Insurance exec to lead DECD - Westfair Communications

In appointing ING executive Catherine Smith as the commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has chosen an unconventional figure to lead a consolidation of economic functions within state government.

A longtime insurance executive who lives in Northford, Smith replaces Joan McDonald, who former Gov. M. Jodi Rell recruited from New York for her transportation expertise to focus on urban-centric development. She has since returned to New York to lead the state”™s Department of Transportation.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo chose the head of the New York State Business Council to lead the Empire State Development Corp., which like DECD has a primary role of advising businesses on how to access incentives and wade through red tape.

In the early weeks of his administration, Malloy has reached out both to business groups and individual employers as he sets the state budget and priorities, including at a recent gathering of the Bridgeport Regional Business Council. He said Smith brings exceptional business acumen to the post and he is empowering her to reinvent DECD to adopt the best approaches for development nationally that can be applied here.

While Malloy said Smith is superbly qualified to reorganize and streamline DECD and increase jobs in Connecticut, in a press conference he and Smith did not address some of the state”™s most intractable problems, including severe blight in cities such as Bridgeport, which are scattered with polluted brownfields that resist development. The Connecticut General Assembly scheduled a hearing at deadline to take testimony on yet another law that would seek to jumpstart brownfield development.

“We will round out a team in economic development,” Malloy said. “But in picking the leader to re-engineer the entirety of the state”™s approach to business retention and growth, large and small businesses, I could not have come up with a better candidate than the one that I did.”

Separately, Malloy named former New Jersey transit official James Redeker as acting commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Transportation while the search continues for a permanent replacement for Jeffrey Parker, who is leaving the job.

A Malloy spokesperson declined to make Smith available for an interview before her official start date of April 1.

Even as he raises income taxes on wealthy and middle-class residents in Connecticut and extends a corporate income tax surcharge, Malloy has also touted a new “first five” incentive program intended to swiftly lure five corporations to undertake expansions involving at least 200 employees in Connecticut. As of the end of 2009, the most recent records on file with the Connecticut Department of Labor, 510 work sites in Connecticut had at least 250 employees, and those organizations employed a quarter of all the workers in the state.

According to the Labor Department, Higher One was the last company to reveal an expansion of at least 200 permanent workers outside the retail and construction sectors, in conjunction with the establishment of a new headquarters facility in New Haven where it is already based.

Smith said she is looking beyond the expansions that capture headlines, however.

“We need to reach out and ”¦ really get to know the corporations that are already here in the state ”“ and I am again not talking just about the big ones, the big Fortune 100 companies, but the little companies as well that make their home here in Connecticut, that we can help grow and prosper even more,” Smith said. “I”™ve had a lot of experience dealing with customers, and I”™ve learned that if you understand their point of view, what their needs are, you can create an efficient and effective way to meet those needs. And I hope to bring that thinking into the department itself so that we become very user-friendly to all of our stakeholders here in the state.”