It’s a trustworthy truism, tried and tested over time, and it’s about to be tried and tested again at iPark 87, the sprawling and obsolete ex-IBM facility in the Town of Ulster. When you put related parts of large service organizations next to each other at a single location, they can work together more closely to attract and advance their constituents.
You can’t have these organizations competing with each other on their common turf. They have to work together. To succeed, these arrangements require buy-in at the top, a shared vision of the mutual benefits of co-location.
That may be what’s happening among the workforce development shakers and movers in Ulster County
The alignment being organized involves the exceedingly complex world of work. The task is to bring together in a single location “institutions that have previously tended to work in their own silos,” in the words of county executive Jen Metzger.
The recent news that Ulster BOCES was considering moving its Career and Technical Education center (CTE) from its overcrowded Port Ewen facility to iPark 87 has marked the most significant single step yet in the silo-busting process. That move might well prove the game-changer, leading to the involvement of additional players not yet announced.
“I believe this opportunity has the [potential] for us as a county to redefine an outdated career and technical model,” Ulster County BOCES superintendent Jonah Schenker said. “The world of work doesn’t operate in 26 different career clusters. There are universal skills that we could be back mapping as we think about economic and workforce development.”
Metzger lauded the BOCES initiative at the fourth annual county workforce summit on January 18, saying it “creates incredible synergies with all the partners.” She noted that Schenker, SUNY New Paltz president Darrell Wheeler, SUNY Ulster president Alison Buckley, and she herself “came into our new positions at around the same time last year, with an eagerness to work together and to forge new paths.”
The cooperating organizations plan to occupy 140,000 square feet of space at iPark 87. Of that amount, about 100,000 square feet will be occupied by the BOCES CTE facility, about 20,000 square feet by three departments of Ulster County government (economic development, tourism, and employment and training), and the remaining 20,000 square feet by SUNY New Paltz and SUNY Ulster.
That’s both a lot of space and not much space. A one-story building of that square footage would occupy three acres. On the other hand, the space to be occupied is only seven percent of the entire ex-IBM Kingston campus,
Are fast-growing children still taught to buy slightly larger shoes than they need to provide their feet room to grow in? That/s the picture at iPark 87. There’s plenty of room to grow in, both for economic development and for workforce development,
Ulster BOCES operated under a total budget of $91.6 million in 2023-2024. The CTE portion of that budget was $13.2 million.
BOCES’ intention upon approval by its constituent districts is to sign a 20-year lease with iPark 87 owner National Resources, with a first-year payment of $1.9 million and a two-percent increase each year thereafter for the full term of the lease.
Schenker is hopeful that the iPark 87 CTE facility can open in 2025-2026.
The Zinc8 experience
“Up to $160 million is now on its way to supercharge Upstate NY as a booming battery research hub being led by Binghamton University,” said U.S. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer this Monday, January 29. He was announcing a National Science Foundation grant of that amount to the school, which he characterized as “the beating electric heart of federal efforts to help bring battery innovation and development back from overseas to spark growth of this critical industry vital to our nation’s national and economic security.”
Binghamton’s lithium-ion battery hub, continued Schumer, was “already electrifying Upstate New York’s workforce and economy.” This new investment was the crown jewel that would help fuel the scientific discovery and innovation to ensure this industry was here to stay in America as demand grew for electric vehicles and reliance on battery storage grids increased.
Does that speechifying sound familiar to an Ulster County audience? Cut back to a year ago.
Reads a caption to a Tania Barriklo photo in the Daily Freeman; “The iPark 87 footbridge in the Town of Ulster on Thursday morning, January 26, 2023, when governor Kathy Hochul announced that Zinc8 Energy Systems, a Canadian zinc-battery manufacturing company, was to locate its first manufacturing and U.S. headquarters in Ulster County at the former TechCity.
The announcement followed an extended effort on Schumer’s part to attract Zinc8 to Ulster County. Six months earlier, he had personally called Ron MacDonald, CEO of Zinc8, to urge [Zinc 8] to establish its American manufacturing operations in Ulster, bringing hundreds of clean-energy jobs to the Hudson Valley.
Schumer made clear that Ulster’s former TechCity campus — now iPark 87 — had all the right ingredients to become the home to the battery-storage firm’s major manufacturing facility. The senator’s six-billion-dollar federal incentives in the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would exponentially expand U.S.-based battery technologies, It could help supercharge (yes, he seems fond of that word) Zinc8’s future in New York, his press release at the time indicated.
The Canadian energy-storage company was persuaded. It said it would make Ulster Country its American headquarters, lease 237,000 square feet of space at iPark 87, and create 500 well-paying jobs at the site.
Eight months later, the company collapsed. In September, a press release announced that the company needed additional financing to continue its operations. Its stock price dwindled to pennies.
The remnants of the firm are still in existence.
Workforce development
The management textbooks suggest a synergy between economic development — the creation of jobs in a geographical area – and workforce development — a range of activities, policies and programs employed by geographies to create, sustain and retain a viable workforce that can support current and future business and industry.
“Investing in our people” will engender a more sympathetic public response than giving tax breaks to outsiders willing to make job-creating investments in our community ever will.
The mission of the Office of Strategic Workforce Development (OSWD) within Empire State Development is to ensure that “New Yorkers have access to the quality training they need to truly meet business needs and succeed in the economy.” Among other things, OSWD provides capital grants to help providers to enhance their facilities and programming.
Ulster County has applied for a million-dollar state grant to help bring the Sustainable Ulster Workforce Innovation Center at iPark 87 closer to reality. Metzger noted the support of free public transportation, on-site childcare, and county mental-health services,
The image of BOCES as providing dead-end technical training for kids who weren’t college material dies hard. Nationally, more BOCES students now go on to college than don’t.
“I hope to foster innovation to address the shifts needed in the traditional educational model to ensure all learners have what they need to succeed,” said Jonah Schenker at the time of his appointment as Ulster BOCES superintendent. He now sees the proposed move to iPark 87 as “allowing BOCES to partner with businesses for mentoring programs, hands-on classes, and instructional platforms that would otherwise require more complicated transportation logistics.”
Supporters of the visionary project at iPark 87 see what it intends to accomplish not as an end in itself but as a beginning. Jen Metzger noted the support of free public transportation, on-site childcare, and county mental-health services.
“When we think about workforce development, we can’t limit our thinking to education and training, internships and apprenticeships,” said Metzger at the mid-January county workforce summit. “It’s also about providing the other supports that create the conditions for individuals to succeed… We want to build a resilient, sustainable, thriving Ulster County that leaves no one behind.”
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