Study: Local growth lags national numbers
Communities that score well fall behind out-of-state competitors
“State underfunding of local public education over time has shifted a huge unfair tax burden onto the backs of residential and business property taxpayers.”
Joel DeLong, CCM executive statement
When Italia Yachts chose southwestern Connecticut for its first U.S. sales office, it had any number of Gold Coast enclaves in which to weigh anchor.
Its port of call? Milford — a choice that more businesses are making as local economies continue to build momentum off an ongoing surge in the markets.
New Haven led Connecticut’s largest cities in economic performance in 2017, according to a new study by the state Department of
Labor, with
Milford edging
Danbury for the top score among smaller cities in southwestern
Connecticut.
Oxford topped all towns in the region, with
North Stonington having the best-performing economy in the state regardless of population.
The state Department of Labor assesses economic performance according to household employment and wage trends, and any changes to the numbers of business establishments in any given locale on a net basis.
The index omits several other important economic criteria, including the relative performances of residential real estate markets that can be a telltale for the desirability of a town for newcomers considering their options on where to live; and office occupancies that provide a window into the hiring of companies located within a town. As an example, Greenwich is ranked 155th on the statewide list, despite an ever-shrinking vacancy rate in its downtown area as the run-up on Wall Street trickles down to the professional firms in its downtown
business sector.
Rising scores
On the DOL index, Hartford had the best improvement of any city in Connecticut with at least 100,000 inhabitants, edging New Haven’s yearover-year comparison. Among smaller municipalities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 people, Mansfield made the biggest jump just ahead of Orange, with Franklin registering the biggest gain among smaller towns statewide and Darien ranking 12th to edge one rung ahead of Sherman to lead the southwestern corner of the state, with the two towns also leading the region for economic gains since 2014.
Municipalities statewide saw a sizable upswing on this year’s DOL index, with only nine Connecticut towns suffering a drop in their economic score including Newtown and Fairfield.
What represents strong economic performance in Connecticut pales to other parts of the country. The New Haven-Milford region ranked in the bottom 40 percent of metropolitan areas nationally for yearover-year employment growth in August, with a 1.1 percent gain, versus 1.4 percent in the Danbury economic zone and 6.9 percent in Atlantic City, N.J., which led the Northeast and ranked third nationally.
With a meager 0.7 percent employment growth over the intervening year, the Greenwich-Bridgeport corridor only barely cracked the top 300 regions for hiring momentum, relegating the area to the bottom 25 percent of metropolitan clusters nationally.
Easing the burden
For the fall elections, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities is pressing candidates to consider ways to alleviate the financial burden the state’s cities and towns are carrying, particularly with regard to new laws that force them to increase spending — with a waterfall effect on local property taxes that represent the major source of revenue for cities and towns.
CCM wants not just a ban on new edicts from Hartford, but a rollback of prior mandates such as exemptions on taxes for certain classes of properties, or requirements for towns to pick up much of the cost of educational services for children with extra needs in the school environment.
“State underfunding of local public education over time has shifted a huge unfair tax burden onto the backs of residential and business property taxpayers,” said Joel DeLong, executive statement of CCM, in a written statement this week in support of the nonprofit’s government priorities. “To continue to transfer state budget problems to towns and cities and their property taxpayers is unfair, and it shortchanges Connecticut’s future.”