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By Alison Gregor Photograph by Roy Gumpel
Last December, Gov. Jon Corzine assembled three dozen state leaders in real estate and economic development and enjoined them with devising innovative ways to combat the effects of a global economic recession, largely by staving a slow leak of industry and jobs from the state.
By press time, the group of leaders who comprise the New Jersey Real Estate Advisory Board (NJREAB) had met officially only a handful of times. However, the board’s chairman, Joseph Taylor, president and chief executive of Matrix Companies, had already broken the board into four subcommittees focusing on legislation, marketing, regulations, and housing. Work had begun on modifying legislation and regulations while developing a strategy for marketing New Jersey to the industry.
New Jersey & Company magazine talked to eight of NJREAB's members: Taylor; Caren Franzini, chief executive of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority; and developer members Carl Goldberg, chairman of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority; Mitchell Hersh, president, director, and chief executive of Mack-Cali Realty Corporation; Steven J. Pozycki, chairman and chief executive of SJP Properties; Joseph Riggs, Edison group president of K. Hovnanian Homes; Emanuel Stern, president and chief operating officer of Hartz Mountain Industries, Inc.; and Eric Witmondt, chief executive of Woodmont Properties and vice chairman of FirstService Williams.
What is your understanding of the board’s mission?
Joseph Taylor: The mission of the board is to bring private investors and developers together in a proactive way—to advise, give counsel, and where possible, steer the administration in issues we think are important to enhance economic activity in the real estate sector to help lead us out of this recession.
Carl Goldberg: It’s supposed to assist the administration in developing regulatory and legislative proposals to assist New Jersey in recovering from the current economic recession. Historically in New Jersey, the real estate industry has been one of the primary employers. It has been one of the most significant economic drivers. If there’s going to be a recovery, the real estate industry needs to be a part of that.
Caren Franzini: The board’s mission is to provide advice, guidance, and suggestions to the governor and to the state on how to enhance our competitive advantage to continue to encourage businesses to stay and locate in New Jersey.
Emanuel Stern: I think the board is a committee of the top real estate professionals in the state whose mission is to liaison with the governor’s office and his economic development executives on what the state could be doing better to support its commercial real estate interests.
Mitchell Hersh: The mission as described to the members was to essentially craft a message that New Jersey is open for business.
Why does New Jersey need a Real Estate Advisory Board?
Taylor: While New Jersey gets kind of a bad rap, both in the media and from a number of other constituencies, there are a lot of things the state has going for it, as well as a lot of very strong initiatives that have come out of Trenton on the legislative and the regulatory sides, so we had to get the word out a little bit better than we have as to what the state is doing to try to, first of all, retain the jobs that are already here, and second of all, to attract new ones.
Steven J. Pozycki: People look at the history of our politics in New Jersey, and it gets a bad rap. But it’s got a very bright capable labor base as well as an incredible infrastructure with the ports, the airports, the highway system and the mass transit system. [We need] to make suggestions to the state on how to improve retaining businesses within New Jersey and attracting businesses and getting them to expand in the state.
Joseph Riggs: New Jersey, perhaps more than any other state—because of its location and because of the scarce land resources that we have—finds itself involved in debates of consequence regarding how growth is going to happen. It’s important as those types of debates are happening that the administration hear directly from the development community.
Eric Witmondt: Before Jon Corzine came into office, we’d been losing private sector jobs to other parts of the country. And the Governor wanted to step up his efforts to combat some of the negative fallout from the financial industry crisis to make sure we are as well-informed and well-positioned to take proactive steps to help continue to build on the economic growth platform that he has to help stimulate New Jersey’s economy.
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