The Chautauqua County Industrial Development Agency came in third in New York State for total revenues in 2020.
The State Comptroller’s Office released its annual IDA report, stating that the CCIDA had over $1,069,000,000 between 46 projects in 2020. Of those 46 projects, there was a total of $31.8 million dollars in tax exemptions were offered along with $1.8 million in Payment In Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) for a total tax exemptions net of $30.8 million dollars.
The projects created 581 jobs and retained 2,080 jobs.
CCIDA CEO and Deputy County Executive for Economic Development Mark Geise said the county’s IDA is one of the highest performing ones in the state, “We’ve got a lot of active projects that are fairly large. Some of them are like the wind farms and Athenix, which is now ImmunityBio, and Americold and the list goes on and on. It also reflects that we have some of the highest expenses of any IDA, in the top ten of IDAs in the state
In 2020, IDAs had total revenues of $72 million, consisting largely of project fees, a decline of $3.6 million from 2019. New York City IDA had the highest total revenues at $6.7 million, followed by Genesee County IDA with $5.7 million, and Chautauqua County IDA with $4.8 million.
Geise said the CCIDA also runs two large loan portfolios with the Al-Tech Revolving Loan Fund and the CARES Act Loan Fund, “Their value is over $20 million, so we have all of that money out there working and committed to businesses right now. And I guess what’s a little misleading, if you will, is that while our expenses are high it doesn’t count the jobs that are created through the loan funds, only through the IDA incentives, direct incentives, the tax breaks, if you will.”
Geise said with other IDAs in the state having loan fund programs now, he hopes that the reporting will change so that job figures from that can be included in future state reports.
The Comptroller’s report said, statewide, there were 4,262 active projects with a total value of $114 billion in 2020, an increase of $5.3 billion from the prior year. It is estimated that a total of 225,227 jobs would be created during the life of the projects.
NYS Comptroller 2022 IDA Report: https://www.osc.state.ny.us/files/local-government/publications/pdf/performance-of-idas-in-nys-2022-annual-report.pdf
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