The Ulster County Legislature’s committee on economic development, tourism, housing, planning and transit met last Thursday evening in the lounge of the Bearsville Center in Woodstock. This committee likes to hold occasional meetings at various venues throughout the county, and members who wanted to see the perfornance facility were given a tour prior to the meeting.
Five committee members (genial chairperson Brian Cahill, Jim Delaune, Abe Uchitelle, deputy chair Herb Litts, and Thomas Corcoran) and a staffer (Fawn Tantillo) sat at a rectangular table with a paper tablecloth underneath a wall with a much-enlarged image of the five original members of The Band. Member Lynn Archer sat nearby.
Three rows of three chairs each were available for an audience. Several people sat on sofas. Of the 20 people in attendance, most were either legislators or employees of county government.
On the same wall as The Band were blowups of images of other Woodstockers: a young Paul Butterfield and en even younger Bob Dylan.
There was a message there. For more than two generations, the music industry and the tourism it has attracted have been an important contributor to the Woodstock economy.
The most controversial item on the agenda turned out to involve the Enterprise West Redevelopment Project, the county-foreclosed ex-IBM buildings on the west side of Enterprise Drive on the Town of Ulster. As county executive Pat Ryan’s team adjusts its search for a user for the main 400,000-square-foot space, the legislators are growing restless about the project’s continuing drain on county resources.
County executive Ryan does not lack a vision for the redevelopment of the former TechCity property. “For far too long we have watched this site decay right in front of us, but now we see a path forward to finally address this long-standing reminder of what we lost as a community when IBM left,” Ryan said in a press release earlier this year. “We have an opportunity now, as we begin to emerge from the pandemic, to rebuild better and stronger than we were before – to leverage our resilience during the pandemic into the energy and cooperation it will take to build a more people-centered economy going forward.”
It’s been a meandering path. An advisory committee was appointed. The county legislature agreed to turn title to Enterprise West over to the Ulster County Economic Development Alliance (UCEDA), a governmental subsidiary. It solicited proposals for the use of the place, and got 22 applications. It agreed to use of the grounds for cultural activities organized by BluePrint, one of the applicants. Adaptive reuse, they call it.
Ulster County has also had to cover the considerable maintenance costs on the aging structure, which was last used for tax processing by Bank of America in 2015.
Haven’t you heard? The demand for office space in the United States has plunged since the pandemic, and the places where work, especially office work, can be done have expanded. Work wherever you want!
“The new and prolonged remote work arrangements have raised questions about the future of office space,” summed up state comptroller Tom DiNapoli this month. “Employers are assessing how they use shared office space while considering shifts in worker preferences and the feasibility of long-term remote work. Some businesses have already instituted permanent hybrid remote-work arrangements, and others are contemplating similar plans. As these developments unfold, the future of office real estate is largely uncertain.”
Ulster County had been hopeful that food processor The Farm Bridge would remain an anchor tenant at Enterprise West, but that employer of 50 people very recently laid off its entire workforce.
Converting office use to non-office use is expensive. Except for special situations, warehousing and fulfillment centers have in the last couple of years been the main competitors for space occupancy in the region. The exceptions have occurred through extraordinary governmental inducement or through the skills of innovative developers – often both.
“The market is at a weird place,” county economic development director Tim Weidemann told the legislative meeting in Bearsville last Thursday. “We needed a development partner.”
To prepare for such a joint venture, the county needed a survey, an appraisal, the services of an engineer and an architect, and continued maintenance. The development partner would be expected to bring financial resources to facilitate improvements.
Three developers had made complete responses in September to the county’s Request for Expressions of Interest (RFEI) September expressed interest in Enterprise West, Weidemann said. It was unusual that he then identified only one of them, Connecticut-based National Resources, whose portfolio included among others a big project in Yonkers and iPark 84, a redevelopment of 300 acres of the former IBM and Global Foundries complex in East Fishkill. The latter project involved plans for a business incubator, movie-making facilities and a food- and-drink cluster – just the industries Ulster County had said it hoped to grow.
Within the past month, Pepsi subsidiary Frito-Lay has submitted plans for a 150,000-square-foot distribution center at iPark 84. The press has reported the likely arrival of a major film studio; the National Resources development in Yonkers already has secured one.
Weidemann said that the executive was asking for $100,000 for property management. Legislator Lynn Archer, sitting apart from her colleagues in the lounge of the Bearsville Center, would have none of it. She saw a floundering project sucking up money and going nowhere. “We’re just asked for more money. I’ve lost confidence,” she said. “We didn’t want ot be landlords. You come here and say this is the last time. Every time is the last time we’ll ask you for money.”
Chairperson Cahill smoothed the situation out. Without much enthusiasm, the committee approved what Weidemann had asked for. It wasn’t so much that they completely dismissed what Archer had said. Under present conditions, they felt they had no better course of action but to support the county administration’s proposals.
Meanwhile, Ryan’s 2022 county budget proposes relocating economic development, tourism development, workforce training and other economy-related functions at the former TechCity site. Two million dollars are earmarked in that budget for the Ulster County Center for Economic Innovation at that site, and four million for support of the agencies involved.
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