From leaving to loving New Jersey.

• Author: Gordon, Dianna
• Position: Laws enticing businesses - Includes related articles on state-business relationships and pro-business state laws

Garden State lawmakers have passed legislation designed to encourage established businesses to stay as well as lure new ones to New Jersey.

Pity New Jersey. Businesspeople just haven't been interested in the state. Some have been moving out. Others aren't too interested in coming in. Reasons include the perception that New Jersey is a "high-cost" state and its tax rate is 1.5 percent to 4.5 percent greater than other areas of the country. Not a pleasant economic picture. (In fact, the Garden State ranked 42nd in economic development, according to a 1994 legislative report.)

New Jersey lost 240 businesses - and 21,233 jobs - in 1995, according to the state Labor Department. But those statistics don't tell the whole story. They're only the "known permanent," but don't include all business and job losses, the department reports.

Assemblyman Joseph Azzolina decided to use his business background - he built a mom-and-pop grocery store into a 1,100-employee chain of supermarkets - to help stem that business downturn by creating a public-private partnership to help keep business in the state as well as boost economic development.

Working with former Assembly Speaker Garabed "Chuck" Haytaian, Azzolina helped organize a task force of 17 business executives and four legislators. The group toured the state, holding coffees and forums for entrepreneurs and business owners. From those meetings, they learned why businesses were leaving the state and how other states were luring businesses out of New Jersey.

"They convinced us we needed programs to keep business here as well as ones to get companies to move here," Azzolina explains.

The Legislature responded last year by enacting seven bills geared to stimulating economic development. Six more bills based on task force recommendations have been reintroduced in the Assembly this session.

GOING REGIONAL

One of the new laws creates regional offices staffed by the state Commerce Department. Local businesses or business organizations provide office space, equipment and on-loan professionals.

The offices will iron out businesses' problems with the bureaucracy and become one-stop centers for information, loans and other assistance, according to Deborah Smarth, Assembly senior policy adviser for trade and economic development.

In New Jersey, the utilities, county economic development agencies and three separate state agencies - the state, commerce and labor departments - were all doing their own things when it came to helping business.

"We needed to gather together to help business," Azzolina explains. "We were going off in different directions, and we needed to put everyone together so they could work as a team." The result...