State of the County offered little
for business
By ALEXANDER SOULE
In his State of the County address in
late March, Westchester County Executive Andrew
Spano said one of his grandfather’s favorite expressions
was, ‘Watch the hands; don’t listen to the mouth.’”
Business owners might still be using their
hands to flip through the print copy of his speech
to see if they missed anything that came out of
Spano’s mouth regarding economic development.
Spano made only passing references to issues
of importance to most local businesses, including
property taxes, devoting most of the address to
citizens’ issues such as housing and health care.
In a sense, Spano’s silence comes from
a position of strength, Westchester County’s enviable
economy. Unemployment was 3.9 percent in January,
according to the New York State Department of Labor,
down from 4.2 percent in January 2006, and trailing
only Putnam, Rockland and Tompkins counties in New
York.
Brokers predict that office vacancy rates
in Westchester County will fall to 12 percent this
year as employers add jobs.
Spano expects hotel vacancies to drop sharply
this summer as well, when the county hosts the Empire
Games, a sporting event expected to draw more than
20,000 visitors. He said the event should produce
$20 million in additional revenue for hospitality,
retail and tourism establishments in the region.
On the issue of permanent lodging, Spano
proposed the creation of a housing land trust meant
to prevent affordable housing from reverting to
market rates. He wants local municipalities to donate
land earmarked for affordable housing to a trust,
which would then lease properties to developers
on a continually renewing basis.
Some 300 units of affordable housing built
15 years ago can be priced at market rates at year-end,
Spano said, and that number could climb to 500 annually.
“Even though we are building more (housing),
at best we are either building and standing still,
or at worst we are losing the gains we have made,”
Spano said.
Spano did not use the speech to make any
new proposal concerning how to move forward on a
replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge. He is the
incoming co-chairman of the New York Metropolitan
Transportation Council.
Spano reiterated his opposition to Entergy
Corp.’s efforts to renew its license for the Indian
Point Nuclear Power Plant, saying that alternate
energy sources could be found to replace the plant’s
2000 megawatts of power, but not providing specifics
in his speech. He said his staff has been meeting
regularly with Con Edison officials and state auditors
to discuss crippling blackouts businesses and homeowners
endured last summer.
And his address was not without the occasional
hiccup. A Web site he touted for businesses to explore
international trade opportunities instead is an
obscure dot-com site for various communications
products and services.
Reader
Comments
|
Please
send us your comments!
|
|
Add
Your Comments
