In their separate one-house budget resolutions passed this week both houses of the State Legislature included a "database of deals," a public register of state business subsidies that would shed light on billions of dollars in government incentives to corporations.
The legislation, which has been around for years but not passed, would require the state to publish a searchable database of state subsidies for economic development projects that would document the corporate recipient, the state benefits received, and number of jobs committed to and created.
Supporters of the proposal including legislators and transparency advocates say the tool would allow the government and the public to evaluate the efficacy of roughly $5 billion in annual business and economic development incentives and could make it possible to track the total flow of state money to businesses across the state.
Passage in State Senate and Assembly budget resolutions does little more than show significant legislative support for the proposal. In order to become law, it would have to survive final state budget negotiations, which are now unfolding among Governor Kathy Hochul and legislative leaders ahead of the April 1 start of the next state fiscal year. Alternatively, the bill could be passed at any time by the two houses of the Legislature.
Hochul has not taken a public position on a database of deals nor did she put it in her $216 billion executive budget or State of the State policy agenda, both released in January.
Calls for a database of state economic development deals and subsidies have grown over the years amid related corruption scandals, high-profile failures, evidence of pay-to-play politics, and general questions about the necessity and effectiveness of such tax breaks and other incentives favored by former Governor Andrew Cuomo.
"The public wants to know how their dollars are being spent and we think this database of deals legislation will go a long way to ensure that we can capture exactly what is happening, especially in economic development projects," said State Senator Leroy Comrie, a Queens Democrat who has sponsored the bill.
The legislation will "help the public see which businesses are getting state subsidies, how much they are receiving, and whether those subsidies are creating jobs, as intended," said Assembly sponsor Monica Wallace, in an email statement urging lawmakers to back its inclusion in the final enacted budget.
Economic development subsidies can take many forms, from government grants and loans to tax benefits to utility assistance. They can be administered through a range of state agencies where reporting on them is decentralized and often incomplete. One of the largest, the New York State Film Tax Credit Program, gives $420 million a year in tax breaks to businesses that produce films in New York.
Opaque and unaccountable subsidies have helped prop up billionaires and political insiders. Tech mogul Elon Musk received upwards of $950 million in state incentives to open a spectacularly overvalued solar panel factory in upstate New York that created few jobs before being absorbed by Musk's company Tesla. Another economic development project, the billion-dollar nanotech initiative spearheaded by Cuomo as part of “the Buffalo Billion,” incubated one of the biggest bid-rigging scandals in recent state history and ended with close Cuomo allies going to jail.
Like her predecessor, Hochul has continued to tout state incentives for major economic development projects, like the "Finger Lakes Forward" initiative that includes a $500 million state investment promised to “incentivize private business to invest well over $2.5 billion” to revitalize the region and create “up to 8,200 new jobs.”
As part of that effort, on Wednesday Hochul announced that a French yogurt and desserts company, La Fermière, “will establish its U.S. production operations in New York State” and committed to constructing a large new production facility in Batavia. The company, the governor’s office said in a press release, “expects to create up to 135 new jobs in the region.” The press release did not say what types of incentives the company was getting from the state.
4 comments:
Is their AG Tish appointing a special counsel to look at this ?
Asking for a friend...
Society just plunges further and further into insanity.
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville
The word 'Accountability' linked to anyone——or anything——in New York State government is an automatic oxymoron. Nobody in public office (elected or otherwise, as it were) knows what they are doing (not even the vaguest of ideas), except to read from their pre-prepared scripts and propaganda lying teleprompters, whilst completely tonsuring the ravaged earth of this once proud, independent, egalitarian, Blue Collar state, and to massively continue to colonize and invade it with more foreign, peasant-laden populations, in addition to a tsunami of laws and regulations that have already betrayed all pretense of freedom, democracy, and living standards that no longer engender the pursuit of happiness and contentment.
Now, only human misery, destruction and alienation abound——compliments of ALL paid off politicians (not public servants), and the kleptocratic 1% who outright own and operate them, the same corporate fascist predators who carry their bartered souls and endless mendacity to full, cradle-to-grave, and womb-to-tomb terms of their secure, set for life, government defined pension systems for which everyone else continually pays a soul-crushing price, without ironically securing a living wage, much less a reliable pension for themselves, despite the foisted, openly rigged, 'Taxation WITHOUT Representation' scam of this never-ending, money laundering Ponzi scheme called a government paycheck.
And the ever languishing public be eternally duped, bilked, scammed and damned! What? THIS IS NEW?
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