Tagged: broome county

The Innovation Trail is taking a closer look at New York State's industrial development agencies, or IDAs. Follow our coverage by subscribing to the IDA RSS feed.

Richard D’Attilio is the executive director of the Broome County Industrial Development Agency.

Any project awarded tax breaks by the IDA comes across his desk. And any project that is rejected comes across his desk too.

D’Attilio started with the agency 18 years ago, turning it into - basically - a developer that gives away tax breaks.

“We are revenue-driven. We are independent and autonomous from the county, the government,”  says D’Attilio. “Once the board of directors has been put in place, they are the final word on all activity.”

That means only the nine member board of directors has a say in how the IDA spends money.

It’s not clear that the board, which meets once-a-month, actually gets involved in any meaningful way.

A review of more than a year of board meeting minutes found no projects that were rejected by the board after getting the OK from D’Attilio.

The Innovation Trail is taking a closer look at New York State's industrial development agencies, or IDAs. Get up to speed on what IDAs do - and what they don't do - by reading this primer, and subscribing to the IDA RSS feed.

In an audit released Wednesday, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli cited Broome County's Industrial Development Agency (BCIDA) for a conflict-of-interest.

The problem: George Akel, the IDA's chairman of the board, is also part owner of a company involved in one of the agency's big ticket projects.

The comptroller says that's a no-no.

Recently a reader sent us what seems like a fairly straight-forward question:

What does New York actually stand to make from hydrofracking?  How much money, for the state, and for individual landowners/secondary businesses/drilling firms?

Unfortunately, in the Marcellus Shale, there are no simple answers. 

Broome County officials are urging Governor David Paterson not to sign a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing.  The moratorium is allegedly symbolic, given that the six month delay lines up with the Department of Environmental Conservation's ongoing review of fracking.  But proponents of drilling say that signing it could still have negative affects for landowners.

Last week the Broome County Legislature turned down an offer of $7.8 million for the gas rights to 3,200 acres of county land, including the subsurface of the airport and several parks. However, the Press & Sun Bulletin suggests today that Republican victories in the November elections may put gas leasing right back on the table in January.

The offer, from Denver-based Inflection Energy received the support of only three of the nineteen county legislators. Four were not allowed to vote because of a personal stake in drilling in the Marcellus Shale. 

The wait for election results in Broome County was a little longer than usual last night – and not because of those  new-fangled, scanning voting machines. We're talking about the getting results up on the Internet.

With the results slow in coming, lots of people got curious about where the data was, and logged onto the county’s election website.  Visitors caused the website's server to crash, prompting the county to send out the following email: