As commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs, Taylor Caswell is charged with attracting new businesses to the Granite State and helping them navigate roadblocks.
‘We live and breathe literally by the natural assets in this state,’ says Caswell. ‘If we were to advocate for an economic strategy and approach that paid no attention to that, we would be shooting ourselves in the head. It is why people come here for a vacation, but it’s also why people choose to live here.’
Caswell serves as the chief economic and marketing official for the state and oversees the state Divisions of Economic Development and Travel & Tourism Development. Prior to joining BEA, he was the executive director of the New Hampshire Community Development Finance Authority and served as the New England regional administrator for the U.S. Housing and Urban Development.
Caswell lives in his hometown of Littleton, where he founded PRKR MTN trails, a 20-mile trail network that covers over 500 acres. He’s a regular alpine skier, mountain biker and hiker.
This article was adapted from an interview with Caswell for NH Business Review’s “Down to Business” podcast.
Q. What is your role at the BEA?
A. The Department of Business and Economic Affairs started back in 2017. Gov. Sununu felt that he needed to have a new way to address economic development in the state. We had previously been under what was called the Department of Resource and Economic Development, which had one of the more unfortunate acronyms in the history of New Hampshire state government, DRED.
We took what was the tourism and the economic development pieces and combined them into a single department. We turned it into something that takes economy, that is not just simply business recruitment and tourism marketing.
It has to be something that has an integrated purpose, a purpose of helping to expand the economy of the state, to find new segments, new employers, to match that with new workforce — and increasingly now to deal with the housing issue that comes with that.
Q. You’re an avid outdoors person. How do you balance trying to bring in a 500,000-square-foot factory to Hudson for a company like Life is Good and retaining the quality of life that brings people here?
A. It’s the basis of how we are able to talk to companies like Life is Good about putting a facility in New Hampshire or talk about the expansion of the biofabrication industry in Manchester. You have to be aware of where an economy is in order to design a system that’s going to work for that. We live and breathe literally by the natural assets in this state. If we were to advocate for an economic strategy and approach that paid no attention to that, we would be shooting ourselves in the head. It is why people come here for a vacation, but it’s also why people choose to live here.
Q. How do we bring in multifamily workforce housing without altering too much of why people want to be here to begin with?
A. We have to be able to have a relationship with our local communities and our municipalities for them to be the ones that are making a lot of these decisions. I think the trouble that we’ve had over the last several years has been that, in the affordable housing space, there’s been a choice of a 250-unit, low-income housing tax credit, highly complex, $300,000 per unit type of development that works, but has been become so complex and can only be pursued by larger companies. And it has had the effect of scaring a lot of smaller communities.
That’s not right for every community.
What we need to be able to do is spend more time talking about how we address the housing issue on a community level, and what is it that works.
I think the answer to the housing situation is much in the hands of local communities and advocates as it is in the state.
We’ve been providing resources through our investment program and other programs that we have with New Hampshire Housing and others to help communities think about this subject.
The Housing Opportunity (Planning Grant) Program does just that — it provides funding to be able to help communities walk through the process of “What does housing look like for us?”
Q. During the pandemic, you had the responsibility of working on distributing federal money that was going to all the states to help them get through the pandemic. How did you adapt to that situation?
A. The brightest spot for me during that period of time was when we needed to have things like pipettes, gowns, gloves and masks. We had no way to get it. We were we were calling all over the country trying to find this stuff, but we were competing against the federal government.
The governor and I put a call out to New Hampshire businesses and manufacturers, and said we need help getting this stuff.
The number of companies in New Hampshire that raised their hand was just amazing. They were not making what they had been making, and they retooled to do this kind of thing. That was a pretty important moment for me in the recognition and respect I have for the business community here.
