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6 n e w h a v e n B I Z | J a n u a r y / F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 9 n e w h a v e n b i z . c o m Fiscal policy, workforce issues top business group's agenda for new era at the Capitol By Michael C. Bingham O N T H E R E C O R D | Q & A Voice in the Wilderness J oseph F. Brennan last month marked three decades with the Connecticut Business & Industry Associa- tion (CBIA), with 5,000 members the state's largest business group, which he joined in 1988 as a staff attorney. He has overseen CBIA's public policy opera- tions since 2006 and most recently served as executive vice president of CBIA, before assuming his current role as president and CEO in December 2014. Brennan, 64, earned a JD from the New England School of Law in Boston, and a bachelor's in political science from the College of the Holy Cross. Entering 2019, the Connecticut busi- ness community has probably never had less muscle at the Capitol than it does now. How did we get here? I'm not sure I agree. I hear from people on both sides of the aisle about business, both Democrats and Republicans, and the business community still has a lot of clout. is last election notwithstanding, when you look at any survey of vot- ers, the economy and jobs always comes out No. 1. And because we represent employers and work on economic-competitiveness issues, we have a major role to play. Just because the legislature has shied somewhat [toward Democrat control] that doesn't make us less relevant or less important. CBIA's 2019 legislative agenda is heavy on state budget recommenda- tions and proposed remedies. A lot of it is on fiscal policy — trying to put Connecticut on a better fiscal path, and the chilling effect these ongoing budget deficits and large unfunded liabilities have on investment in Connecticut. e other big issue is workforce. Most of our members say they have difficulty finding skilled employ- ees. It's probably most acute right now in advanced manufacturing -- the demands Electric Boat, Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky, other large OEMs have in their own hiring, and then the hundreds of compa- nies in the supply chains of those firms are all ramping up right now. So the demand for skilled workforce is probably most acute in advanced manufacturing, but I hear it from almost every industry in our membership. These are well-paying, high-skilled jobs. What has to be done to fill them? We have to find better ways to communicate to people about the opportunities that await them in very good, high-paying jobs in Connecticut. We have to build a pipeline so that people coming from colleges, community colleges, technical high schools, people returning from the military or even coming out of the corrections system can enter into a pipeline that leads them through training programs into a company. Why aren't there more people already in the pipeline? Many of these careers are an entryway for young people into the middle class. A lot of it is cultural. For years people looked at manufacturing jobs as unstable because they were likely to go overseas, or companies would [relocate] to other parts of the country for lower costs, or they would just go out of business be- cause we had tremendous declines in manufacturing employment for decades in Connecticut. Part of it is also transportation, because much of the potential workforce live in urban areas, but [the jobs] end up being out in the suburbs. And part of it is the whole retention issue -- the notion that young people don't want to be in a suburban state as opposed to large metropolitan areas that are really attracting [young people], whether it's New York, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago. We have to do a better job communicating the opportunities. Did CBIA endorse the recommendations of the Commission on Fiscal Stability? ere were some issues that prevented us from fully endorsing them in the first iteration, largely around tax policy. One of the major components of the first Commis- sion report was a new payroll tax on employers that would raise over $600 million -- a 0.8-percent pay- roll tax on all employers. at was something we were not expecting, and frankly our members were very concerned about that. ere were other taxes on business, such as ex- panding the base of the sales tax, so in all it was close to a billion-dollar [tax] increase on businesses. So we did not endorse the first report of the commission. But that was amended in the so-called '2.0' Commission report released the last week of November. at [revised report] was much more in line with our thinking. ey eliminated the payroll tax and are looking to reduce some taxes in key areas. [For instance] the personal income tax they originally [recommended reducing] from 6.99 to 6.5 percent; now they're saying 6.99 to 6.7 percent. So it's less costly to the state. And they do call for identifying savings in operations of state government. And they call for looking at all the post-retirement benefit costs for state employees — which is difficult to do, obviously. How does CBIA view the role of the state's business community moving ahead with a new administration in Hartford whose leader was clearly not the more 'pro-business' of the two major-party candidates? Well, CBIA does not endorse candidates for governor. We'll con- tinue to present ideas to [incoming Gov. Ned Lamont], to comment on ideas that he or the legislature might come up with, and do what we pretty much do every year — work with the administration and the legislature to promote policies that encourage people that make investments to make investments here in Connecticut. A lot of it comes down to confidence — whether it's a large multinational making a decision about where to invest, or a single entrepreneur, we want Connecticut to be a location of choice for those investments. It's been challenging, because of fiscal policy and workforce issues, to get as many of those investments as we would like here. What do you hear most from business leaders? What we hear all the time from business leaders is the word pre- dictability. ey would like reason- able predictability that when they make an investment, they're going to get a reasonable return on that investment. But because we've had very large tax increases, changes to regulations and things that make Connecticut less and less affordable for them, those are challenges that we have to overcome.

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