Small Breaks For Small Business

With a winter gone AWOL and the sun rising steadily to meet daylight saving time in a couple of weeks, small signs of growth are showing up a little early in the sunny protected spots by foundations and stonewalls. Encouraging signs. So, perhaps, taking their cue from this freak nonwinter, Newtown’s Economic Development officials showed up at last week’s Legislative Council meeting in their search for signs of growth in the battered economic landscape. They tried to be encouraging.

Connecticut’s Center for Economic Analysis reports in a new study that in 2011 the state’s modest 2.65 percent growth in real gross domestic product outpaced the national rate of 1.85 percent. Typically, according to the center’s economists, Connecticut lags behind the rest of the nation in recovering from economic downturns. But this time around, private sector growth in many other states is being offset by deep cuts in public spending and widespread layoffs of public sector workers as states struggle to balance their budgets without tax hikes. Connecticut, on the other hand, used a mix of spending cutbacks and tax hikes to balance its budget, so more state paychecks continue to spark the tinder of 2012’s uncertain flicker of economic growth.

With this tender new growth as a backdrop, Newtown’s Economic Development Commission (EDC) told council members last week that it remains committed to a goal of increasing the commercial and industrial components of the town’s grand list of taxable property by about one percent over the next decade. According to the commission’s co-chairmen, that increase would represent $63 million of capital development locally. We normally associate that kind of capital investment with large projects like the high-tech Advanced Fusion Systems under development on Edmond Road. (AFS alone expects to invest more than $100 million in Newtown by 2016, employing as many as 500 people.) But wisely, the EDC is turning its efforts to support the largely unseen home-based businesses — nearly 3,000, they said — that generate jobs and local economic activity on a scale that rivals big corporate developers.

The EDC’s idea, which is still in its formative stages, is to create a “small business incubator” in town that would provide needed banking, administrative, and support services. Too often it is the small breaks that never materialize that spell the difference between success and failure for a start-up home business operating close to the bone. Delivering large-scale incentives for large-scale businesses may be beyond the capacity of our town, which itself struggles to finance its own business of public service. But delivering small breaks for small businesses — economies of scale for the truly small scale — just may be something we can do while we wait for the rising tide of recovering state, national, and global economies to lift us up and out of these tough times.