General Electric to move headquarters to Boston in digital move

“Greater Boston is home to 55 colleges and universities”.

“We want to be at the center of an ecosystem that shares our aspirations”, GE chief executive Jeffrey R. Immelt said in a statement.

Several states, including NY, have been competing to lure the company from Fairfield, Conn., since GE announced in June that it was unhappy about legislative tax proposals and thinking about a move.

The new corporate headquarters will have about 800 employees, comprised of 200 corporate staff and 600 digital industrial product managers, designers and developers for GE’s Digital, Current, robotics and Life Sciences divisions, the multinational company said in a statement Wednesday.

It said it already employs almost 5,000 people across MA, in various businesses including aviation and energy.

General Electric has been wooed from the CT suburbs to the Beantown waterfront by $145 million in incentives offered by the state of MA and city of Boston. The company is selling its Fairfield campus and its offices at Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan.

General Electric has announced that it has selected the city of Boston as the next location for the company’s corporate headquarters.

Employees will have to move to a temporary Boston location in summer of 2016.

But what do those trends mean for the less urban environment here in CT? GE said it was also attracted by the area’s thriving venture capital and startup community, and pro-business state and local government.

John Frey, Connecticut’s State Representative of the 111 District was quoted in the article as being one of the first people alarmed by “GE’s displeasure”, with Connecticut. But U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, has led the crusade against the obscure federal agency, arguing the bank is a form of “corporate welfare”, benefiting politically connected corporate giants such as Boeing Corp. Fairfield’s 2013-2014 annual report listed GE’s headquarters with an assessed value $74.7 million and ranked it the city’s largest property tax payer.

“They are unequivocally not moving about taxes, they made it very clear to us and it is not about incentive packages either”, he said. The General Assembly later scaled back some of the increases after other companies voiced concerns, including Aetna Inc. and the Travelers Companies Inc. Earlier this year after the CT legislature marginally increased business taxes, GE threatened to move and anti-tax advocates wrongly held up the state’s tax increases as a cautionary tale. Equally important, GE will continue to work with and support many smaller businesses throughout our state.”.

“There were a lot of things that could have been done better and if we had to do them over again… but GE said in their article this has been in the planning for three years”, he said, so tax issues “obviously couldn’t be everything”.

Major state and county business organizations have echoed Malloy’s dismay, calling the iconic company’s move a significant blow to the state’s image. “They are eating our lunch because fiscal instability and anti-business sentiment from the Democrat majority make CT unappealing and unwelcoming”.