Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s chief of staff today touted the collaboration between the mayor and Gov. Charlie Baker for bringing General Electric’s headquarters from Connecticut to Boston and said more corporate arrivals could be on the way — all while hitting back at critics who labeled GE’s move to the Hub “a bad deal.”

“I think it’s a great sign and a great message to the world that Boston is open for business with GE coming here,” Daniel Koh said on Herald Radio, adding that the mayor’s office “absolutely” will be reaching out to other companies about coming to Boston.

“We will be reaching out to businesses not just in Connecticut, but across the nation,” he said. “And using this as an example of how we collaborate and how we work with companies that want to come here.”

Koh said the process began when he, Walsh and Boston Chief of Economic Development John Barros noticed GE had taken issue with a tax hike in their present home, Fairfield, Conn.

“The mayor saw a news report that there is some kerfuffle in Connecticut around the taxes with GE, so he said ‘John, why don’t you just make a cold call to them?’” Koh said. “That’s how this started.”

In an earlier Herald Radio interview, Evan Falchuk, the Chairman of the United Independent Party, said the $145 million in tax breaks for GE from the city and state make the move a “bad deal” for taxpayers.

“It’s exciting to have a company like GE pick Boston and pick Massachusetts and they said they did it because we have this great business culture and tech savvy people, but its a bad deal to be giving them about $150 million of taxpayer money in order to do it,” Falchuk, a 2014 gubernatorial candidate, said. “I think it’s pretty clear they probably would have picked Boston anyway based on what the CEO has been saying and what they did is asked the government, ‘will you help us pay for this?’ and they managed to get us to give them 150 million bucks.”

Koh took issue with Falchuk’s assertion that GE would have chosen Boston without the incentive package, which includes $120 million in state grants and other financial incentives and another $25 million in tax relief from the city of Boston.

“As someone who was intimately involved in the negotiations here, it was not, by all means, a done deal for them to come to Boston,” he said. “To assert that they would have come here anyway without any kind of inventive, I don’t think is fair.

“(GE) made over 40 calls to different areas of the country when they first thought about the idea of moving. When you have a situation where incentives are a key part of this deal, in our minds that’s a key part of what we need to pursue,” Koh said, adding he feels the collective economic benefit to the area “far outweighs any concerns about the deal that have been put forward”

“I would rather see that money go to our schools, or to fix the T,” Falchuk argued. “I think those things have a much great economic benefit that giving that money to General Electric.”

It’s unclear how many of the 800 jobs GE is expected to bring will be available for local applicants, Koh said.