Adirondacks 3.0: Reinventing the industrial parks
This morning we aired a great piece by Jon Alexander, WNBZ’s assistant news director, looking at the spotty track record of pre-approved industrial parks in the Adirondacks.
These are islands of commercial opportunity, where 90% of the Park’s regulations and bureaucratic hurdles are stripped away.
Despite being shovel-ready, despite being located in some of the most beautiful places in North American, and despite the availability of a well-trained, educated workforce — most stand empty.
Which brings me back to my argument about the Adirondack Park 3.0. People have been asking for more specific ideas about how this kind of initiative might work and this seems like a great place to start.
Why not convene a task force under the aegis of the APA with the express goal of marketing and filling up these industrial parks?
The task force would include business leaders, chambers of commerce, regional development agencies, and other relevant state officials.
But the APA itself would take the lead in working to rebrand the Park as a business-ready place for investors and start-ups to come.
That means working with Albany and Washington to develop incentives. That means doing outreach to manufacturing and venture capital groups.
Most importantly, it means identifying and removing unnecessary hurdles that may still remain. Is there different or better infrastructure needed?
Let’s see if that infrastructure is environmentally friendly and, if so, let’s get it built.
Remember, these are sites where the APA team has already kicked the tires, done exhaustive environmental reviews, and determined that these are appropriate, good places for light industry.
So that part — the most important part — of the APA’s mission is accomplished.
Now it’s time to serve the human communities by helping to recruit dependable, year-round employment.
Would this be a hard lift? Sure. I imagine this task force would be in existence for a long time, perhaps as a permanent standing committee.
But setting clear benchmarks — how about aiming to recruit one new business per year? — would allow the APA to put a metric on success and failure.
Over time the effort would also begin the process of changing the Park’s (often mistaken) image as a tangle of red-tape and delays.
It would also change the APA’s image and help to clarify its mission as a defender of all the Park’s assets, human and wild.
Check out Jon Alexander’s story and comment below.
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I have a better idea. Why don’t we try to encourage very small businesses, mom and pop operations, to set up in the park? Bigger businesses are always looking for start-up money or tax breaks or grants. Owners of very small businesses often run on their own capital.
Once you have a strong business environment built on many small businesses the bigger businesses will want to move there on their own.
“The task force would include business leaders, chambers of commerce, regional development agencies, and other relevant state officials.” These leaders have proven they are unsuccessful at improving the business climate; time to move past them and work on smaller scale grass-roots initiatives.
Coming up with ideas and addressing obstacles I think is a good idea. I would simply add my tired old refrain that the economic forces which keep the rest of the industrial parks in the North Country and a good portion of Up-State NY only partially full are the same forces impacting these Industrial Parks which happen to be in the Adirondack Park. I honestly don’t think it is about the Park per-se.
And you have to pass a lot of other industrial parks, wherever you’re coming from, before you get to one in Newcomb.
I keep coming back to one idea about the Adirondacks. It is what it is. I live here because it is what it is. If i wanted something else, I would move someplace else.
What I like most about the Adirondacks is what keeps most people from wanting to live here.
I like the long winters and the short summers. I like the lack of traffic for most of the year.
Yes, jobs are scarce and the job choices are limited. But this is primarily due to the fact that most people don’t want to live here even if they could find a job they would want to do or would pay them as much as they want to be paid.
Filling Industrial Parks near and within the Blueline is not a marketing problem. The local IDAs have had good marketing programs in place for years.
Looking at the vacancy rates I think it is probable that industrial parks are a bad fit for this area. It makes little logistic sense to ship plastic pellets into the Park and manufactured goods out. Oval Wooden Dish in Tupper Lake is a good example of how that doesn’t work.
The Industrial Parks probably are good assets, but some realistic assessment of how they can be used is needed first. If what is needed is billion dollars of infrastructure like roads, sewer, water, telecommunications, and government hand-outs (excuse me,”incentives”), well, given today’s economic climate, dream-on.
Then there is the problem of a fairly small, scattered workforce. When I did economic development work in the area one company, for instance, told me they relocated out of the park to Plattsburgh to have access to a larger workforce.
The old 1.0 of economic development is recruiting new businesses into an area, known as “economic hunting.” The real economic development 3.0 is growing the small businesses that are already here, also known as “economic gardening.”
The thing is we need to get more Pete Kleins here, people who live here because they want to be here, because they like the lifestyle. There are many people who can live wherever they want because they work for themselves or they telecommute, all we need are a few hundred of those people to start living and working here. What we don’t need is to spend money trying to attract the same people everyone else is trying to get; let Adirondackers self-select.
Yeah, we are not going to get traditional industry, that is old time and just not going to happen. We simply cannot compete with other parts of the country on cost and transportation availability so why waste money trying? We are unique though and indeed we need people to give us a try who want to be here and who do want to start businesses and I think that is possible.
I would start with asking businesses and individuals that are ALREADY here what they need and what would help them and what would they want to see about how to expand.
The whole idea of an industrial park to me is not relevant or needed, it is from the ideas of the 70’s.
NYS government needs to enact policies that reduce the cost of doing business and make government more effective and efficient. That is how we’ll attract businesses to the area.
Scratchy, sounds like you’ve been listening to the business council. I run a business here, thousands of other people run businesses here. New York is a great place to do business. People say taxes little high and the state has too many regulations. Maybe some of that regulation could be less bureaucratic, but it isn’t stopping people from doing business. Those people who want to move somewhere that they get tax breaks and lower labor costs, freedom do pollute, and free rein to treat their workers poorly are going to move away. Good riddance.
The benefits of being here far outweigh the slight difference in taxes.
If all the business groups would stop griping about how hard it is to do business in NY and start talking about how great a place it is to live, work, and raise a family, about how good the workforce is, about how hard working and clever New Yorkers are, maybe more businesses would want to move here.
My feeling is that if we wanted to lower taxes in this state we should shut down every single economic development agency. Seems like they spend more time making up charts about what a great job they’re doing and traveling to China than actually paying for their own existence by bringing in jobs that wouldn’t have come here anyway . But then we’d have a bunch of guys in cheap suits out of work.
Knucklehead makes some good points.
When I was in sales, my boss used to tell me, “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.”
Constant complaining about the state and its taxes only drives businesses away that would otherwise locate here.
Yes, money could be saved, taxes lowered, by cutting back on the number of bureaucrats, consultants, etc. But no amount of cost cutting will work without a positive attitude.
Some ideas to save money are probably counterproductive and cost more money too. I’m thinking of the push to consolidate local governments. Money is spent by towns and villages to look at consolidation with the only positive result being the money made by the consultants.
To me real money could be saved by trashing SED and the Regents. Those to overpaid groups do nothing for education except raise the cost of education while totally confusing parents, teachers and students. Their philosophy seems to be – if it ain’t broke, let’s fix it.
IMO there idea of “industrial parks” is kind of an outdated idea anyway. Industry is going to move to where power is cheap, taxes are low, workers are available and transportation is easy and cheap. NY and the Adirondacks meet none of these requirements. Even in the heyday of logging and mining the raw materials were often processed hundreds of miles away. These days with costs so high it make no sense to move to someplace that will simply be too expense to compete.
Bill Easterly on Reversing Conditional Probabilities explains pretty succinctly the faulty reasoning about industrial parks: http://bit.ly/a44Yl6
WIth laws like the Scaffold Law, it’s hard not to conclude that NY is overlitigatious. http://cuomollc.com/doc/NY%20Law%20Update%205-14-08.pdf
I mean a law that holds a building owner liable for contractor’s fall when that contracter was working without the owner’s consent or knowledge? Does anyother state have such a hostile attitude toward business? And yes, this is all because of downstate politicains.
Careful here. Business parks are not the only places in the Adirondack Park where new businesses can be set up. They do, however, provide an important development options as was the case in Moriah with Pre-Tech Plastics, in Willsboro with Old Adirondack, Inc., and in Keeseville with Essex Box and Pallet. Also, the Westport Development Park was the first choice for locating a consolidated General Composites operation (which btw was permitted by the Agency). Business parks can accomodate commercial and industrial activities that are best suited for their locations and design. They are important assets in the effort to build a more diverse economic base in Adirondack communities. To knock them as inappropriate or a throwback to an earlier era is to help limit development options for the future.
Steve – Thanks for weighing in here. I agree. And it strikes me that in a Park area like ours having some pre-permitted shovel-ready areas would be even more valuable than in other areas.
–Brian, NCPR