In December, Governor Cuomo announced the funding awards for Regional Economic Development Councils. Since July, ALIGN, the Buffalo-based Coalition for Economic Justice and Long Island Jobs with Justice have advocated and mobilized in coordination with community and labor allies across the state to make sure that Regional Economic Development Councils—the state’s newest job creation initiative—made a clean break from wasteful economic development practices of the past. Together, we demanded that Regional Councils come up with better strategies for creating quality jobs and community benefits for New Yorkers.
While not perfect, we are happy to share that Regional Councils have led a more robust discussion about how to better coordinate and target economic development efforts in our state. Most of the plans emphasize quality job creation in project selection criteria and performance metrics. The four winning plans (Western NY, Central NY, the North Country, and Long Island) speak clearly about targeting distressed communities, about abiding by smart growth principles and redeveloping core urban areas, and about prioritizing high-skill green industries, neighborhood-level projects and affordable housing development.
Regional Councils are a step in the right direction. However, much more needs to be done to proactively create the good jobs New Yorkers need.
• We still need a greater degree of coordination between the many economic development entities in the state. Outside of the new Regional Councils’ scope, New Yorkers forgo over $8 billion a year in revenues because of corporate tax exemptions that too often fail to create promised jobs. Moving forward, we need to take a hard look at how Regional Councils and Industrial Development Agencies, New York’s largest economic development entities, will co-exist.
• With gaping budget deficits still to be filled, we must rein in wasteful spending on corporate subsidies by implementing transparency and accountability fixes like a Unified Economic Development Budget, an easily accessible tool that many other states use to better monitor costs and benefits of their expenditures on economic development. We should also implement a clearly stipulated mandatory Money Back Guarantee (“clawback”) policy, and increase agency oversight of economic development entities.
• Resources spent on programs that are not performing well should be put to better use on innovative job creation solutions. With the amount of money wasted in one year alone on Industrial Development Agency projects that fail to create jobs or cut jobs, we could have retrofit nearly 11,000 small businesses for energy efficiency, saving NY businesses millions of dollars in energy costs, and creating over 2,200 jobs in the hard-hit construction industry.
In 2012, we will continue to monitor economic development activities and advocate for bold solutions to create good jobs for New Yorkers. New York government can and should take a proactive role in spurring economic activity. Reining in wasteful spending on economic development subsidies and investing in innovative solutions will put New Yorkers back to work and build a stronger economy.
