‘We’re here to create jobs’: Greater Boston Chamber boss Jim Rooney looks back at 10 years

With just over a decade under his belt leading the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Jim Rooney is a familiar face on and around Beacon Hill.

The former MBTA official, chief of staff to late Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and past head of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority has led the chamber — which represents almost 1,200 member companies — since July 2015.

Rooney, who grew up in South Boston, today also chairs the Board of the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives and recently relaunched a national coalition of chambers of commerce to advocate for the economic benefit of research funding across the country.

From a seat in the State House Library on a quiet, mid-August day, Rooney reflected on his time leading the Chamber and his hopes for the next decade.

Rooney also discussed the “competitive complacency” he sees plaguing Massachusetts, issues he’s keeping an eye on this legislative session, and why he thinks tax policy should be best of mind.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Q: What’s on your mind as you reflect on the last decade?

A: When I talked to members of the chamber 10 years ago, there was a lot of discussion about the role and relevancy of the chamber, especially “as the demographics of the business community were changing in terms of age, race, gender, and the way that business was being conducted.

And I think to some people, the chamber felt like it was dated in its approach. I remember talking to some young entrepreneurs who described it as the Rotary Club or the Kiwanis Club — my grandfather’s organization.

As I reflect on the last 10 years, I feel like we’ve done a good job in elevating the voice in the role of the chamber in Massachusetts and in the business community generally, that we provided seats at the table for a wide variety of people.

There’s a great discount more people diversity, but also industry diversity in terms of the membership of the chamber. And with that comes an elevated capacity to represent the business community in places like the State House and in political and policy discourse.

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Q: Anything in particular that stands out most in that 10-year span?

A: Three public policy issues come to mind. One was the Women’s Pay Equity Act of 2016 — I was only in the job for about a year, and that legislation was proposed, and the people that were still there from before let me know that the chamber had opposed that for 20 consecutive years.

And I said, “Well, let’s hold on here. This is not something I’m comfortable in 2016 opposing. Why are we opposing it?”

It turned out that the way that the bill was written had what people thought was burdensome, restrictive, litigious types of language in it.

So we talked it over, and we had some meetings up at the State House and made some suggestions about language changes that were adopted that didn’t weaken the bill.

If you look at the media reports from back then, I think it was front page of the Globe that said, “Chamber supports women’s pay equity after decades of opposing.” It felt like a very symbolic way to let our world know that it’s a different chamber than it was.

What year was the grand bargain? [2018.] There were a number of different policy initiatives in play. There was minimum wage, there was the Sunday blue laws, there was paid family and medical leave.

We ultimately got to a discount. We didn’t like everything, they didn’t like everything — I guess that’s what defines a good discount. But I think again, for the business community to move beyond and acknowledge that issues like paid family medical leave had to be addressed while dealing with Sunday blue laws — that was a pretty significant accomplishment.

The third one is the tax cuts of 2023. We submitted a tax reform proposal to the governor, the speaker, the Senate president, mapping out some research we had done where Massachusetts is an outlier in certain tax categories. We had a number of proposals in that.

We didn’t get everything we asked for, but at the end of the day, the governor and the Legislature saw fit to pass the first tax cuts in 20 years in Massachusetts.

Q: Do you find yourself going back to the same person or people for advice? Who do you go to?

A: One of the things I’m blessed with in this job is access to a board and business leaders in Boston that collectively have seen it all. Depending upon the subject matter, I’m able to reach out. So if it’s a health care policy issue, we have hospital presidents and insurance company presidents and bio and pharma companies as members.

I can pick up the phone and say, “Tell me what I should know about this.” AI — my board chair was Corey Thomas at Rapid7. I mean, he’s one of the brightest minds in the technology space. He’s advised presidents and governors about technology.

I get to text with him and call him. I’ve got all these subject matter experts in my Rolodex that are a phone call away. So when a public policy issue comes up, it’s pretty empowering to have that ability to talk over things.

I’d say even people in the State House. As we’re moving forward or thinking about something, we’ll reach out to the speaker, the Senate president, the chairs of Ways and Means, or a committee chair, depending upon what the issue is, just to get their read on things both substantively and politically. You know, how will this land?

And they appreciate the dialogue that I think we’ve established with people there. We do the same thing with administration officials, key secretaries, Lauren Jones in Labor and Workforce Development, Matt Gorzkowicz in [Administration & Finance] — I would say that they’re people that you can have a conversation with.

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Q: You’ve talked before about how Trump administration tariffs are going to trickle into the economy over time. What are you most concerned about when it comes to outfall there?

A: From a business and economic development perspective, I’m concerned about the chilling effect, the paralysis that the uncertainty has created, and you see it in job data. I think some of the reasons why unemployment has gone up a little bit, or the creation of new jobs is somewhat stagnant, not just here in Massachusetts but nationally, is that businesses are a little bit paralyzed by [wondering], What is the impact of the tariff policy going to be?

It changes day-to-day, week-to-week, so it’s hard to sort of map out a strategy.

Do I hire? Do I invest? That concerns me about how long that will go on, because there are things to do. There are businesses that I talk to, they want to invest in people and equipment, but they’re feeling a little skittish about it.

Q: How do you anticipate that hitting the consumer?

A: In terms of the consumer, it’s always been fascinating to me, the interrelatedness of the economy and the way things sort of work. The one I came upon that I used on TV over the weekend [was] about insurance going up — you get a fender bender, and the auto part was imported, and the rate of that went up, and the insurance company pays for it. Well, you’re going to pay for it.

We’ll see it in food prices. Another fascinating one is on the construction commodities: steel, lumber, aluminum. The national objective, as it’s been said, is to bring those back to the United States, so that we’re producing the steel.

That might be good for those industries, but it’s not good for developers who are paying for those commodities, and it’s not good for construction companies who are having to rate those.

So you wonder what kind of effect that will have on development and construction. On the one hand, if there’s a steel mill that gets reactivated or built someplace, I suppose it’s good for that town.

But on the other hand, if that means that construction costs are going to go up, it’ll inhibit development. That’s a bad thing.

That’s what I mean about it trickling. Your food products are going to go up, whatever types of electronics, toys that people grab in the holidays that are imported, they’re going to take a anthem, because none of those factories are built yet.

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Q: With regard to national endeavors, you revived a group of chambers called the Businesses for Federal Research Funding Coalition. Talk to me about that.

A: Research funding is incredibly important, not just to Massachusetts but to the entire country. It has, in many ways, been one ingredient of the economic power that this country has grown.

The coalition was one that we formed back in about 2016 and it was much more of a normal time, steady state coalition that would advocate the way any advocacy group would when it was time for a bill to get passed.

As the new policies started coming into effect, several chambers from across the country reached out and asked, “Are you going to revive the coalition?” So we did. We sent out a letter to chambers all over the country.

We’re at over 70 today, in over 30 states. The idea is to make the business case. I appreciate that the colleges, universities, hospitals and medical institutions will make the scientific case.

They can talk about Alzheimer’s research and ALS research far better than I can.

But what my colleagues and I can talk about is what that means in our communities — the number of jobs that are dependent on that.

Not just the scientists, but what it means to the law firms, the accounting firms, and even the restaurant down the street from the research facility. It has a trickling effect, research funding.

I’ve read reports that in this country, every one scientist creates between five and eight jobs. So we make the case that it economically matters.

Q: You’re doing a fly-in into D.C. in September. What are you hoping comes out of that trip?

A: We’re trying to assemble the data and the stories, congressional district by congressional district, across the country, in red states, blue states, red districts, blue districts, and meeting with key congressional leaders to say, “This is what’s going on in your district, and this is what’s at stake.”

And leveraging the upcoming midterm elections — “Do you want to run on a platform that says ‘While I was in Congress, we lost this research funding. We lost this many jobs in that district.’?”

We’ll make the case about national competitiveness. [In meeting] with key members of Congress and members of the administration, our ask is: release funding that’s already been approved.

Some funding has been frozen that had already been through the process. I know you’ve got issues with direct and indirect costs. I know you’ve got issues with the types of science. You may have a different view on what we should be investing in. That’s all fine.

Let’s do that prospectively. If you’ve got a problem with the way that the universities and the research institutions are allocating direct and indirect costs, have at it. That’s fair to have a conversation about.

But right today, you can’t just freeze science. You can’t just say, “We’re going to stop.” Because so many lives depend on it, both in terms of physical health and the economy.

Q: That concept of competitiveness is a huge buzzword. Business groups and others continue to say that Massachusetts is losing that competitiveness “battle” of sorts with other New England states and places like Texas, Florida, California. What should and can Beacon Hill do to get on the other side of that issue, or to quell the concerns about young people and businesses leaving?

A: I think that it would start with escalating the sense of urgency around it. I think that we’ve got to put the issue of how public policy and how investments affect our competitiveness more central to the way we think about public policy [and] spending.

We’re at an interesting crossroads because there are so many economic strengths to Massachusetts. There’s so much of an ability to compete, led by talents and workforce.

But on the other hand, we’ve got taxation policies that are outliers. We’ve got a housing crisis. We’ve got a transportation crisis that we’re starting to get after.

There are so many headwinds that we just have to roll up our sleeves and understand that this is more urgent than we thought. It’s not just another problem to discount with that will go away.

I describe this as a slow burn. The economy won’t deteriorate next week, next month, next year.

It will happen over 10 years. We’ll look back and say, “What happened? Why aren’t businesses starting up here? Why aren’t young people staying here?” And by then, the problem will be bigger and harder to correct than to re-pivot. We’re in a good place to fix things right today.

There was just a report on business friendliness and competitiveness released. North Carolina was the most business-friendly in the country for three of the last four years. Massachusetts, on that chart, went up from about number 37 to number 20. A

nd I was curious about what increased us in the rankings. It was Massachusetts’s ability to withstand some of the federal tax cuts, federal policies, research funding. You saw a demonstration of that when the governor [proposed] $400 million for research funding.

Other states don’t have the capacity to do that.

I’ve used the phrase competitive complacency to describe where we are. We’ve had this generation, 25 years or more, in which all we had to do was wait for the phone to ring. Companies wanted to be here. People wanted to be here.

We didn’t have to compete for it, really. today the world has changed. We’ve watched places like Austin and the Research Triangle in [North Carolina] emerge.

We’ve watched other countries even try to mimic some of what we do — I get visited all the time by foreign groups, talking about the way we do things. We’ve got to look at the burden we’re putting on people and businesses, and whether or not we shouldn’t take a look at some of those tax policies and the rates of spending and growth of government.

Beyond that, as it relates to government, the sense of results and output… I think one of the things government can do is refocus why we’re doing things, and think about ways to demonstrate that the money is being put to good use. I think there are many times that there’s a program put together, there’s funding allocated to a particular public issue — I got into a public battle with Gov. [Charlie] Baker about the MBTA, because every time he talked about the performance of the MBTA, he would say that he’s increased spending by $800 million.

And finally, I must have had a bad bowl of Cheerios that day or something, but I said, “That’s an input. That’s a lot of money, but what the riders in the business community want is results. They want service reliability and quality. So where are we on the outputs? You spent a lot of money. Great. Where are we on the outputs?”

Q: The tax policy conversation — people are proposing we take a look at that. There are two business-backed tax ballot question proposals for 2026.

A: I saw that. There are like 47 questions.

Q: Have you taken a look at those tax policy-related ones?

A: No, not yet.

Q: One of them looks at reducing the personal income tax.

A: Yeah, from 5% to 4% over three years or something.

Q: Exactly. Thoughts about that?

A: I don’t know. We haven’t looked at it. We haven’t digested the arguments. I don’t know what the budget impact would be. All of the ballot questions have a long road ahead of them in terms of getting the signatures and then deciding whether they can fund a campaign.

Without getting into the specifics of that, I think that that is symbolic of the sentiment out there that we’re spending a lot of money, we’re paying a lot of money — both personal and business — in this state, and we’re just not feeling like we’re getting our bang for the buck.

You can look across the board, whether it’s the T performance, whether it’s the creation of jobs, or whether it’s housing development.

I think it’s symbolic of an element of frustration that people have to come up with certain public policy initiatives like that. We’ll take a look at it and see whether or not it’s something that seems like good public policy to us.

I know it’s hard to do apples-to-apples comparisons because all the states’ tax structures are different, but where do we fit in the income tax groupings? Is 5% a high tax? Sitting here, I don’t know.

Q: It feels like there’s this kind of tension between cutting taxes to put money in people’s pockets, but also being able to invest in things like housing, transportation, education — things that are appealing to businesses and workers who might come here. What is the best balance between those two things?

A: I think that is a tension, and I think that both individuals and businesses want benefit. They just want to know — if the three of us put $20 on the table and decided to grab something and you entrusted me to grab it, each of us would want to know that we got benefit for that.

That it didn’t feel like or look like or actually was wasted somehow, that there were some results, whatever the reason we put the money on the table. I think there’s some frustration around that.

If you look at polling data, no disrespect intended, but the government and the media are like the least trusted entities in America right today.

There’s a lot of reasons for both, but some of it has got to do with that.

Achieving that balance between, what is the right level of revenue and taxation, what’s the right place to get it, and letting people know that, yes, you pay those taxes, but look at what we did. Here are the real results, whether it’s in the school system, whether it’s on the roads and bridges, whether it’s in transit, whether it’s in housing, whether it’s in facilitating job growth.

You have to be able to say this is valuable. You go to a restaurant, you want benefit. You go to grab a car, you want benefit. You invest your taxes, you want benefit. I think it’s pretty simple.

And I just don’t know that government is doing a good job demonstrating — I’m not talking necessarily about the state, there’s federal issues. One of the reasons why half of America thought DOGE was a great thing was because they perceive government as wasteful.

And it did need some cleanup. today, their approach was a little awkward, to say the least, but that’s why it resonated, because people have that sentiment. It’s out there, and if you’re blind to it, you’re missing something.

Q: Given those tensions and frustrations and this uncertain fiscal climate that we’re sitting in right today, at least in Massachusetts, do you see tax increases coming down the line?

A: I hope not. I don’t know that the citizens of Massachusetts would feel like that’s what’s necessary. If you look at the growth of the rate of spending in the city of Boston, at the state level, it’s been pretty extraordinary in the past decade or so. A little bit of belt-tightening this year, but not enough, in my opinion.

Budgets have gone up 7% or 8% — that’s well above inflation. I think the first step is to take a look within. What are we doing?

Part of the challenge is that we’ve had such a good run that many of the people in elected office have never experienced the need to cut programs or cut things out. But maybe we’re on the horizon of having to do that.

I’m old enough to remember times when there were pretty robust 9C cuts in the middle of the year, a budget that was level or lower than the year before got submitted. That hasn’t happened in a long time. 2009 or 2010, that timeframe. If the money’s not there, it’s not there.

So, who knows what the impacts of the federal policies will be? But I think before we get down the road of taxation, we really have to take a hard look at spending.

Q: The Chamber called for Mayor Michelle Wu to move forward with inflationary spending. Her budget was a more than 4% increase from fiscal 2025.

A: A step in the right direction.

Q: What do you foresee as the path forward there when it comes to spending?

A: More than any city in America, Boston’s overly dependent on property taxes. The city’s growth in the budget was largely driven by commercial property tax growth, not just in terms of valuation, but new buildings.

The whole Seaport — that didn’t exist a decade ago, that’s new buildings, new taxes.

Any new development adds to the tax base, and that’s good, and it mitigates the need for you to increase what exists, particularly residential taxes.

The city’s challenge right today is, given that reliance on property taxes, and that there is not the level of commercial property growth going on. The base isn’t going up.

If we want to maintain the level of spending, then we’re going to have to take it out of the sources that we have, which would be residential property tax increases.

I live in Boston. The average over the last five years has been about 10% a year, so that’s pretty hefty.

On the commercial side, the challenge is that the valuations are going down. So if you’re going to get more out of them or stay where they are, you’re going to have to increase the rate. That’s part of what the mayor proposed last year.

That’s a tough thing to do, to tell someone, “Look, we know that your property benefit’s depressed, but we want more taxes from you.” That’s at minimum an unfairness to them, if not bad public policy, because no one comes along and says, “Well, we know your property went up, but we’re not going to charge you that much more.”

Q: What does that mean moving ahead?

A: It means — and again, the city is no different than the state or the federal government — maybe for the first time in a long time, looking at, what are we spending money on? I know they’re focused on it.

But we probably have twice as much capacity in the Boston Public Schools as we need. There are just fewer students than there were years ago in Boston.

Yet we’re keeping schools open. So how do you discount with that? It’s a political hot potato, because whose neighborhood are you going to close the schools in?

But if the money is not there, what do you do? You’re going to increase taxes so that you can keep schools open that we don’t need. It’s a tricky political question.

Q: Speaking of potentially difficult political endeavors, what are you working on getting across the finish line here at the State House, or what do you anticipate being a major issue this session? Curious about the Chamber’s legislative agenda.

A: Tax policy will be on the agenda. We will again advocate for inflation-based budgeting. We’re focused on the distribution of the millionaires’ tax/Fair Share tax revenues from a number of dimensions. We advocate for a 50/50 split. Right today, it’s skewed more towards education.

We think that the crisis in transportation warrants at least a 50/50 split. It wasn’t in the ballot question, but I think it was the expectation that it would be split evenly. We’ll also advocate for transparency in that spending and results in that spending.

Okay, we created this new tax. Show us that it mattered.

One of the fears when that passed is that there’d be a little bit of a shell game played up here, that it was for transportation and education, but that people would say, “Okay, we’re going to fund these things that already existed with this new money and then move that money over to fund something else.”

Haven’t seen that in its pure form yet, but a couple of things have happened that make us think that at least the mindset is not completely out of bounds.

For example, the $400 million for the research funding — $200 million is from the millionaires’ tax. Is that what people thought they were voting for? I don’t know. Is it a crisis that I understand why?

Yes. But what it tells me is that they’re willing to look at ways to sort of move some of that money into places other than what people voted for. They also used it to fund some education funding that had previously been part of the General Fund last year.

It makes you a little queasy when you think about it. Is that a sign? Maybe those were okay. But how liberal an interpretation of what the intent of that money is will they take? So we’ll series that, and we’ll throw the red flag when we see it. That’ll be a big issue for us.

Q: Anything else to series?

A: Energy costs are becoming a bigger and bigger issue for the business community, both in terms of the cost today and projected growth, but also in our ability to supply the energy needs of a growing economy. It manifests itself in real ways. Let me give you an example — they’ve got that controversial rest stop bid that the highway department did.

The successful bid is going to put in 780 electric charging stations. That’s great for people with electric cars. So I met with them, and I said, “Is there power to do that?”

And they said, “No, not yet.” So they’re planning to do it, but you’ve got to get the power to the service stations to enable that to take place. Who’s going to pay for it? How’s it going to happen? What’s the business side of that? Are people going to pay to charge their vehicle? Right today, the power is not there to do it.

We talk about quantum computing and data centers — the power is not there to do it. Energy costs and support to meet the high-cost nature of doing business and living in Massachusetts is a key issue, but it’s also an issue that is a headwind of our growth as a state and our ability to do the kinds of things we want to do.

That’s not made its way into a legislative proposal yet, but it’s a looming issue.

Q: You’re 10 years into the job. Looking 10 years from today, do you have goals for what you want the chamber to be, for what you’re hoping to get done?

A: At the end of the day, there’s a lot of public policy issues and aspirations people have in different ways for Massachusetts that get solved only through healthy economic growth and job creation. So everything we need to do relates to competitiveness, it relates to economic growth.

I embraced a long time ago something that former Congressman Joe Moakley, who was a mentor of mine years ago, said: “Jim, our job every day is to create jobs. That’s what we’re here for. Create jobs. And that gives people a sense of pride. It puts money in their pockets, supports their family, and it’s a good thing for everybody.”

So as I think about it, I think every day it’s about how can we make this the best place for businesses, all businesses, and all people, to succeed? And fundamentally, it’s economic growth and job creation.

And then you trickle down from that all the public policy issues that either inhibit or facilitate that taking place.

As I think about the chamber’s role in all of that, it is really trying to communicate that message, exercise the voice, the platform we have to communicate it, and advocate for policies in support of that agenda.

Growing our capacity to influence public policy in that direction — I think we’re in a good place today, and I’d like to continue to grow that.

I think where we said it at the beginning, as relates to competitiveness, we’re in a pivot moment. From 2010 to 2019, Massachusetts ranked 16th in the country with 15% job growth among states.

We were one point ahead of the national average. From 2020 to 2024, we’re 47th with 0% job growth. The city of Boston over that time period it’s .003%, or something like that. Boston’s our economic engine.

So if Boston’s not growing, the rest of the state’s not growing. That creates a lot of problems. You can just do so much when there’s growth.

We need to understand that economic development and job creation matter, and employers, which is what my members really are, are a big part of that equation, and we just have to let them loose, let them do what they do.

Entrepreneurs are a big part of that. Young people with great ideas that want to try to make something work. How do we make sure they do it in Massachusetts?

How do we not make them feel like they have to go to North Carolina or Florida or someplace else to start their business? How do we keep them here? You get to the housing issue. Build. We try all these policies.

Q: You’re not a fan of policies like inclusionary zoning and rent stabilization.

A: No. The governor said we need 220,000 housing units in the next 10 years. There’s nothing that those things do to contribute to that. What they do is take a difficult problem and put a Band-Aid on it that doesn’t work, and it creates more problems.

Rent control has been around since the 1940s and places that put it in vote it out a few years later. There’s a lot of reasons why it’s never worked.

We’ve got inclusionary zoning policies that say that if you’re going to build a multi-family unit, you have to do 20% affordable units. 20% of zero is zero. It’s expensive to build, so you add on best of that, 20% have to be affordable and we’re going to rent control your units — it doesn’t work.

You just have to create more units. You have to incentivize people. Others are doing it. We don’t have to invent these things. In Toronto, they’re building housing for 100,000 people, and government is creating the land and building all of the amenities they need — the fire stations, the libraries, the schools. Government’s making the land available.

And if they get a developer who’s willing to do what they want to do, they will deed the land over for free. We think that’s criminal here in Massachusetts.

Government’s doing that because they’re facilitating development, they’re not inhibiting development. Others are playing the game. And it comes back to that issue that we talked about earlier.

I think that some of the things that people have found their way to doing, like that in Toronto and in North Carolina and other places, was because they got to a higher sense of urgency, and we are still working our way out of complacency. I think that’s my diagnosis.