By WILLIAM J. KEMBLE
Correspondent

KINGSTON, N.Y. — Ulster County Industrial Development Agency members are being asked to increase  efforts to compete for state aid through a regional approach.

Hudson Valley Economic Development Corp. President Michael Oates said during an agency board meeting last week that state funding is being provided to groups with projects that have a wide geographic impact.

“When Gov. (Andrew) Cuomo took office, he basically set out to redefine how economic development was going to take place throughout the state,” Oates said Wednesday.

Oates said Cuomo has been seeking to change aid distribution methods used by previous administrations that based funding on “an upstate economic model and downstate economic model” that split the state.

“The governor’s approach was to create a series of regional councils throughout the state with the idea that economic development was going to come up from a local level on a regional basis up to Albany ... through (the Empire State Development Corp.) for the creation of incentive programs in support of targeted industries,” he said.

“What the governor has done is taken all the economic development dollars in the state and put it in essence into a contest approach so that regions can apply for funding out of basically two pots of money,” Oates said. “There’s an $800 million pot of money which is a combination of 10 or 11 different agencies in the state housing different urban development programs and a $200 million pot of money that regional councils are competitively trying to secure funding (from) for priority projects.”

Hudson Valley Development Corp. has developed a promotion campaign that focuses on semiconductors, the finance industry, data centers, tourism, film production, environmental technology, bio-tech industries, food and beverage, and product distribution.

“The marketing strategy that we’ve put in place ... is identifying a number of key industry clusters throughout the Hudson Valley that are already in position for growth and have the ability to see expansion if we can support them,” Oates said. “So part of our marketing campaign is ... an approach that combines direct mail, email blasts, videos, and trade shows all designed to promote nine major sectors throughout the Hudson Valley.”

Oates said Ulster County businesses can benefit through the regional approach by having a better distribution system.

“What we look to do is have a beginning dialogue to identify areas where we can create ... everything from workforce training programs to business-to-business networking,” he said. “We’ve had a number of companies specifically from Ulster County ... that needed help expanding the distribution of their products. So you might have a company in Ulster County that’s doing very well here on a local basis but they’re having a difficult time distributing their products in either the southern part of the Hudson Valley or into New York City.” Continued...

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Ulster County Industrial Development Agency and its related agency the Ulster County Development Corp. annually pay $10,000 each to be members of the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corp. Lance Matteson, who is an Ulster County representative for the regional group, said the affiliation has had benefits.

“In practical terms we receive leads on a pretty regular basis from HVEDC,” he said. “They are usually anonymous leads and are available to all seven counties in the Hudson Valley.”

“We can propose specific marketing projects or needs to HVEDC,” Matteson said. “The whole concept here is to leverage resources that we don’t have a sufficient amount of to do (marketing) by ourselves. One example of that is when the small business development center for the state was hosting Shandong province from China ... we managed to (host) that in Ulster County at SUNY New Paltz and I immediately asked Mike (Oates), can we get some financial support for this event, and he quickly said yes.”

 

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