The Finger Lakes region has
won one of three $500 million awards from the state “hunger games” competition. The other two are the Southern Tier and Central New York. The Upstate Revitalization Initiative is supposed
to help regions rev up their economies, and the award will be paid out in $100 million annual installments over five years.
The four regions that do not win the URI will share $50 million that Governor Andrew Cuomo will add to next year’s budget.
The winners are being
announced this morning in Albany.
Local leaders predicted
that our region would win — there has been a sense of inevitability to the
proceedings — but there was also worry that we’d mucked up our chances by
squabbling over the location of the headquarters for the $600 million federal
photonics institute.
The dispute resolved
rather quickly — the headquarters will be in Legacy Tower — but the blow-up was
public and embarrassing and gave the impression that Rochester may not be ready
for the golden opportunity handed to it.
But that’s in the past. Now
it’s time to figure out how to spend the money.
Seven Upstate regions made
pitches for the awards, focusing on how they’d invest the state-provided
bonanza more so than the specific projects they’d fund. The Finger Lakes
Regional Economic Development Council emphasized three industries in its
application: agricultural and food production, high-tech manufacturing, and photonics
and optics.
The council chose
industries that are uniquely able to grow in the region. Those three areas are already woven
into the local economy, experts say, and could spur substantial growth here.
The Finger Lakes Council
will next accept applications for specific projects to fund with the money, and
then review and prioritize them.
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2015.
It’s morally reprehensible to celebrate this monetary gift from Governor Andrew Cuomo. The politicians are all smiles as they scratch each other’s backs. It’s actually kind of sad to need regional welfare. We should save the happy faces for a future time when it’s obvious that this money has contributed to sustained increases in jobs.
Amen, Mike Bruton. The governor admitted that the state ignored the economic development needs of upstate for decades, and that admission was a good thing. But his solution was unfair in many respects. First he gave Buffalo a billion dollars with no strings attached. Then he created seven arbitrary upstate regions and made them compete with each other for smaller amounts of funding. The losers got nothing. At least Cuomo’s “Hunger Games” required the regions to create plans for economic development but in the end all of the regions should have gotten something. The economic needs of the losing regions hasn’t gone away. To top it off Cuomo has the nerve to make a ‘victory lap’ expecting gratitude for giving us our own tax dollars back. And I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there wasn’t some amount of politics at play given the tradition of corruption in New York State government. We shall see.
Cuomo is sure getting a lot of good will by spending OUR OWN MONEY.
Where has all of the money from the previous years gone? Why are they saying $500 million, when it’s really only $100 million a year. Same as previous years? Why does Buffalo still get $83 million this year after getting $1 billion last year?Why is there so much money for Photonics when we supposedly just got $600 million for that and all I hear about is 2 offices in existing buildings?
and finally:
I had no idea that NYS was so flush with cash that $$billions$$ can be thrown around like this. Why not just lower taxes so EVERYONE and every business can do better, not just a hand full of companies?
Lower taxes= less opportunity for corruption.