Fair 090913

Page 1

FAIRFIELD COUNTY

BUSINESS JOURNAL YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR REGIONAL BUSINESS NEWS | westfaironline.com

September 9, 2013 | VOL. 49, No. 36

The ABCs of IOUs

FCBJ this week lOVe OF JOB An appeal for the best workplaces to stand and be counted … 2

BluMenthal targets student loan Burden By BILL FaLLON

need FOr a JOB Youth employment numbers paint a glum picture … 5

bfallon@westfairinc.com

A

FCBuZZ The skinny on the classy in the county … 18 neWSMaKerS See who’s on the rise … 20

MEDIA PARTNER

Jonathan Redwood

Window of opportunity diMensions has Been ‘cutting it’ For 25 years By BILL FaLLON bfallon@westfairinc.com

GlaSS Can Be aS PedeStrian as a soda bottle or as exotic as a load-bearing bridge. Not a true solid, glass is forever in motion, although the wavy glass in old home windows is not evidence of slo-mo dripping; it cooled that way. For Jonathan Redwood, principal at Fairfield-based Dimensions in Glass Inc., which celebrates 25 years this year, that’s just the beginning.

Redwood admittedly founded the company having broken a few panes, but with little other knowledge of glass. A friend — long gone from the business picture — got him interested. He has since come to study glass and his enthusiasm pours forth during discourses on plexiglass (“can’t be too big”); laminated glass (“like a front windshield, two pieces of glass with plastic in between”); hurricane glass (“like laminated, but with thicker plastic in between”); and tempered glass (“heated to just below the melting point of 1,500 degrees

s national millstones go, student debt is a doozy. It currently hovers at $1 trillion, outpacing debt on credit cards and car loans. It hinders and delays home ownership, crimps retirement savings, slashes household spending, limits career choices and — in sum and in the words of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal — “is crippling national economic growth.” In a 2012 survey of college costs, the federal Department of Education determined a four-year college education cost $8,756 in 1980, determined in constant 2009 dollars. By 2011, that figure, also in 2009 dollars, was $32,617. For Connecticut college graduates in 2011 who borrowed for their education — 62 percent did so — the average debt at graduation was $29,380. Those figures have the focused attention of Blumenthal because, as he said in a telephone interview with the Business Journal, “We need to significantly raise the visibility and awareness about the crisis in college affordability and champion measures that relieve this crushing financial burden on recent graduates and students just getting started.” Blumenthal has this summer toured “more than 10” colleges in Connecticut with a multipronged message about the need for change. Among his more attention-getting numbers is the $51 billion he says the federal government makes each year as steward of student loans at a 3.4

» Window, page 6

+

15

Hitchin’ a ride

» aBCs, page 6

NEWS NOON @

Sign up now at westfaironline.com


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.