Chautauqua County Industrial Development Agency

CCIDA CEO and Deputy County Executive for Economic Development Mark Geise presented the 2022 Annual Report on the CCIDA to the Board on Tuesday.

He said the IDA Board had approved more than 50 projects in 2022, which included the approval of business loans, development project incentives, and the procurement of grants, “We approved in 2022, either through loans or grants or PILOT incentives, over $500 million. Last year (2021), I believe it was over $140 million. It’s over $500 million this year. We did nine Al-Tech loans. We did eight EDA CARES Act loans. We secured $2.8 million in grant funds.”

Geise said 363 full time jobs were created with 774 being retained in 2022. He said the projects also will create hundreds of temporary construction jobs.

He also discussed the Chautauqua County Partnership for Economic Growth, which was formed in 2019 as an initiative of the CCIDA’s non-profit subsidiary, the Chautauqua Region Economic Development Corporation.

Geise said the organization supports the five pillars of economic development, “We need to be thinking about place making, creating communities that people want to live. We need to be thinking about infrastructure – water lines, sewer lines, electric. We need to be thinking about house – creating housing that meets the needs and demands of talent. We’ve got to have the right housing stock. And workforce development, of course. We talk to businesses every day, ‘I need people.'”

Geise said CCPEG provided over $420,000 in financial assistance and technical assistance to support several dozen partner-led projects and initiatives. In addition, the Partnership was awarded nine grants in 2022, totaling over $1.4 Million, and leveraged an additional $7.5 Million on behalf of its partners.

Geise said his goals for 2023 include acquiring land for expansion of shovel-ready sites; and re-activating several key vacant buildings, including the Furniture Mart Building in Jamestown, Truck-Lite Building in the Town of Ellicott, and the Lenhart Hotel in Bemus Point.

He also wants to develop a marketing and branding strategy for the county to help address population decline and supply businesses with talent.

The CCIDA’s 2022 Annual Report can be found on the CCIDA website: https://ccida.com/about/

EDITOR’S NOTE: As a point of transparency and disclosure to our audience, Chautauqua County Industrial Development Agency is a corporate underwriter for WRFA and has provided a financial contribution for the general operations of the station within the past year. Funding we receive for General Operations is not used to fund our coverage of local news in the community. That is only made possible through a Community Service Grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 

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