Yet another of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s economic-development fantasies bit the fairy dust this month, as the SUNY Polytechnic Institute opted to sell a Rochester building after six years of failed efforts to fill it with with high-tech jobs.
When SUNY-Poly bought the site from Kodak for $2.6 million six years ago, Cuomo and economic-development “whiz” Alain Kaloyeros said it would bring millions in private investments. But Kaloyeros is headed to prison, and taxpayers will be lucky if the building sells at a loss of only $1.1 million.
At one point, Team Cuomo promised the building would become a $100 million solar-panel manufacturing plant. Then it was a $500 million electronics facility — and, next, a photonics showplace. As the Rochester Democrat Chronicle dryly reports, “None of those promises panned out.”
At least that’s better than the $15 million “film hub” that the state wound up selling off for $1, or the $90 million it poured into a lightbulb factory that never opened.
Kaloyeros is one of several former top Cuomo aides and donors convicted of pay-to-play corruption surrounding state economic-development schemes. The governor has flushed billions into these projects — with most of the jobs they’ve generated being in construction of buildings that almost never house many permanent jobs. Yet Cuomo resists all efforts to restore basic oversight of his economic-development spending, even as he ramps up a new roster of dubious projects in the name of boosting alternative energy.
Meanwhile, the 48 counties of northern and western New York continue to lose jobs and population, as young people move away in hopes of a better future.
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