Issue link: https://nebusinessmedia.uberflip.com/i/477238
86 Hartford Business Journal • November 26, 2012 www.HartfordBusiness.com Celebrating 20 Years of Business News FUTURE The a place where they want to spend their time? What makes this a place where they want to live? BELL: In another life, I was running a daily newspaper in Oakland, Calif. And one of the big issues was there wasn't a movie theater. There isn't a movie theater here either. There's no 'there' there. The question is: Is there a 'there' here? LUISE: I have a large group of 20-somethings working for me and they're not positive on downtown Hartford. Not positive to live here for a variety of reasons. Gro- cery stores, movie theaters, a life where the subur- ban world has advantages. I think we're uniquely unqualified, as a 45-year-old, to answer that ques- tion, but listening closely to others, yes, we have a lot. We don't market it well, but we do need to parlay on the success we have. Where the money's coming from is not necessarily the 20-somethings spending the money at the pub, but it's a doggone good start. GRIEBEL: Let's go to CRDA for a second. This is what drives me nuts about the way––in most places, you have a 17-square-mile city that would be 50 miles square. Pick any place. Why isn't West Hartford considered, Blue Back Square considered the retail section of Hartford? Why is it West Hartford is there? Why is Rentschler Field considered in East Hartford – I mean there is this whole way we think about our- selves. If you've not lived here all your life, which I have not, I think we do ourselves the worse ... the longer you live here, the more you see the glass is not only half empty but cracked and leaking. The base is not perfect, but I'll tell you, I'd take this base over a lot of other cities in the country, in terms of what we have to work from. CRDA, I think the governor and the legislature that are putting this in place, we'll see whether it delivers. But it's the first time we've had a structure where you've actually had the mayor of East Hartford and the mayor of Hartford on the same board. God willing they'll put the mayor of West Hartford there. It's a place to at least begin to think about it. MILLER: `Well it opens up the whole conversation of regional- ism, and pushing that agenda. Can a state with 169 towns ever get over itself and develop some level of cooperation that's meaningful? SMITH: People are starting to talk about it a lot more. Neces- sity is usually the mother of invention, so the down economy is actually probably making people think more about opportunities to share, which is very healthy for our state. We are a very small geographic area, and so often I'm talking with companies, and more importantly with local leaders in the public sector, about the fact that we shouldn't be competing with each other. We are competing globally at this point. So it's a movement that's starting, and CRDA is a very important component of that. Because if you don't think about the region, all those towns to the west and east of Hartford are going to do better if the downtown is doing better, and vice versa. It is very important that we start thinking much differ- ently about our future. BELL: We're talking a little bit about regionalization here. What about looking at it from the other side? Farm- ington's a place that's getting itself into a great future at the moment. It's bringing a lot of dollars, a lot of potential jobs. Why are they interested in regionalization? SMITH: They recognize that, well, if you look at the investment that's being made at UConn with Jackson Labs com- ing there, they can't survive on just that one part of that one campus. They're already incredibly integrally aligned with the hospital system here in Hartford. So a lot of their students get trained part in Hartford, part out in Farmington, and so there's this connection that is absolutely essential for the university system out there and for all of the people that work and live out there. That's just one example. But almost everywhere you look, there is some tentacle between one of our outlying communities and a downtown location or between communities, one community to the other. We live in an age now where it's just impossible, physi- cally, to locate everything where we need it. With tech- nology helping us learn how to work better remotely, it's going to be even more important that we are able to get back and forth. GRIEBEL: Let's just make sure on regionalization, what's the definition? Is the definition that there's going to be a simple zoning committee for ... ? I don't think that's what we're talking about. We're talking about how do you integrate transportation systems more effec- tively? How do you integrate public services? When you do surveys on this stuff, most people don't care. If you have a heart attack and the EMT comes to your house, you don't care whether it says 'Cheshire' on there, you don't care whether it says 'Hartford.' You just want to make sure that EMT is thoroughly trained and can take care of you. So I think we have to say what is regionalism? What are we talking about when you use the 'R' word? I don't think it's the zoning issues. The other hot button is public edu- cation. The one thing that gets everybody up in arms is the control over the local school systems. It's prob- ably the last thing you'll see ever integrated, but look what's happened in the city, you put magnet schools in, you put choice schools in, it does matter. But the regionalization around transportation, the busway system is designed with a spur to get somebody out of UConn Health Center to come downtown, and vice versa. BELL: Do we end up, once we lay down the tracks, faster or not, and we set up the stops, do we then create a whole different world of have and have-nots? The communities that have a stop have economic devel- opment? Those that don't, don't? SMITH: There's a reason that people want stops. I mean, there are people now looking for new stops on the MetroNorth Line. So it does matter, which is why being a pioneer in some respects, despite it being hard to do, locally for zoning and other reasons, it does, in the long haul, help a community to get that attachment. But having said that, it will push even harder for the other communities in and around Hartford to look for ways in which they can be as connected. Maybe it's not a busway, but it might be better commuter buses themselves. Or carpooling or all of those sorts of things. It does matter. MILLER: Sort of a cause-and-effect relationship, too. I mean, you say, well, what about the other places that don't have that? If it's the economic engine that you're Chris Luise laments naysayers are too quick to accentuate Hartford's and Connecticut's negative when there is so many positives on which to focus. " I have a large group of 20-somethings working for me and they're not positive on downtown Hartford." -- Chris Luise For Chris Luise of ADNET Technologies, downtown Hartford still has a ways to go before it offers the kind of atmosphere that will attract the next generation of workers.