Santa Cuomo’s Pork Parade
his Christmas, Santa Cuomo is leaving lots of goodies in the stockings of New York businesses and nonprofits from the Finger Lakes to the North Country and the Capital Region to Montauk Point.
On Thursday, Gov. Cuomo dispensed $700 million in regional economic development council grants and tax credits, supposedly for business development and job creation.
It was the sixth annual edition of what some upstate critics have dubbed “The Hunger Games” as 10 regions “compete” for a share of the Cuomo Cash giveaway.
In the five previous rounds, the state awarded almost $4 billion for more than 4,100 projects justified as creating or saving more than 200,000 jobs.
Cuomo touts it all as a comprehensive, communitydriven approach to regional economic development. And never mind that much of it looks like political pork. Here are a few of the new projects:
Voodoo Manufacturing, a 3-D printing outfit, got $200,000 in tax credits to expand its Williamsburg factory.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum won $204,000 for a marketing initiative.
Another exhibit, Beyond Suffrage: 100 Years of Women’s Activism, got $60,000.
$500,000 went to the Sing Sing Prison Museum for preservation and design.
$160,000 will help promote the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze 32-night walk-through exhibit in Van Cortlandt Manor next October and November.
$3 million goes to Legoland New York in Goshen.
Brown’s Brewing Co. of Hoosick Falls won $557,450; another $53,560 will go to help study chemical contamination in the village’s groundwater.
Jamestown, the birthplace of Lucille Ball, got $834,000 to support development of a National Comedy Center campus.
As for the governor’s claim that initiatives like these have helped keep upstate unemployment down, well, we’ll leave it to upstate voters to judge whether their economy is booming — and whether they think these projects make up for Cuomo’s jobs-killing ban on fracking.
The real joke is on New York taxpayers who are funding Santa Cuomo’s stocking stuffers.