Raimondo reaches out to business

OPEN DISCUSSION: Hope Global CEO Cheryl Merchant, left, and Senior Vice President for New Business Development Leslie Taito discuss the manufacturing business climate in the state at Gov.-elect Gina M. Raimondo’s Jobs Summit on Dec. 16. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
OPEN DISCUSSION: Hope Global CEO Cheryl Merchant, left, and Senior Vice President for New Business Development Leslie Taito discuss the manufacturing business climate in the state at Gov.-elect Gina M. Raimondo’s Jobs Summit on Dec. 16. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Gov.-elect Gina M. Raimondo started work three weeks ahead of her Jan. 6 inauguration at a Jobs Summit that participants and supporters hope will position her administration to hit the ground running.
Whether the Dec. 16 summit she hosted at the University of Rhode Island’s Feinstein campus in Providence was, as some participants wondered, a “feel-good” way to draw attention to Raimondo’s economic-development plan, or if an actual “to-do list” will emerge, remains to be seen. Raimondo gave no indication at the end of the three-hour session whether there will be more public meetings on the five focus areas she identified: workforce development, tourism and hospitality, small business and startups, manufacturing and infrastructure.
But many of the more than 100 invited guests, mostly from the business community, said they were excited to share in a conversation about economic development and the state’s future that could produce meaningful results.
“It’s well-timed,” said Constance A. Howes, executive vice president for women’s health at the Care New England Hospital System, and a participant in the workforce-development group.
“She has a 40-day period to hire people for her administration and submit a budget,” Howes said. “What she’s gotten … is an army of committed businesspeople and leaders in this state who will help her achieve her goals in increasing growth in the business community.”
Raimondo herself issued a rallying cry to participants that each summit break-out group addressed individually.
“Tonight is the beginning of a conversation,” Raimondo told the crowd at the start, following a standing ovation. “We want to get the best ideas out of you, and then we want you to stay in touch with us.”
Raimondo timed the transition policy summit to include newly nominated Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor, who sat in with her on a portion of each break-out session.
Jaime Aguayo, co-owner and president of real estate agency ANH Enterprises of Providence, got to the meeting early and stayed through to the end of the break-out session he was assigned: tourism and hospitality. The timing for the summit was good, he said. “What it does is set the tone,” Aguayo said. “The perception is good, because it means she is willing to work with everybody, listen to the small-business owner, the taxpayer.”
Aguayo had only met the governor-elect once before and hopes to stay in contact with her administration, particularly with regard to possibilities for job creation, as well as tourism.
“That [breakout] group, they’re not entrenched in their thinking; they’re looking for ways to make it better, and I had a sense of a great deal of cooperation,” Aguayo said.
Curt Columbus, artistic director of the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, urged the tourism group to call for advocacy within government.
“We are ignored as a sector within government,” Columbus said. “We are treated like the bastard stepchildren. So we need that advocacy.”
Each break-out session, facilitated by moderators, lasted about an hour and a half. Whether a written report of the suggestions moderators wrote on tablets will be produced as follow-up is unclear, but Brown University political science professor Wendy Schiller said the likely place to expect findings to emerge is in Raimondo’s inaugural address.
“She’ll try to use ideas from the summit that she wants to pursue and use this summit to generate public support for those ideas,” Schiller reasoned. “This was an informal convening of business leaders. I don’t think there’s any obligation to issue any kind of formal report.”
But Neil Steinberg, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation, said he hoped a “prioritized to-do list” would emerge after the summit.
“I thought it was great to not wait [until Raimondo is in office],” Steinberg said. “There’s a lot to do, people know there’s a lot to do, and the real merit of this will be in the action, so the quicker we can get to action the better. This in my mind accelerated that.”
With 20 to 30 people in a room, there appeared to be a limit to the number of people that could actually share ideas, but Schiller said it was “smart” to give people the opportunity to voice their ideas and hear what others had to say.
Raimondo did not reference the recently approved RhodeMap Rhode Island economic-development plan for the state when addressing the summit gathering, but Steinberg and Howes noted that the break-out topics from her own economic-development plan overlap. “What will come out of this process [are] some plans, so whether it’s the RoadMap plan or something different I don’t know, but I think she sees the need to have a plan and really focus on some priorities,” Howes said.
Schiller, however, noted that House Speaker Nicholas A. Mattiello has already indicated the RoadMap plan, developed over two years at the behest of outgoing Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee’s administration with the help of federal funding, may get shelved, so it made sense for Raimondo to steer clear of it.
Each of the break-out sessions had a different feel, but in each one people spoke up freely and shared observations and ideas.
In the workforce-development group, Howes and others pointed to several programs that are working well. But Work Immersion, which helps unemployed Rhode Islanders get jobs and gives employers a chance to feel out a prospective hire, is about to run out of money, she said.
Laurie White, president of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, said the Community College of Rhode Island is “starved for resources.” Others suggested the vocational career and tech academies are underutilized.
In the infrastructure session Kelly Coates, senior vice president of development and commercial leasing with the Johnston-based Carpionato Group, and others compared the land-use permitting delays and “bottleneck” in Rhode Island with a different approach in Massachusetts that may have some potential to serve as a model.
Alan Tear, co-founder and managing partner of Betaspring, liked the idea of gathering data about small businesses and startups as a way to begin addressing their needs.
Tear said whether the summit is more than talk will depend on Raimondo’s ability to convert her “opening salvo” into a continuous dialogue.
“There should be an ongoing conversation between the private sector and the governor-elect,” Tear said. “The true work is going to be done over time. Our job is to stick with it.” •

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