State Assemblyman Sean Ryan says if the Buffalo-Niagara region is to finally move forward in economic development, economic development agencies to stop the practice of one locality pirating a business away from a neighboring locality.
Ryan stood outside Prime Wines, known also as Premier Liquor, in the Village of Kenmore, a thriving business that even he has patronized. He likes the store, but does not appreciate how the Amherst Industrial Development Agency offered it 500-thousand dollars to relocate from this neighborhood into Amherst. Ryan says that's just an example of the actions local IDAs are carrying out, at the expense of other nearby communities, with no job growth to show for it.
"The IDA system, compared to regional economic development system, is neither strategic nor comprehensive," said Ryan. "It does not recognize the strengths of our economy, and it does not attempt to build on those strengths in any comprehensive manner."
Ryan says the region's nine IDAs offered more than $48 million in tax breaks and incentives in 2009, but only 20% of the projects to which the money was offered showed job retention or increases.
Several years ago, then-county executive Joel Giambra pitched the idea of unifying IDAs into a single entity. That never happened, but Ryan says what the nine existing local IDAs need to do is unify in approving regionally minded projects instead of pulling them from neighborhood to neighborhood.
"The celebration we had in Albany last week over the hundred-million dollars... within a two year period that hundred-million dollars will be dwarfed by over a hundred-million dollars that will be given out by the ineffective IDAs in our region that will, instead of promoting economic growth, will continue to drive our region backwards," said Ryan.
