Remember - blog posts migrate downward, so the most recent post is at the top; the oldest at the bottom.

Monday, June 10, 2013

What Will Work?

As you are no doubt aware, economic development consultant Sandy Mathes spoke with the Board of Reps last Wednesday about economic development in general, and developing Otsego County in particular. He repeated his message to business leaders in Oneonta a few days later, and the Daily Star summarized it here.


I found some of his thoughts compelling – actually, most of them – and any concerns about his message that I had were the result of my reluctance to government jumping into an alliance with business, to the benefit of the latter. I don't believe that government exists to serve business (“The business of America is business”), but to serve the people. Sometimes serving business achieves this goal, and sometimes it leads us further from it. Also – I'm a little concerned about this, but I'm not exactly sure why.


Overall, Mr. Mathes told us that we need to market ourselves wisely, consistently and aggressively. Can't argue with that. He also, when asked, emphasized that long-term planning and prioritization was crucial. First the towns, villages and city: then the County should assess those plans, see what commonalities they have, see who wants to opt into aggressive economic marketing and who doesn't, and then create a county plan designed to take everyone into consideration.


A comprehensive plan like this – a long-term, time- and energy-intensive process, involving everyone with a stake in our county's future – has long been a goal of mine. I think it's essential for any organization to know what its priorities are, and what goals it's pursuing. When that organization represents citizens, it's doubly important. There's not going to be any substitute for aggressive marketing if we really want to address economic development, but if we don't have general agreement about what that means, and where we want to go with it, we'll be tripping over each other from the very beginning, and we won't get anywhere.

Friday, June 7, 2013

Tax-Free NY

I just returned from a presentation by Robert Megna, Director of the New York State Division of Budget, at SUCO's Morris Hall. He was here to present the Governor's Tax-Free NY initiative, an attempt to create new jobs by carving out tax-free zones within or adjacent to SUNY facilities statewide (this includes community colleges). The idea is that any business that was new, or expanding, or diversifying, and was thereby creating new jobs, could locate on or near a SUNY facility and enjoy ten tax-free years. In the words of the Governor's press release: 
Tax-Free NY will entice companies to bring their ventures to Upstate New York by offering new businesses the opportunity to operate completely tax-free – including no income tax for employees, no sales, property or business tax – while also partnering with the world-class higher education institutions in the SUNY system. 
That's a pretty good deal. The idea behind it is that companies can take advantage of the proximity to a SUNY campus. This, the thinking goes, would be beneficial in a number of different ways, but especially in that there would be easy access to a well-educated workforce. Each campus would establish their own plan to implement this program, and would choose companies to participate based on this plan. Retail and financial product companies, according to Mr. Megna, were probably not ideal for this plan.

There is much more to come on this. There are lots of questions, of course. Companies can locate on campus or 'adjacent land,' this phrase does not, apparently, mean what you think it means: 'adjacent' can mean one or two miles away (for instance, downtown Oneonta). 'Adjacent' land that these companies occupy becomes state land, and is taken off local (for instance, city and county) tax rolls.

Initially, this sounds like a kind of inverse unfunded mandate for city and county:  instead of requiring us to spend more, it requires us to raise less revenue. When I asked Mr. Megna how the affected localities would join in the process and have a say regarding their lost revenue, he didn't, frankly, think that this was a very important issue. Of course, if the program is wildly successful, and incubates great economic growth, it won't matter. 

Mr. Megna used the old Empire Zone process as an example of an economic stimuls plan that didn't work (it was too easy to game the system: companies could benefit from the tax break but not create any economic benefit), and, on a number of occasions, noted that the Tax-Free NY planners had learned from the Empire Zones's mistakes.

Let's hope we're not listening to another presentation, in another ten years, about a new plan that has learned from the mistakes of Tax-Free NY.

It's A Different World

I've been thinking about economic development lately, since Carolyn Lewis, our Economic Development department head, gave her notice last month. There's general agreement that, as we look for a replacement for Carolyn, that we need to take a much more aggressive and collaborative – and expensive – approach to economic development in Otsego County. Carolyn agrees, and has made some suggestions for the Board to consider, going forward.

I'll have more to say on this soon, probably in posts about Sandy Mathes's presentation on Wednesday, and the Governor's 'Tax-Free NY' proposal, which eliminates many taxes for new jobs created on or 'adjacent to' SUNY facilities. 

But all this (as well as graduation season) got me thinking about my older son, who has almost finished a bachelor's degree at a good private school in NY. One semester before graduation (he was scheduled to graduate this December) with a degree in Computer Science, he left school and took a job in San Francisco, as the first employee of a well-funded internet startup. He's making about what I made when I was first promoted to district-wide adminstrator. 

He's got a list of idols – role models – in his field, as most of us have had at one time or another. What's interesting about this list is most of the names on it – starting with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs – never finished college. The guy he's working for – the guy who founded the company and secured the funding – is 20 years old and did not finish college. The same is true about the many successful, busy, happy geeks he has run into in the month since he's been there.

So we have a huge, successful, vibrant, creative, entrepreneurial subculture creating great wealth and changing the culture of the world with tecnology, and many (most?) of them did not do what, for generations, we have assumed you had to do to create world-changing technology.

How does that inform us when we start to ask about economic development in Otsego County? The Governor has connected job growth in New York to the SUNY system, and he may be right (more on that soon). But are we making any purposeful forays into the (admittedly unfamiliar) world of 21st century technology, where the rules we've used for centuries have been left behind? The world has changed, friends. We need to change with it or be left behind. Dylan was right: “He who isn't busy being born is busy dyin'.”

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Ingraffea on Fracking

If you weren't at the Foohills production center on Thursday night to listen to Dr. Anthony Ingraffea talk about methane gas, you were, apparently, the only one. Everyone else was there – the house was packed, standing room only. It was a fact-dense, but user-friendly presentation with slides that lasted a little over an hour, followed by Q&A. He began with data and pictures describing what kind of well density is necessary to profitably exploit the Marcellus or Utica shales (very dense, with sprawling well-head infrastructure); then he laid out the data regarding pipe leakage in wells, and gas leakage during drilling and transport (about 5%-8%), thus putting to rest the 'clean energy' myth, especially considering that methane is dozens of times more effective in trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere than carbon dioxide. He ended with a proposal, which his team will present to Governor Cuomo whenever the Governor has a moment, setting forth a plan to move energy production in New York State away from hydrocarbons and toward renewables, perhaps reaching 100% clean energy production in 30 years.


Sound crazy, this last bit? As crazy as the billions-of-dollars infrastructure explosion and large-scale exploitation of the environment and the political process necessary to get only 20% of the methane out of the Marcellus in a profitable manner? The more I learn what it takes to do the latter, the more I think the former is the rational choice.


Anyway, if you did miss the event, it was recorded, and I'm working on getting a link up here on the blog. Until then, you can watch Dr. Ingraffea's presentations on YouTube: just type 'Dr. Anthony Ingraffea' in the YouTube search bar, and take your pick.  Here's one I've watched to get you started.



By the way, I'd love to includ a link to the Daily Star's article about the presentation... but there wasn't one (online, at least). Where were you guys?