Another Summit

I've just returned from the Mohawk Valley Economic Development Summit in the delightful Arkell Museum, right on the Erie Canal in Canajoharie, NY.  New York State is divided into ten economic development regions, each of which submits a consolidated application for each annual round of state economic development grants. Otsego County is the southern outlier in the Mohawk Valley region, which also includes Oneida, Montgomery, Fulton, Schoharie and Herkimer Counties.

There was a lot to learn today, and I'd be glad to go into more detail with anyone who's interested. Just some random highlights:

• The Mohawk River connects two of the hottest economic engines in the Northeast – the Marcy Nanocenter at SUNY-IT, just north of Utica, and the Global Foundries installation in Malta, NY, just north of Albany. These are monster installations that do, or will, manufacture a significant proportion of the digital brains that are running more and more of the stuff in our lives. The Malta plant has a 'clean room' the size of six football fields, and has an impact on tens of thousand of jobs in the region. Dozens of local high schools and colleges – especially community colleges – are adding new courses and programs specifically to train local folks for careers in these and related industries.
• There's a lot of movement in the agriculture sector, in all of upstate New York, but this is not your grandfather's agriculture. The hungriest market in the country is only three hours south of us, and the demand for buzzword food groups – local foods, artesial foods, BGH-free, reasonably antibiotic-free, non-GMO foods, free-range (the list is very long) – increases every day. This shouldn't have surprised me, given all the vacant farmland in Otsego County, but it did: upstate farmers can produce many times what they produce now if they can only be assured of a market for it. So the challenge here is not producing the right kind of food, but creating and maintaining the sustainable economic connections needed to assure farmers reasonable market consistency. So: food hubs, food cooperatives (which should be a no-brainer for Oneonta), central processing operations, refrigeration and storage centers on the way to the great appetite, etc.
• Each county had ten minutes at the beginning of today's meeting to 'introduce itself,' and the representatives of five of them, mostly CEOs of prominent businesses, did a great job of presenting a balanced and comprehensive view of the resources and challenges in all segments of their county's economy. Otsego County's representative, however, did not. Jeff Idelson, President Baseball Hall of Fame up in Cooperstown, spent about eight of his ten minutes selling the crowd on the Hall of Fame, as if there weren't anything else worth talking about in Otsego County. What a great opportunity wasted.

Probably about 100 people showed up this morning, the men and most of the women in suits, dressed for networking, and much of the day was self-congratulation and cheerleading. There's lots to be encouraged about, and lots of talk along the lines of “this is not the same old encouraging chatter we've heard for fifty years of decline; this is different,” but there are signs – local, national and international – that this benighted region may be in the way of some significant opportunities. More to come, surely.