A new Yale-funded business chief came to town — as local advocates (like Len Smart, top photo) offered advice for how she can make a difference.
The new chief (pictured at left) is Michele Whelley. (That’s not a typo — the last name is one letter different from one of the city’s needier main business strips.)
Whelley is moving downtown from Baltimore to head up a new government-influenced private group called the Economic Development Corporation of New Haven (EDC). Government and business leaders introduced her at a City Hall press conference Thursday afternoon.
Yale came up with a promised $1.6 million for five years to fund the new group. The EDC will do jobs that used to be the bailiwick of city government’s economic development office — working with existing businesses to keep them here; luring new employers to town; helping neighborhood businesses expand. The EDC will serve as “one-stop shopping” for businesses needing to deal with government.
Yale Vice-President Bruce Alexander knew Michele Whelley from his days working in Baltimore and made the initial contact to lure her here. Whelley plans to assume the EDC’s CEO spot March 31. She was senior vice-president of a real estate firm called Colliers Pinkard and, before that, president of a business advocacy group called Downtown Partnership of Baltimore.
Mayor John DeStefano, who announced plans for the group in his inaugural address, said his administration has never done the job-retention job well. He said city government lacks the money or staff to carry out these duties essential to growing the city’s tax base and creating jobs.
Whelley will report to a board of directors headed by water authority chief David Silverstone, who promised the entity would be “transparent.” DeStefano promised that, unlike a similar entity that folded amid scandal earlier in his administration, the new agency would follow the same freedom of information rules applied to city government. Those include open board meetings and public access to memos and emails. Also, the agency will be run separately from the city, in a separate building.
The city will have lots of influence over it, though. The board will include the mayor; city economic development chief Kelly Murphy (pictured with Yale-New Haven spokesman Vin Petrini), and City Plan Director Karyn Gilvarg. Bruce Alexander will sit on the board, too. Its other members have yet to be named. DeStefano said they would “look like New Haven.” Murphy will serve as the EDC’s vice-chair.
Carter Winstanley was among the business leaders on hand for the press conference. His family owns 300 George St. and 25 Science Park, with an emphasis on housing biotech firms. The family hopes to build a new facility on Route 34 land the mayor hopes to reclaim for development.
Winstanley (pictured speaking with DeStefano after the press conference) said the EDC’s one-stop shopping mission could prove helpful to the firms he rents by navigating state and city regulatory bureaucracies. He tries to do that for them, but isn’t great at it, he said. “A lot of tenants come to me to ask questions about how to handle radioactive isotopes,” for instance.
Len Smart, who runs the Greater New Haven Business & Professional Association, New Haven’s black chamber of commerce, was pleased that the new agency aims to address “brownfields” — possibly contaminated land that needs to checked and/or cleaned up in order to house new business.
“I think it’s a good step forward,” Smart said of the EDC. He recommended that Whelley launch a “micro-credit” program offering $50,000 or less to small businesses looking to expand onto adjacent brownfield sliver lots. He spoke, for instance, of an auto repair shop next to old railroad tracks by Bassett and Dixwell in Newhallville. “You’ve got to be able to say to a lender, ‘It’s clean,” before obtaining a loan to buy and build on land like that, Smart said.
Whelley had never been to New Haven before she began traveling here in September to discuss the new job, she said. She hasn’t had a chance yet to eat at any local restaurants. But she did hear, she said, that New Haven has great pizza.