NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ-With New Jersey making progress on changing the business environment in terms of taxes and development, the state can now start marketing itself as a destination to attract companies from other areas. That, at any rate, was the belief of speakers at a NAIOP discussion of “Selling New Jersey,” held at the Heldrich Hotel and Conference Center here.
The first goal is to have something to sell. The Christie administration took office with a three-pronged economic agenda, said Richard Bagger, Christie’s chief of staff, and a former mayor of Westfield, NJ. The agenda included: restoring fiscal discipline to the public sector; promoting a pro-growth tax environment; and regulatory reform.
“The first six months were about stabilizing the state’s finances, then proposing a state budget to close the gap without raising taxes,” Bagger said. “In terms of reviewing the anti-growth tax policy, we had to turn that around. He challenged the staff to come up with recommendations with changes to the tax structure.”
Regulatory reform, he noted “is easy to talk about and hard to do.” Yet the state has cut the number of pages of regulations published in the New Jersey Register to one-third the total of a year ago. Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno now famously gives out her cell phone number to developers looking to cut through red tape to get projects built.
The governor remains committed to the repeal of the commercial development tax as passed by the state senate, Bagger said, and is waiting for the passage of the property tax Toolkit. “You have two sets of handcuffs,” Bagger said. “I’m fairly confident in the next few weeks and months we’ll see this passed.”
And more help is on the way, with the formation of Choose NJ, an independent, privately funded, nonprofit organization formed last year to market the state to the business community.
“Is there a state more successful than Texas?” said Dennis Bone, president of Verizon and chairman of Choose NJ, which also examined such successful development markets as the Research Triangle in North Carolina. “We looked at what they did and said that what sets them apart is that they have public/private partnerships, selling a region. We just don’t do that in New Jersey. There are individual efforts, but no concentrated effort.”
Choose NJ spent much of last year raising money and recently appointed Tracye McDaniel, most recently executive VP and COO of the Greater Houston Partnership. The organization is still staffing up and understanding the business community’s perceptions of the state before preparing marketing materials. Even so, the state will still have some obstacles, Bone admitted.
"We can’t go from 48th in terms of onerous taxes to Number 1 or 2,” Bone said. “Getting to the middle of the pack would be good. We are starting to bend the perception curve. I’m very optimistic.”
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