Cuomo’s $8 Billion Waste
Y et another investigation has concluded that New Yorkers get very little bang for the $8 billion a year the state spends in the name of economic development. This time, it was a six-month review by Gannett’s USA Today Network, documenting such flaws as a regular failure to create the promised number of jobs as well as opaque reporting on just how public funds get spent.
The most notorious is StartUp NY (now renamed Excelsior), which has spent $600 million on tax breaks — and $53 million on advertising — to create only about a thousand jobs, a third the promised number.
Most important, the spending has utterly failed to revive the economy upstate — where unemployment is down, mainly because the workforce has shrunk by 3.5 percent since 2011.
Yet Gov. Cuomo routinely says otherwise. At a recent news conference announcing another yogurt-plant deal, he insisted that state incentives are attracting and retaining companies upstate.
This is only the latest exposé of his programs, directly echoing an exhaustive inves- tigation by the lefty outfit ProPublica.
A study by Pew Charitable Trusts found the state does a terrible job evaluating the effectiveness of its tax breaks.
And the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research found that New York’s $8 billion a year in incentives is not only the largest amount of any state (three times the effort of the next three largest states com
bined) but also the least effective. The governor’s response to all this? He’s not only fending off demands for tighter controls, he’s moved to eliminate requirements that development authorities under his control report anything about how many jobs they create.
There’s some good news about his Buffalo Billion program: The corruption trials won’t start before January. On the other hand, there’s still no sign of when that huge taxpayer-built solar-panel plant will actually open.
Cuomo can take credit for “investing” more upstate than past governors — but not for delivering better results. The region would’ve been far better off if had he simply allowed fracking instead.