality into the state’s urban areas.

To attract new companies to start, grow or relocate to Connecticut, “It’s not enough to tell them that we’re close to New York and Boston but our [business] costs are 40 percent lower,” Lehman said. “That pitch isn’t good enough.”

He said the Lamont administration is poised to release its new economic-development action plan by the beginning of spring. At the core of the plan will be measures to stimulate lending to and investment in the small-business sector — not in the form of direct government loans and incentives, but by private-sector financial institutions, supported where most needed by government guarantees, Lehman said.

Meanwhile, perhaps the Nutmeg State could take a cue from the sunny outlook  of business and civic leaders in low-tax North Branford, where a major growth industry is agribusiness and agro-tourism generally and sunflower cultivation specifically (so apropos).

In his state-of-the-town remarks Town Manager Michael Paulhus pointed specifically to the town’s recent tax assessment-deferral program as an engine of business attraction and expansion. The initiative, which phases in over time property taxes on building improvements, has to date helped four companies expand in North Branford, Paulhus said.

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