COMMISSIONER OF ECONOMIC AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT (CGS § 32-1b)

The commissioner manages the Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD), which develops and implements the state's housing, community, and economic development policies and programs.

• The housing development policies include financing elderly and low- and moderate-income housing.

• The community development policies include dispersing federal and state dollars to small towns and nonprofit developers for rehabilitating homes and apartments, improving roads and sidewalks, constructing community facilities, funding regional revolving loan funds, and developing industrial and office parks.

• The economic development policies include providing different types of financing and tax incentives to businesses for constructing or expanding facilities, acquiring machinery and equipment, and cleaning up and redeveloping polluted properties.

QUESTIONS

1. What are the fundamental development challenges facing Connecticut's businesses and communities? Is the state geared toward meeting those challenges?

2. If the committee were to evaluate your efforts as DECD commissioner four years from now, what kinds of standards should it use? How would it know if your efforts made a difference?

3. Does the state need to revamp the way it organizes itself to develop the economy, revitalize communities, and provide decent and affordable housing? Is DECD structured in a way that will allow your efforts to succeed?

4. Last year, the legislature considered a bill requiring the DECD commissioner to prepare a strategic economic development plan. Do you think Connecticut needs such a plan? Who should prepare it and how? What kinds of issues and concerns should it address?

5. The legislature also considered a bill that would have replaced DECD with a quasi-public corporation. Do quasi-public agencies plan and implement economic, community, and housing development programs better than traditional state agencies?

6. Many different types of state, regional, and local organizations plan and implement housing and economic development policies and programs. How should DECD relate to these organizations? Should DECD use these agencies to achieve state objectives or give them technical and financial means to achieve their own objectives?

7. While Connecticut aggressively pursues economic development, it has also tried to steer that development away from farms, forests, and open spaces to cities and towns where the roads, sewers, and other supporting infrastructure already exist. Can economic development programs co-exist with smart growth programs?

8. As the state's lead housing agency, DECD is mainly responsible for providing housing to low- and moderate-income people. But the quasi-public Connecticut Housing Finance Authority oversees most of the state-funded public housing projects. Given this arrangement, how can DECD fulfill its housing mission?

JR: ts