Long before the Heldrich rose off Route 18, before Rutgers added an Honors College campus downtown, before HELIX became the biggest bet the state’s life sciences sector has ever placed on New Brunswick, there was a building on George Street.
It wasn’t much to look at. And it hardly fits into the grand scheme of what the New Brunswick Development Corporation would eventually build. It was a project for what was then UMDNJ, put together in the mid-1990s by an organization that, at the time, had no track record, no reputation and — as DEVCO Chairman George Zoffinger tells it — a whole lot of debt.
“We wouldn’t really know how successful that was going to be,” Zoffinger said. “But when that building became successful, it basically built a reputation that we could get things done.”
That reputation didn’t happen by accident. It happened because a young executive named Chris Paladino.
Tonight at American Dream, that success will be recognized when Paladino enters the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
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DEVCO’s origin story starts with Johnson & Johnson.
The pharmaceutical giant, headquartered in New Brunswick, supposedly was weighing whether to stay in the city or relocate somewhere newer and more upscale. Keeping J&J in place meant keeping New Brunswick viable — and that meant someone had to take charge of making sure the city kept growing.
Zoffinger, then running a bank, struck an agreement with J&J CEO Ralph Larsen to rebuild DEVCO into something capable of doing that. He just needed someone to lead it. He found it in Paladino, who was suddenly available because of the political misfortune of others.
Paladino was a rising star at the Economic Development Authority, but when Gov. Jim Florio lost his 1993 reelection bid to Christine Todd Whitman, he was in need of a job.
“Take a shot at it for a year,” Zoffinger told him, “and if it doesn’t work out, we’ll do something else.”
That was 33 years ago.
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What made Zoffinger bet on a young, relatively untested executive?
Intuition.
“I recognized in Chris the hardworking ethic and the ability to basically build these partnerships with people,” Zoffinger said.
DEVCO in its earliest years was hardly an easy sell — the organization was carrying so much debt that Zoffinger recalls constant meetings just to manage the payments. There was no guarantee any of it would work.
What Paladino built instead, project by project, was a model that didn’t exist in New Jersey in any real way before DEVCO — a genuine public-private partnership, one that required buy-in not just from private capital but from the state, the county, the city, and a long line of governors and mayors who had to trust that DEVCO could deliver on what it promised.
“If you don’t have a partnership between the public entities and the private entities, I really believe you cannot get new projects done,” Zoffinger said.
Without that support — the EDA in particular, he said — DEVCO’s biggest projects simply don’t happen.
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The George Street building was the proof of concept that DEVCO needed.
Everything since — the Heldrich, the Performing Arts Center, the Cancer Center, HELIX — has been the follow-through.
Zoffinger is quick to note that none of it was a one-man show. DEVCO’s success, he says, has always belonged to the team Paladino built around him — Sarah Clarke, Merissa Buczny and the rest of an office that has stayed remarkably intact for decades in an industry where turnover is the norm.
“I always had a lot of confidence in the team that we put together,” Zoffinger said. “I did think that we could accomplish really great things, but it doesn’t happen without the work of the team and the leadership that Chris has given to the organization.
“Leadership is the most important thing in a team and Chris is a great example of great leadership and dedicated hard work.”
