Politics

Regional Councils

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced early in his term that he'd be creating a set of "regional economic councils" to build plans for funding economic development across New York, from the ground up.In the summer of 2011 he finally announced some of the details of the program, to be led by Lieutenant Governor Robert Duffy. The ten councils each have dozens of members, and are charged with gathering input from the public and business leaders, and creating a plan by November 14. Those plans will be pitted against each other for a pot of $1 billion in grants, incentives, and tax relief from various state agencies. The winners will get more funding, the losers will get less.But other details - like whether funding will be available past the initial term, and who will serve on the board that decides who wins and who loses - have not been released.The Innovation Trail is looking for your feedback about what your regional economic priorities are, and what you want your community to look like once the councils have completed their task.

Finger Lakes economic council releases draft plan

WXXI News | By Zack Seward

Published October 24, 2011 at 3:55 PM EDT

Lt. Gov. Bob Duffy at the Finger Lakes regional council announcement in July.

Ahead of three public meetings this week, the Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Council released the first draft of its strategic plan Monday.

You can read the entirety of the 17-page document after the jump.

Here are the whens and wheres of this week's public input sessions:

Tuesday, October 25 - Batavia
Wednesday, October 26 - Geneva
Thursday, October 27 - Brighton

More info about the meetings can be found here.

Finger Lakes Draft Strategic Plan 10-24-11

Update

The 17-page document highlights many of the region's strengths - placing special emphasis on agriculture, optics and higher education - but it's still incomplete. The draft plan (the first to be released to the public) lacks key sections, such as a "Regional Implementation Agenda" and "Performance Measures."

Greater Rochester Enterprise CEO Mark Peterson chaired the work group process for the council. He says this week's forums are designed to get the public to help fill in the gaps.

"We're going to ask [attendees] to break into some small groups, with parts of the plan that they might be interested in," says Peterson. "[They'll] read it, and provide us with some feedback that we can feed back to the council as they continue to redraft the plan."

The deadline for the final plan is November 14. Peterson says the council will release a second draft on November 1. He says the plan will probably be finalized during the November 9 regional council meeting.

The plans will be used to determine which four regions win $40 million in state economic development money. Going forward, each of the ten councils will also have a 20 percent say over projects seeking to tap into an $800 million pot of state incentives.