And Now, a Word from Our Sponsors

Buh-bye.

That's the word that Paula Deen is hearing from her sponsors, including Smithfield Foods and Target and The Home Depot and yes, even Wal-Mart. The Food Network (TFN) is not renewing her contract.  Novo Nordisk doesn't even want her any more.

Deen has been accused of racism for her (admitted) use of the N-word, and also of (allegedly) creating  a hostile workplace at the restaurant she and her brother run.  She's apologized at least twice on video, and on the Today Show, proclaimed "I is what I is" in an apparent attempt to put herself so far out there (even beyond Popeye) that people would see her for a nut and forgive her for her sins, or something. I'll be honest, I is not really sure I is able to understand what she was thinking with that comment.

Her sons, Jamie and Bobby, came out pretty strongly on their mom's behalf, referring to what's happening to Paula as character assassination, and denying things she said in her own deposition for the lawsuit. Our Momma's no racist, and she never said those things she said she said, or something. Again, I'll be honest, I'm not really sure whether she said things and told them not to say them, or whether they said things and she told them not to say them meanly but they could say them nicely -- the interviews can get confusing.

TFN is taking a beating, apparently, for their decision to not renew her contract.  Paula fans have been blasting them, starting support pages, and the like -- and a food marketing company with a similar name has been hit with so many angry calls that they posted a supportive message on their website expressing willingness to work with the Disgraced One, and at the same time clarifying that they're not the bad guys.

For the network, this was not the first less-than-optimal experience with Deen. Remember, she was the one who failed to mention that she had Type-2 diabetes for a few years even as she continued to serve up her high-fat, high-calorie, over-the-top recipes -- knowing that lifestyle changes such as getting rid of high-fat, high-calorie, over-the-top recipes is one of the best things a person can do to reduce their risk of getting that type of diabetes (and the risks of having it). Oh, she was taking money from Novo Nordisk, the company that makes the drug she takes for her condition, at the same time she was cooking up a killer storm on TV.

Listen, I have no idea if Paula Deen's a racist. I don't even know if she's a good cook... I've never tried any of her recipes, nor have I watched any of her shows or read any of her cookbooks. 

I do know that the politics of race are complicated, and fraught with danger. In some ways, what she's going through now is reminiscent of Juan Williams being booted by NPR a couple of years back. Celebrities like Deen and Williams and a whole host of others get dropped for what looks like a silly little thing but it's frequently more than that.

Want to know what I find interesting?  As of now I've found no evidence that the boys quit their gigs on TFN. If they haven't yet, are they going to? Wouldn't true Southern gentlemen do whatever was necessary to defend the honor of a real Southern belle? 

Whether she's a bad girl or not, to me, staying with the company that done your momma wrong just ain't right.

Tuesday's Number: $428,773

Tuesday is the day my local paper, the Syracuse Post-Standard, publishes the weekly business section. In addition to special features, tips from stock experts, budgeting advice and the like, we get the judgment and bankruptcy listings.

As I did for much of last year, I will be tracking health care related filings. I include anything that is clearly a debt owed to a hospital, nursing home, physician or physician group, medical supplier, and so on; I do not include filings by insurance companies, many of which are so diversified it would not be a fair assumption that the filing is related to medical care or health insurance.

This week, there were 21 people listed with new judgments to hospitals, doctors, or other medical providers totaling $394,304.

This week, there were four satisfied judgments totaling $28,178 to a hospital, doctor, or other medical provider.  

And, there was one health-care related bankruptcy, totaling $6,291.

The paper publishes only those accounts of at least $5,000.

Tossing the ED coin: Tails, You Lose

As I noted the other day, economic development is like a coin toss – sometimes business win, like The Sound Garden did, and sometimes they lose.  And businesses aren’t the only winners and losers – people like you and me can win or lose depending on how the deals go.

Take, for example, the businesses along Syracuse’s Connective Corridor, who had the threat of having to pay special maintenance fees to keep the Corridor looking in tip-top shape hanging over their heads for a while.

What is the Connective Corridor?  Well, it’s kind of hard to describe.  It's a vision, more than anything else. It's over $40 million in grant money, spread over multiple phases, to make a 'connection' between Syracuse University and Syracuse, the city.  Here’s the official description:

The city of Syracuse is home to three major universities, more than 30 art and cultural venues, and shopping centers all within close distance to one another.  In the coming months and years, nodes of the Connective Corridor will be stitched together and showcased with new urban landscapes, bike paths, imaginative lighting, public and interactive art, signage, and way finding systems.

What’s that mean?  Well, there’s been a lot of work done along East Genesee Street, University Ave, and part of Fayette Street.  Traffic patterns are different; new lighting has been put up; bike lanes are in; there’s a lot of color coordination – and to be honest, it looks pretty good. There’s been a lot of talk about the giant red benches in the park on the 700 block of Genesee, and more about the cool sidewalk at Syracuse Stage. Overall,  things seem to be looking up. 

And the  work means there’s now a need to maintain all of this connective tissue, as it were. Businesses along the Corridor were notified recently that the Syracuse Common Council was

considering a proposal to merge properties along the Connective Corridor into the Downtown Special Assessment District (DSAD). Since the district was created in 1976, downtown businesses have paid an extra fee on their taxes for maintenance and other services provided by the nonprofit Downtown Committee of Syracuse. It would be the first expansion of the special district.

That fee, for the Connective Corridor businesses, would have been more than $28 per foot of frontage; about $149,000 would have been raised from around 50 businesses in the area. The money was to have been used to add a couple of dedicated maintenance folks to keep the Corridor in shape.  

There were some businesses that were OK with the fees, but certainly for many of the smaller businesses along the way, the fee would have been very hard to bear, and hard to pass on to customers as well.

One of the big concerns mentioned in the many news stories on this was that the businesses were not aware the fees would be charged when the Corridor work was finished – it was one of those out-of-the-blue things that get sprung on businesses all the time in the form of regulations, fees, special charges, and so on.  And for businesses that were there before the connectivity vision was floated, well, this was seen as a slap in the face.

In the end, the Council voted down the proposal, leaving the DSAD intact (and actually downtown, some would say) -- and leaving the Connective Corridor maintenance-free.  So that would seem like the businesses won, right?  And their customers, folks like you and me, we won too, right?

Well, not exactly.

Listen to Norm Swanson, a long-time local developer; he has three businesses that would have collectively contributed around $22,000 to the fund had the proposal gone through.

Maintenance is everything. Maintenance is taking the money that’s been invested and almost multiplying it. As you continue to put the money back in and keep it fresh, this is what brings new business to locate there.

 

You know he’s right, don’t you?   

You can see it, every day, all around the city.  You can even see it along the Connective Corridor already. This picture taken by Dave Tobin of The Post-Standard last October, shows one of 19 lights that had been damaged even as work was nearing completion.

Next time you’re out and about, look around. Look at the condition of our highway ramps,something local columnist Sean Kirst puts into words so well. Look at parking lots and sidewalks; look at lighting. Look at signage, and plantings, and paint jobs and store windows.  Heck, even look at your own neighborhood. 

Can you honestly say that maintenance doesn’t matter?   No, Swanson’s right: maintenance is everything. 

We won't live or shop where it's a mess, and businesses don't want to move into neighborhoods that are a mess, filled with broken lights and trash and weeds higher than the red park benches... we know this, because we pass by places like this every day, and cringe. We pass by, literally, and take our business elsewhere.

The bottom line is, once these projects take off, it's in our best interest to see them through -- and that means maintaining them when they're done.  And it would certainly help if those in charge have the foresight, going forward, to figure out a way to ensure that after the opening celebration, there's a way to keep the project going on a day-to-day basis.

Unless someone – SU, or the Common Council or the Mayor or the Downtown Committee or the businesses themselves - come up with the money that’s needed to keep the Corridor looking good (and if that means adding a few cents to all of our tax bills, that's OK too), it will go the way many of our other economic development projects: the initial investment is made, but we don't realize the end result we thought we were going to get.  

Tails, you lose.

Tuesday's Number: $448,800

Tuesday is the day my local paper, the Syracuse Post-Standard, publishes the weekly business section. In addition to special features, tips from stock experts, budgeting advice and the like, we get the judgment and bankruptcy listings. 

As I did for much of last year, I will be tracking health care related filings. I include anything that is clearly a debt owed to a hospital, nursing home, physician or physician group, medical supplier, and so on; I do not include filings by insurance companies, many of which are so diversified it would not be a fair assumption that the filing is related to medical care or health insurance. 

This week, there were 22 people listed with new judgments to hospitals, doctors, or other medical providers totaling $400,314.  

This week, there were two satisfied judgments totaling $34,770 to a hospital, doctor, or other medical provider.   

And, there was one health-care related bankruptcy, totaling $13,716.  

The paper publishes only those accounts of at least $5,000.

Tossing the ED Coin: Heads, You Win

I’m talking about economic development, folks, not erectile dysfunction. That's a whole nother post entirely.

Let me tell you, economic development happened here in Syracuse the other day.  Not the traditional, ‘give a company a boatload of tax breaks and hope’ kind, but the real, every day kind that happens in cities all across the country, on a very regular basis. 

There are two sides to the economic development coin – and as with most coin tosses, one side is good for someone, the other less so.  When the coin was tossed here, we saw both winners and losers.

You may have heard the tale of The Sound Garden, the downtown Syracuse staple, home to concert tickets, vinyl music, and other second-hand entertainment.  Part of a two-store chain (the other’s in Baltimore), at Sound Garden they buy yours, you buy theirs – CDs, albums, games, movies, the whole gamut. It’s a funky vibe like no other in Syracuse; they have a devoted following (my Albany brother-in-law can't visit Syracuse without making a pit stop there, for example); they're in Armory Square -- so you'd think they had it all going on, right?

Well, not so fast.

Syracuse has an updated law on the books that requires second-hand stores to log all of the used items they purchase, and provide reports to law enforcement. They are also required to hold items for seven days before re-selling them, and only stay open until 8PM. The point of the law, which was changed last summer, was to better allow the Syracuse Police Department to track down 'stealers-sellers', the people who rip off the big box stores and dump the merchandise wherever they can, and to make it harder for them to make their quick buck by instituting the early closing time on merchants who sell used stuff.

The consequence was that it also cracked down on music collectors and funky people.

The logging and reporting part that was a big issue for Sound Garden.  With over 40,000 used items purchased each year, the costs of implementing a computerized system for tracking and reporting, and to hire the two full time employees to do that work, were prohibitive.  

Bryan Burkert, Sound Garden's owner, and Jake Barrett, head of the Common Council’s Public Safety Committee, butted heads in talks to get a compromise deal worked out. Burkert preferred a total exemption from the law, something he says other cities routinely give record stores. Barrett (the same guy who wondered if we needed to be a little kinder and gentler to parking scofflaws), offered concessions on hours of operation and a two-day reduction in the hold period, but wasn’t going to go any further. After things fell apart, Burkert announced that he would close his Armory Square shop and find someplace else to do business, outside the city limits.

Sadness hung over the store; the entire process, played out in the press, left a bad taste in our collective mouths. Surveys were circulated, a Facebook fan page was born, and just about everyone waited to see what would happen when the lease was up.

When all seemed lost,  Mayor Stephanie Miner and Councilor Khalid Bey (in a past life, he was a hip-hop star known as The Most Talented) worked out a compromise with Burkert and his local attorney that would allow Sound Garden to stay open later than 8PM Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and require them to only log the first five items they purchase in any single transaction and summarize the rest. For their part, Sound Garden will continue to get a copy of a photo ID for all transactions, which should help Syracuse’s Finest track down people who steal items from one store and resell them at another. The compromise was approved unanimously by the Common Council yesterday. 

And so Sound Garden, Armory Square, small business owners and funky people everywhere, call it in the air.

Heads, you win.

Tuesday's Number: $185,902

Tuesday is the day my local paper, the Syracuse Post-Standard, publishes the weekly business section. In addition to special features, tips from stock experts, budgeting advice and the like, we get the judgment and bankruptcy listings.

As I did for much of last year, I will be tracking health care related filings. I include anything that is clearly a debt owed to a hospital, nursing home, physician or physician group, medical supplier, and so on; I do not include filings by insurance companies, many of which are so diversified it would not be a fair assumption that the filing is related to medical care or health insurance.

This week, there were seven people listed with new judgments to hospitals, doctors, or other medical providers totaling $137,284.

This week, there were four satisfied judgments totaling $36,357 to a hospital, doctor, or other medical provider.  

And, there was one health-care related bankruptcy, totaling $12,261.

The paper publishes only those accounts of at least $5,000.

Sidebar: Tax Free? Not Me

New York is notorious for coming up with economic development programs that are meant to do great things for our economy, particularly in Upstate NY.  Our politicians are nothing if not creative when it comes to this kind of program, and certainly the Tax-Free NY proposal from  Sonofa Governor Andrew Cuomo is no exception. 

As noted, the main reason I'm not a fan of TFNY is that it codifies a class system: the 'have-to' class  of New Yorkers that have to pay income tax, and the 'don't-have-to' class that, simply by the stroke of a pen, don't have to. They could be working in buildings right next door to each other, making exactly the same salary, doing exactly the same thing, living right next door to each other, going to the same churches and restaurants and grocery stores, their kids attending the same schools -- but for 10 years they are different in the eyes of the government. 

The bottom line is, this program creates not only more corporate welfare, but more personal welfare. And that's wrong.

The other reason why I'm opposed to this is that frankly Albany has a horrible track record of creating corporate welfare programs that actually benefit anyone, other than themselves. We either get promises on which businesses under-deliver (or never deliver), or we get lawyerly fun and games.

Probably the most famous of these programs was the Empire Zone debacle.  This was a lawyer's dream, a program where pretty much all you had to do was change the name of an existing company and get a fistful of tax credits as a result.  You didn't have to create a single new job; you didn't have to build a store or office building that would have put other people to work doing something productive, and where a customer could go to and spend money purchasing goods or services not previously available.

It was literally as easy as changing your shirt or underwear (more apt, I think, since for the most part it was a load of crap).  That's why, in the Tax-Free NY proposal there are supposed to be precautions so that 'shirt-changers' don't pollute the program.

For purposes of illustration, I did some really easy research and found a database of businesses, the jobs they created, and their tax credits for 2010.  Here's the intro to the data:

More than 3,000 businesses were expected to claim Empire Zone tax breaks on their 2010 taxes. The recently released information comes from records the companies filed with state economic development officials at the end of 2011. Search our database to find the companies' tax credits, investments and jobs.

Here are the Top 25 tax credit recipients for Onondaga County and the City of Syracuse.
 

Company Name  (Onondaga County)	Jobs	Tax Credit	Credit/job
Buffalo- Main Street LLC	1	$639,537	$639,537
DestiNY USA Holdings LLC	3	$440,768	$146,923
Syracuse Property Partners LLC	2	$288,335	$144,168
COR Route 5 Company LLC	4	$575,029	$143,757
Peregrine International LLC	1	$100,290	$100,290
Falso Holding Co. LLC	1	$82,362	$82,362
RLB Development LLC	9	$692,616	$76,957
BAR Advertising Co. No. 2 LP	8	$555,832	$69,479
JGB Factoring GMBH LLC	2	$131,740	$65,870
Performance Drive LLC	1	$59,565	$59,565
6580 Weighlock Drive Company LLC	1	$49,666	$49,666
Roth Global Plastics Inc.	1	$45,069	$45,069
344 South Warren Street Corporation	1	$34,586	$34,586
T-L Marketplace LLC	2	$61,699	$30,850
Basin Associates LLC	3	$67,792	$22,597
SRCTec Inc.	219	$4,808,487	$21,957
GALLAGHER ELECTRIC PARK LP	1	$19,418	$19,418
Reagan Realty LLC d/b/a MNR Consulting	3	$52,359	$17,453
The Empire Crane Company LLC	16	$264,511	$16,532
Syracuse Airport Suites LLC	14	$173,330	$12,381
East Taft Distribution LLC	1	$11,891	$11,891
Evening Star LLC	3	$30,466	$10,155
Kevidco LLC	10	$84,597	$8,460
Roth Global Plastics Inc.	2	$16,026	$8,013
Seventh Brook Properties LLC d/b/a Stickley	18	$130,879	$7,271
AVERAGE	13	$376,674	$73,808

 

Company Name (City of Syracuse)	Jobs	Tax Credit	Credit/job
CNYX Properties Inc.	1	$586,085	$586,085
One Park Place LLC	2	$656,245	$328,123
250 South Clinton LLC	3	$926,672	$308,891
XCNY Properties Inc.	2	$609,917	$304,959
Deys Plaza LLC	1	$278,763	$278,763
Carousel Center Company LP	45	$9,254,370	$205,653
Maltbie/Division LLC	1	$157,465	$157,465
300 Washington Street LLC	1	$153,272	$153,272
DestiNY USA Holdings LLC	3	$440,768	$146,923
Autocom Leasing Corp.	1	$141,347	$141,347
Pomcoplus LLC	3	$392,681	$130,894
Atrium Associates LLC	3	$311,278	$103,759
Clinton Street Soma Project LLC	1	$94,227	$94,227
Lakefront Lofts LLC	1	$92,911	$92,911
224 Harrison Associates LLC	2	$164,985	$82,493
Vinlandic LLC	1	$81,898	$81,898
Trespasz & Marquardt LLP	1	$77,483	$77,483
Sycamore Holdings LLC	1	$77,003	$77,003
Boukair Realty LLC	1	$74,110	$74,110
RHS Holdings LLC	1	$72,798	$72,798
Berkley 518 Office LLC	1	$72,768	$72,768
Sewer Sciences Inc.	7	$492,695	$70,385
Onondaga Commons LLC	1	$68,158	$68,158
One Clinton Square Associates LLC	1	$67,735	$67,735
Franklin Lofts LLC	2	$129,250	$64,625
AVERAGE	3.5	$618,995	$153,709

Seem a little suspicious, all these LLCs and LLPs and Associates and Partnerships and street addresses out there creating jobs and getting those healthy tax credits, doesn't it?

And doesn't it seem like it would be pretty easy for another bunch of LLCs and LLPs and Associates and Partnerships and street addresses to find a way to establish "a relationship to the academic mission of the university" and come up with another whole dresser drawer-full of underwear and do it all over again, doesn't it?

One more thing: a while back, David Patterson (our Accidental Governor) tried to take away ill-gotten gains (in the form of prior-year credits) from Empire Zone abusers.  The shirt-changers got mad, sued, and recently won their case against us, the real tax payers of New York.  Additional lawsuits are pending. 

Don't fall for it, again, New York.