New Green Jobs in Connecticut
Posted on February 23, 2010
There has been a steady stream (or some may call it a slow trickle) of green jobs in Connecticut. For more information on green jobs in Connecticut, click here.
According to an article on TheDay.com, Zerodraft in Connecticut is hiring.
The company, which weatherizes homes to increase energy efficiency, is adding more employees to deal with an increase in business driven by federal grants.
Over the next several months, owner Paul Paris Jr. expects to create five new jobs at the Waterford site and as many as eight in a second office, in Norwalk.
More than $1.8 billion in stimulus funding to create jobs and retrain workers has been awarded to the state of Connecticut from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Of that, about $141 million covers green jobs or projects in Connecticut that increase energy efficiency, develop the state’s renewable energy work force and weatherize people’s homes, said Matthew Fritz, special assistant to Gov. M. Jodi Rell.
The most recent round of green grant awards totals $8.2 million with another $5.5 million pending, he said.
Rell put the plan into action a year ago this month, with the intent of creating green-collar jobs in the state.
But according to the article, Fred Carstensen, an economist with the University of Connecticut’s Center for Economic Analysis, said the jobs created are hardly enough to offset the 95,000 jobs lost in Connecticut in the last 11 months, or the 15,000 more jobs expected to disappear before the economy stabilizes.
Dayush Donyavi of Colchester, who oversees Zerodraft’s Norwalk office and works as an energy auditor for the company as well, was unemployed when he got the job six months ago. He had been working at a pharmaceutical company in Delaware five months prior to that when he was laid off.
Now, he’s earning comparable pay, which he declined to disclose, and feels confident about the future.
“The bottom line is, I had a fantastic job and I lost it due to the economy,” Donyavi said. “I fortunately was able to get this job at Zerodraft. I am able to sustain my livelihood, and I’m not on unemployment. I went from one career to another with very little in-between.”
Whatever their limitations, programs to develop green jobs are timely, Gioia said.
“I think we will see a large number of jobs that will not be created but converted to green, and that will have a lot less to do with government assistance (and more to do with) consumer preference and pressure from larger corporations who want to have a totally green supply chain.”
