Business leaders have cheered Connecticut's fiscal guardrails in recent years. Others say, like some nonprofits, that the state is too strict with the record revenue it's taken in in recent years.
So, is there a compromise on the horizon and where do we go as the legislative session gets underway?
NBC Connecticut's Mike Hydeck spoke with Chris DiPentima, CEO of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association.
Mike Hydeck: You obviously give a voice to business in the statehouse to try to help craft policy. What do you say? Are the purse strings too tight right now? Should they be loosened for things like education and childcare to help the workforce?
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Chris DiPentima: It's a balancing act. I think the fiscal guardrails are doing exactly what they should be doing, which is putting Connecticut's fiscal health in order, creating predictability, stability and certainty not only for the business community, but for our residents by giving us surpluses, paying down some of our longtime liability, which is an excess of $40 billion. So we still have a ways to go there. Sometimes we forget that. At the same time, there is enough of a surplus where we're starting to make investments in critical services like the ones you've mentioned, education, childcare, housing, infrastructure and transportation, nonprofits. We need to continue to make those investments but we need to balance it. I think the fiscal guardrails are doing what they need to do. They're not too restrictive. What we need to look at is freeing up dollars to continue those investments by modernizing government, making government more efficient, look at some things that are maybe aren't working, tax credits and repurpose those to free up dollars. Because we need to continue to make investments in those social services and a lot of other places.
Mike Hydeck: So you don't think adjusting the guardrails at all? They should stay as-is considering that was 2017 data. We're now in 2024. But you think they're, as is, it works.
Chris DiPentima: I think as-is right now, it works. When you start to make tweaks, tweaks become adjustments, adjustments become major changes. And that's the concern when you start to make too much.
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Mike Hydeck: So as you've publicized, we've all read in the news in the last two years, we have 80, 90,000 open jobs across the state. Where do we go in trying to get them filled? With manufacturing, healthcare, education, pick the discipline. What do we do?
Chris DiPentima: Yeah, there's a lot of job openings. It's entry level to advanced skills. Two areas we need to continue to focus on, and we have been focusing on, but one is getting more Connecticut residents back into the labor pool. Our labor participation rate is good compared to the country, but still below pre-pandemic levels. And that's things like childcare, you know, especially when it comes to women, our labor participation rate is about 20% lower than men. And childcare is a big factor; we know women tend to bear the brunt of domestic support. And that's why at CBIA, we've been advocating the last couple of years, I know the governor is very much aligned, we participated in the Blue Ribbon Panel on childcare, to get more funding and childcare to create more affordable, available, quality childcare around Connecticut. The second thing we need to do is continue to keep people in Connecticut, and attract people to Connecticut. Our graduates, you know, we educate a lot of people here in Connecticut, about 35% of them leave the state after graduation. We need to hold more of them here and make the state more affordable so people will come to Connecticut. We've seen some population growth over the last couple of years, and continue to need to work on the affordability side.
Mike Hydeck: So whether it's welders at EB, it's nurses at all of our hospitals, it could be educators in our school, is our school system, in your opinion, giving the right coursework when it comes to trying to train these people for these jobs? Because they're open, and they've been open for a while. So is there a disconnect there in your mind?
Chris DiPentima: Yeah, and in some areas, there are. In some areas, we're seeing best practices where the curriculum being taught, which is primarily guided by the business community, and generating those people to be employed, whether they graduate high school and go through a career pathway program, or two-year community colleges or a four-year college system. But we're seeing other areas where the curriculum is not aligned to what the employers need. And we've been going around the state this month to kind of focus on that. And one of the things we're hearing from the business community, they often have to go to the schools and really talk to the schools about what's needed, versus having the schools go to the business community. We need to continue that communication and improve on that.
Mike Hydeck: So one of the things that was started years ago is the manufacturing pipeline where you would go into middle schools, high schools, try to get kids to say, 'Look, if this is what your discipline, if there's something you like, let's help you kind of focus in that area.' Now, by and large, for the most part, and you can tell me if this is different or not, it used to be focused on southeastern Connecticut because that's where EB is, and all the big defense contractors are. But we also have Sikorsky, we also have Hamilton Sundstrand, all these other businesses up in other parts of the state. Should that pipeline be used in other parts of the state, too? There's Bridgeport kids that could benefit from this as well.
Chris DiPentima: Yeah, absolutely. And we're seeing that pipeline expand for manufacturing. And now we need to replicate it for other industry sectors. That southeastern pipeline is now in Hartford and supporting Collins Aerospace and Pratt and Whitney, to your point, but not just the OEMs and the big companies. It's supporting their supply chain throughout the whole state. Goodwin, purchasing University of Bridgeport, just opened a manufacturing center down there. Another pipeline that's going to develop. Our technical high school systems have quite a few manufacturing programs. Manufacturing is really a bright spot in Connecticut when it comes to the workforce development system. We need to now expand that to healthcare, technology, financial services, the other growth industries that we have in this state, so we can grow those pipelines.
Mike Hydeck: So in the big picture, a lack of affordable housing, we're at the crisis level here in Connecticut. So if you want to hire somebody at any of those disciplines we just mentioned, trying to buy a house in Connecticut is very, very difficult. Should business play a part in this? Back in the old days when it was the coal mines, they built housing around where they did. Other big manufacturing plants, like, you know, Pratt had smaller houses right around there. Is that something that needs to make a comeback, do you think? I mean, affordable housing is a crisis, has been a long time in Connecticut.
Chris DiPentima: Yeah, workforce housing is what a lot of people have called it, what used to be done in the days. And businesses are engaged. I don't know if they're at the point where they're all creating their own housing because they don't necessarily want to be landlords. But they are very supportive and CBIA has been really pushing priorities, just like we are in childcare, around housing. First-time homebuyer tax credit, first-time renter tax credit, leveraging private sector dollars to match public sector dollars to build more housing. And we need all rate, market rate housing, workforce housing, capital A affordable housing, we need all that in Connecticut. That needs to be, continue to be a push. I think we're not going to have big policies this session. But we're going to have lots of little policies that continue to move that needle to develop more housing. But housing, childcare, affordability, cost of healthcare, those are the things we hear from employees and employers that are really challenging us to grow the workforce in Connecticut.
