Politics & Government
A city of economic diversity
Danbury is adding jobs, population, and appears poised to address school overcrowding
By Scott Benjamin
DANBURY – In Danbury: To succeed, you adjust.
The Hat City doesn't have Fortune 500 skyscrapers, a raft of hedge funds or a major defense contractor.
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However, it does have a diverse economic profile.
As he drives into the vast parking lot at Cartus, the city’s fourth largest employer, municipal Economic Development Director Shay Nagarsheth says, “We led the state in business recovery out of COVID.”
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And this was city where the case numbers during the pandemic were so high in August 2020 that Gov. Ned Lamont (D-Greenwich) made an urgent visit.
Cartus had received a state First Five Plus grant in 2014 from then-Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Essex) after the company had considered moving to Texas. A news release at that time stated that it had 1,275 jobs, would add as many as 200 positions in the next five years and referred to the company as “the Global Leader in Corporate Relocation.”
Now, eight years later, the parking lot is almost empty. The pandemic demonstrated the ability for a large company to utilize work-from-home.
On June 7 voters in Connecticut’s seventh largest city will consider at referendum borrowing $210 million on school renovations to address chronic overcrowding. About $164 million would be utilized to turn the 30-acre Cartus site into a Career Academy and educate a combined 1,400 high school and middle school students. It would open in the Fall 2024.
Adding classroom space has been a prime issue in the last two mayoral campaigns.
Nagarsheth, who took over his current position this last winter, said, “The plan is for Cartus to have a small office presence in Danbury to run their operations, but will retain all their employees keeping them working remotely as they are currently doing. Cartus will remain one of the largest employers in Danbury.”
The city doesn’t make hats any more. The Great Danbury State Fair and the accompanying stock car race-arena went out of business 41 years ago to clear way for a large shopping mall. Union Carbide came and went. Suburban Connecticut became less attractive to major corporations as recent college graduates wanted to work in large cities with plenty of mass transit.
Yet, Danbury continues to thrive.
“Danbury does not rely on one industry. There is a good mix between white collar and blue collar jobs, remarked Nagarsheth, a former chairman of the municipal Environmental Impact Commission who also served on the City Council.
Urban & Regional Issues reporter Tom Condon of CT Mirror wrote in a 2017 profile of Danbury, “Manufacturing cities that focus on a single product often struggle or implode when that industry goes away. Danbury is an exception. The Hat City is pretty far along at reinventing itself.”
The leading employer is Nuvance Health, which, among other things, administers the 456-bed Danbury Hospital. It also occupies 350,000 square feet at the Summit, the former Union Carbide site.
According to Wikipedia, pharmaceutical giant Boehringer-Ingelheim ranks second in employees, the Danbury public schools third, Cartus fourth, IQVIA, a global provider of advanced analytics, ranks fifth and Western Connecticut State University is sixth.
New businesses are arriving.
"People are knocking down our door every day," Danbury Mayor Dean Esposito said in a 2021 interview with Patch.com when he was the chief of staff to the mayor and also campaigning to be the city’s top elected official.
The Danbury Fair Mall, which opened in 1986, is largely responsible for the city ranking first in Connecticut is sales tax revenue. It also is first, per capita, in the state in restaurants.
State Rep. Stephen Harding (R-107) of Brookfield, whose district includes a slice of northern Danbury, stated in an e-mail message to Patch.com that there is an influx of people moving to the housing on the west side of the city. He stated that he believes that there will be more demand for restaurants and entertainment.
According to Wikipedia, over the last decade Danbury has added 6,000 people to is population, reaching the current 86,518.
Said Nagarsheth “Danbury is the tenth most diverse city in the country. We also draw a lot of employees from New York and vice versa.”
Over the recent years, Donald Klepper-Smith, of Data Core Partners has made the presentation at the annual Greater Danbury Chamber of Commerce Economic Forecast breakfast, noting that since the Great Recession of 2008, the eight-municipality metro Danbury labor market has outperformed the rest of the state.
He has said that prior to the 2020 pandemic, it was the only one of the nine labor markets in the Nutmeg State to recapture all of the jobs that had been lost from the Great Recession. He recently said that the metro Danbury labor market had added 12,500 jobs since the sharp decline in April 2020 during the early weeks of the pandemic. The unemployment rate is 3.8 percent - well below the state's current 4.6 percent average.
In a phone interview with Patch.com, Klepper-Smith, who was the head of former Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s (R-Brookfield) economic team, said one of the factors for Danbury’s success is that it is “affordable.”
Nagarsheth said in an interview with Patch.com that the municipal budget for the fiscal year that starts in July increased the tax rate by just 0.62 mills after having three consecutive years with the same mill rate.
However, Harding told Patch.com nearly four years ago, that Danbury also has an “odd economic dynamic.”
Former Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton told Patch.com in 2018 that even thought its economy is diverse and robust, nearly half of the students in the public schools are on reduced lunch. A 2018 study by the United Way indicated that about 32,000 households, roughly half of those in Danbury, are just above the poverty line or at some point below that measure.
During a 2013 talk at Western Connecticut State University, Boughton said that the opening of mall a generation ago had caused the downtown, which had been the economic hub, to take “a big hit.”
He said at the time that had not even been born in the 1950s who would look at a picture of Danbury’s Main Street from that era and say, “Why can’t we have that?”
Boughton said, “We’re never going to have that again. Main Streets have changed over the years” as a result of shopping malls and plazas.
However, now there are signs the downtown has become revitalized.
“We didn’t have enough housing downtown,” commented Nagarsheth. “Now we have market-rate housing.”
There are 385 apartments at Kennedy Flats on Main Street and the construction by BRT Realty is under way for 150 units at 333 Main Street, the former site of The News-Times.
Time magazine reported in 2017 that analysts had indicated that one out of every four shopping malls could be dormant in five years.
However, on the city’s west side, the Danbury Fair Mall remains a vibrant economic hub.
Nagarsheth commented, “It has been attracting different kinds of businesses. It is attracting businesses that are not found in traditional malls. There is even a business with a golf simulator. You can go and play rounds of golf.”
Danbury’s proximity to New York City and Westchester County has been a prime factor in its economic development over the last 50 years. The establishment of Interstte-84 that linking the city to Interstate-684 made it more accessible.
However, for years municipal officials have complained about the long train commute to Manhattan.
Nagarsheth remarked that the proposed electrification of the Hat City’s rail line, which is currently being studied and discussed with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, would be “huge for Danbury,” since local commuters would not be seeking to board the train in Southeast, N.Y.
He added, "It would be huge for Danbury by making the trip to Manhattan just an hour and 35 minutes with trains departing every half an hour.”
Resources:
https://ctmirror.org/2022/04/1...
https://ctmirror.org/2017/06/1...
https://www.newstimes.com/news...
https://www.newstimes.com/local/article/State-loans-Danbury-firm-6-5M-to-stay-in-5411337.php
Slide presentation by Donald Klepper-Smith to Greater Danbury Chamber of Commerce Economic Forecast Breakfast, May 11, 2022.
