By Dan Hust
MONTICELLO — February 11, 2011 — Change is in the air at the Sullivan County Industrial Development Agency (IDA), but at Tuesday’s regular board meeting, members lamented the recent accusations of insufficient transparency.
“Shucks, we’ve never refused to give anyone information, unless it was a matter of law,” IDA Board member Harold Gold observed.
He noted that years back, the local IDA had been one of the first in the state to advocate tying IDA-provided incentives to job retention, not just job creation.
“We were ahead of the game,” he said.
IDA CEO Allan Scott and Executive Director Jennifer Brylinski pointed out that the Bethel Woods project has attracted state interest because the initiative is reaping larger payments (in lieu of taxes) to the IDA than expected.
And thanks to the Millennium Pipeline reconstruction project, a million dollars will be available to the IDA over the next decade, at the pace of $100,000 a year from Millennium.
Gold confirmed that a subcommittee of the IDA Board had met last month to begin determining what to do with those funds.
“You’d like to help everybody 100 percent if you could,” he noted. “We’re trying to figure out what we can do to help them all.”
Ideas involve offering grants instead of loans, and paying particular attention to agriculture and the townships affected by the pipeline’s construction.
Another meeting is planned before recommendations will be made to the full board, said Gold.
The board itself will next meet on Friday, February 25 at 10 a.m. at the Government Center to discuss terminating agreements with projects that have not met required goals, said Board Chairman Elwin Wood. The meeting is open to the public.
In the meantime, Brylinski said she continues to work on meeting a just-enacted mandate by the County Legislature to provide a wealth of more information on active IDA projects on the IDA’s and county’s websites.
“It will take me about a month to compile it,” she remarked, with another two or so weeks thereafter to go live on the web.