The future and the race for the Cuomo Billions

Maybe I’m just in a January funk. But nationally and here at
home, poverty and wealth disparity are crippling us, and I’m seeing a lot of
small-bore, more-of-the-same plans to deal with them.

I’ll comment another time on the president’s State of the
Union address – and on Governor Cuomo’s State of the State address, which he’s
giving January 21. Right now, let me mutter about Cuomo’s latest Big Idea: a
$1.5 billion Upstate Revitalization Competition to boost the region’s economy.
If the state legislature approves the plan, the money will come from the $5
billion surplus from the big bank settlement.

“Upstate” is one of those words that mean different things
to different New Yorkers. In this case, it’s much of the state north of the Big
City: the Finger Lakes (including Rochester), the Southern Tier, Central New
York, the North Country, the Mohawk Valley, the Capital area, and the
Mid-Hudson area.

You may have noticed that those are the same regions – minus
Buffalo and New York City – that have been competing for money from another Big
Cuomo Initiative: the Regional Economic Development Council grants. And as with
those grants, we’ll all have to compete for a share of the $1.5 billion: seven
regions competing for one of three awards, each worth $500 million.

The new money is bigger. In the four years of the regional
economic development program, Rochester’s largest grant has been $96.2 million.
We could get more than five times that from the new program. It’s not Buffalo’s
billion, but still….

People in the seven regions are supposed to think about what
their resources and needs are and what kind of economic development initiatives
they’re best suited for. Then they’re to come up with a proposal for investing
$500 million.

At the press conference announcing the program last week,
Cuomo and Howard Zemsky, the new CEO of Empire State
Development, said that leaders in each region will have to come up with a
strong, well-thought-out plan.

But I worry. Other than the size of the awards, this feels a
lot like the Regional Economic Development competition. At the beginning, I
thought that program had potential. My understanding was that the awards were
to go to big initiatives that would create jobs long-term and boost the region.
These were to be “transformational” projects, as several people labeled them.

Over the program’s four years, some of the money went to
significant economic development initiatives like the Eastman Business Park’s
Biosciences Manufacturing Center and High Tech Rochester. But the money has
also been awarded to apartment developments for the elderly, the Letchworth Park bridge over the
Genesee River, a park along the Genesee in Rochester, an update to the Brighton
comprehensive plan, work at Frontier Field, and a blood-pressure screening
program.

It’s not that these are not worthy projects. But they don’t
feel “transformational.” And I worry that the new awards will follow the same
path.

It would be awful for the state to have this much money
available to invest and see it frittered away. Maybe it won’t be. Maybe the
three awards will go to projects that really are transformational. Maybe
Rochester will get one of them. And maybe it’ll give us the shot in the arm
that we need.

On the other hand, big problems are dragging us down,
poverty being the major one. And to solve the poverty problem, we need to
address education (from infancy on up), training, wages…. And the cost of that
will make the Buffalo Billion seem like piggy-bank change.

It’s not that the economic-developments initiatives funded
by the regional councils can’t help. They can. But a big focus needs to go to ending
poverty and the damage it’s doing – to those living in it, and to the state.
And there, I see plenty of words, but not much vision or long-term commitment. More on that later.

This article appears in Jan 21-27, 2015.