In Bethel visit, Gov. Lamont touts state’s manufacturing workforce - Danbury News Times

BETHEL — Gov. Ned Lamont on Wednesday pledged jobs in the state are returning following a tour of a local educational facility. The visit was meant to mark Manufacturing Month, an industry local leaders said makes up more than a 10th of the workforce in the region.

“As a governor of a state that didn’t really have any new jobs for a long time — we were kind of flat as a pancake — we’re coming back and we’re coming back on the strength of our workforce,” Lamont said, speaking from a podium in front of WorkspaceCT. The recently-opened site contains a professional kitchen, 3D printers, a recording studio and other workshops for local schools to use.

“We’ve gotta have the best trained most productive workforce in the world, that’s how you compete, and that’s what we’re doing right here,” Lamont added.

Manufacturing, he noted has “always been our greatest skill set.”

“We’re the Silicon Valley of manufacturing... that’s why we make the most complicated things in the world,” the governor said.

WorkspaceCT was opened in June as a collaboration between EdAdvance and Cooperative Educational Services, two of the state’s six regional education service centers. The quasi-government organizations were established by the state legislature decades ago to provide education supports and services to public schools throughout the state.

Encountering a group of Bethel High School students rehearsing for a Battle of the Bands during a tour of the facility, Lamont said he’d return to hear them play.

The red building that houses the facility is tucked down a bucolic drive in an industrial park, where tractor trailer trucks deliver welding gas to some of the neighboring sites. Before its educational use, the building was at one time a Cannondale bicycle factory, according to a spokesman for CES.

Matt Knickerbocker, Bethel’s first selectman, made a point of wearing a tie festooned with bicycles to the event for that very reason. “This industrial facility dates back about 30, 35 years,” he said. “You wouldn’t know it, it’s very quiet, very peaceful.”

Despite that, the park ships all over the world, Knickerbocker said. “Very quiet and very mighty,” he added.

He thanked Lamont for working to bring manufacturing back to the state “because we can still be the powerhouse that we once were,” he said.

James Amos, a manager of workforce programs at the Northwest Regional Workforce Investment Board, noted manufacturing accounts for 12 percent of the economy of the greater Danbury, Waterbury and Torrington region, and more than 11 percent of employment in the region. The organization’s work includes recruitment and job training resources.

“We have an incredible number of small manufacturers that play such an important role as far as the economy and employment,” said Amos. He said 33 suppliers to Electric Boat, the Groton-based submarine manufacturer are located in the region, seven of them in Danbury and Bethel alone.

The governor recalled how during his graduation in the 1970’s, a speaker told the class there would be no jobs available for them, and that, in Lamont’s words, they should “‘go back and unpack, there are no jobs for you, just stay on the family dole a little bit longer.”

“That’s not where we are today, not in this state, not in this country,” Lamont said. “It’s an amazing time to be graduating. And it’s also an amazing time I think to be giving people opportunity.”

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