This month, we spend a few minutes with William J. Parsons, deputy director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation.
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William J. Parsons
PBN: The General Assembly has just gotten under way. What bills is EDC interested in?
PARSONS: We’re interested in the insurance bills. We’ve put in, I believe, four insurance bills. That’s basically our target market. We have had over the last six months some very exciting interviews and meetings with some big insurance companies.
Can you name any of them?
No. Sorry I can’t. But they’re big.
Of the insurance bills EDC has proposed, what do they cover? Are they tax incentives?
They would enhance the insurance companies’ (capacity)to make profits. There’s actually a whole range of other bills that we’re talking about: the Sunday work law bill, which will probably be back again. It would allow companies not to pay time-and-a-half to people working a continuous seven-day week in manufacturing. You can do that in the financial services, but you can’t do that in manufacturing. (The General Assembly passed a financial service law during the 1998 session.)
You’d be interested in trying again to include manufacturing?
We’re going to support the bill. Some of the other bills are the enterprise zone. We’re sponsoring a bill that would allow for the benefits of the bill to carry three years forward. That’s one of the other ones. The wholesale-retail inventory tax (repeal) that we’ve been after for quite awhile. To extend the Job Development Act to the year 2001.
Tell me about the Job Development Act?
What the Job Development Act does for small businesses under 50, for every 10 people that you hire your corporate income tax goes down by one-quarter of 1 percent. If you’re a large group, I think it’s 50, your corporate income tax goes down by more than 1 percent. Fidelity would come in and take 2 percent corporate income tax deduction because of the Job Development Act.
Other things we’re very active in, the Urban Agenda, which includes the incubator. We’re in the process now of negotiating a two-year lease on a building in South Providence on Colfax Street. It’s called the Coken Building. And also the Equity Loan Fund, which we had established to provide loans to companies in the enterprise zones and other companies that don’t have access to bank lending.
How does EDC measure how many companies have taken advantage of the tax incentives for setting up shop in an enterprise zone?
We have records of everybody that’s in that zone and how many people that they’ve hired. They have to apply through us every year and tell us how many people they’ve hired, in order to take advantage of the tax incentives.
Any idea how many jobs this has created?
There are 485 businesses registered in the enterprise zone (across the state), 1,027 jobs created and filled by Rhode Islanders. Sixty percent of those jobs are manufacturing. One-hundred-and-fifty-two of the 485 increased their employment by more than 5 percent, which is good, very good. In these zones that’s where unemployment is highest. The creation of these zones has been dramatic for Rhode Island employment in those areas.
Are there plans to add any other enterprise zones?
Not at this point. We’re enterprise zoned-out.
Narragansett Brewery is the newest one, are there companies interested in going in there yet?
Unfortunately the companies that we’re talking with now, they’re not closed deals so we can’t talk about them. But we’ve got quite a few in the hopper. We’re doing very well in Rhode Island right now. There’s a lot of activity. I’ve been here for 24 years and the activity that’s taken place over the last year or so, it’s incredible.
Why?
I think we’ve got a great economy. I think one of our key advantages is our labor force. We have a terrific labor force here. When American Express, First Data Corp., first moved to this building back in ’89 we had a 3 percent unemployment rate. They said, ‘We’re never going to move into an area with a 3 percent unemployment rate.’ We convinced them that we had the labor. They were astonished by the labor, because the people stayed with the company. In Boston they jump from one company to another, it’s incredible. But here they stay and they’re still there, they still have some people working there. That will be taken over now by Boston Financial.
Is there anything further on the Pfizer company coming to Rhode Island?
Unfortunately I can’t talk about Pfizer and what we’re doing at this point. We’d like to keep that confidential until we have something to talk about. That’s the type of company that is looking at Rhode Island these days. You know five, six years ago those companies didn’t look at Rhode Island. They didn’t know where Rhode Island was. They knew where we were to pass through to get to Boston, but now those types of companies are looking at Rhode Island. Which is very exciting to me.
