Lamont: Otis will stay, UTC to hire 1,000 at Pratt & Whitney

United Technologies will hire 1,000 people at its Pratt & Whitney unit and Otis Elevator Co. will keep its headquarters in Connecticut after a planned spinoff next year, Gov. Ned Lamont said Tuesday.

The moves follow by two days UTC’s announcement that the aerospace giant will merge with Raytheon Co., maker of missiles and spy equipment, and move the head office of the newly formed $100 billion corporation to metro Boston.

It comes as consolation and maybe then some to a state that was shellshocked by the UTC news. But in an interview, Lamont said the moves were not presented to him as a makeup for the loss of UTC’s headquarters, which would happen by mid-2020 if the Raytheon deal is approved.

“This is just business as usual for them,” Lamont said, making the point that UTC is satisfied with Connecticut’s economic direction.

Pratt currently has about 13,000 jobs in East Hartford

and Middletown, and has been adding employees robustly in recent years as work peaks on the engines for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the geared turbofan commercial engines.

Many people in Connecticut have believed Otis, based in Farmington, would exit the state after its spinoff from UTC, expected in the first few months of 2020. Carrier, UTC’s air conditioning and building controls unit, is also spinning off and is now based in Florida but has employees at the UTC campus in Farmington.

Lamont spoke with Greg Hayes, chief executive of UTC, Sunday evening around the time of the merger announcement, and again Tuesday morning. On Sunday, Lamont said in an interview, “I said, ‘Tell me about the decision,’ and he was very positive about Connecticut, positive on what we did with our budget, positive on Pratt & Whitney and hiring people.”

Lamont wasn’t able to say how many of the 1,000 new hires at Pratt would be additional and how many would fill vacancies, but it’s a safe bet that most are new jobs that would add to the total.

The governor has said all along, even before he was sworn in on Jan. 9, that he was in close contact with UTC and considered it a high priority to keep the company in Connecticut. In all, UTC has more than 18,000 employees in Connecticut including a few thousand at Collins Aerospace, formerly Hamilton Sundstrand, in Windsor Locks.

“He talked about his commitment to the state of Connecticut,” Lamont said of Hayes, “and for him, his commitment is new folks at Pratt & Whitney, Otis Elevator, job training, the incubator that they’re creating, the engineering facility... along the way, Raytheon is headquartered in Massachusetts, so that came along.”

Lamont recounted Hayes’ comments: “Congratulations on getting a budget done without raising taxes, and on time.”

UTC did not immediately provide a comment on the promises of new jobs and the Otis headquarters.

The $21 billion budget adopted by the General Assembly, which Lamont will sign, includes about $170 million in tax increases and an equal amount in postponed tax cuts and credits. It does not raise any tax rates.

“What’s going on in Connecticut is a positive for him, it’s got nothing to do with the corporate location,” Lamont continued.

Republicans disagree with that contention, saying rising costs and taxes are driving people and businesses out. The Connecticut Mirror published a story before the 2018 election saying a UTC board member was heard at a party saying that if Lamont were elected, UTC would leave. The board member declined to comment when Mark Pazniokas of The Mirror asked him about it.

“Connecticut punches above its weight in aerospace, defense, engineering, and advanced manufacturing,” Lamont said in a written statement. “Our highly skilled talent, advanced manufacturing education programs, and ecosystem are ground zero for companies like Pratt & Whitney and Otis. No one is willing to walk away from that.”

Because UTC keeps a lean corporate headquarters with most executives assigned to its operating units, the exit to Massachusetts — as part of the creation of Raytheon Technologies — is expected to cost Connecticut only about 100 jobs.

Some of those are among the highest-paying jobs at the company, but growing employment at Pratt and a global Otis headquarters in Connecticut would more than make up for it economically. What’s lost if the merger goes through is the prestige, philanthropy and local commerce that comes with having a headquarters of a Dow Jones bellwether company — along with the history, as UTC was founded in East Hartford in 1929 and has been synonymous with aviation ever since.

Otis, with global sales of about $12.5 billion, is no small business itself and is the most international of UTC’s four divisions. Founded by Elisha Otis in Yonkers, N.Y. in 1853, the company was acquired by UTC in a hostile takeover in 1976.

It’s not clear how many people are at the Otis headquarters now and how many would staff it as a freestanding, publicly traded corporation. Otis also has a test center in Bristol and a service and supply facility in Bloomfield with several hundred employees.

The UTC-Raytheon merger would be a stock swap, meaning it would be a tax-free combination rather than a sale of one company to the other. That may be a reason why UTC had to agree to move the headquarters to metro Boston; with no premium paid to Raytheon stockholders, the location is part of the sweetener that makes the deal happen.

Raytheon Technologies would be based in, at or near Raytheon’s current headquarters in Waltham, Mass. The merger is subject to several government approvals.