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Onondaga County is playing an increasingly prominent role in the area's economic development. The County's economic development strategy includes activities and initiatives at the local, regional, national and international levels.
On the international front, the County is one of 17 communities from throughout the world who have come together to form the Sesame International Business Exchange. Businesses and governments from each Sesame community meet annually to explore and develop working relationships, partnerships, and affiliations between businesses. Over the past four years, the County and area business leaders have participated in Sesame Business Exchanges in Zhengzhou, China, Lafayette, Louisiana, Parma, Italy and Coimbra, Portugal. As an outgrowth of its participation in Sesame, the County has contracted for services to identify and assist manufacturing firms in the Parma region of Italy that are prepared to undertake or expand business activities in the United States. The County's economic development office also participates annually in the Hanover Business Fair, which is the largest industrial trade show in Europe, and recently participated in the MIPIM Trade Fair in Cannes, France which, with 12,650 participants from 61 countries, is considered the world's largest property market, linking communities and firms.
Nationally, the County has played a leadership role in a very aggressive marketing program aimed at familiarizing national site location firms and corporate real estate executives with economic development opportunities in the area. County economic development professionals, accompanied by officials of the Greater Syracuse Chamber of Commerce, the City of Syracuse and Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, meet on a monthly basis with national site location consultant firms. Funding is provided by a four-year, $1 million County grant, which demonstrates the commitment to vastly expand the area's economic development marketing. This program began operation in July 1999 with an emphasis on building relationships with site consultants throughout the United States through personal visits, newsletters and a client-focused web site.
Regionally, Onondaga County is a charter member of the new Central New York Regional Compact, a public-private undertaking aimed at promoting economic growth throughout a five-county Central New York area. The group recently secured a $500,000 grant from New York State to engage in a regional marketing campaign, and has engaged in joint lobbying and workforce development planning.
Locally, the County is participating with the Greater Syracuse Growth Council, a partnership of all of the area's economic development organizations, to provide rapid, comprehensive responses to retention and recruitment inquiries and team-based support for prospect visits. The County has also become much more pro-active in taking steps to improve the human, as well as the physical and financial, infrastructure necessary to improve the area's ability to retain and recruit businesses.
The County has made maximum use of available economic development tools. For example, the County has taken a proactive and project-oriented approach to the management of its Empire Zone and the powerful package of tax incentives available in the Zone.
The County is a Foreign Trade Zone grantee and has begun an active campaign to educate area economic development professionals about the benefits of Foreign Trade Zone operations. The County has engaged a Foreign Trade Zone expert to conduct seminars for local businesses to create an interested and informed customer base and to identify the physical changes in Zone boundaries that will increase market interest and subsequent utilization.
The County has developed a 200,000 square foot, $35 million, Whitney Applied Technology Center at Onondaga Community College which provides a variety of training and retraining opportunities to area residents in technology-based fields as diverse as architecture, photography, and manufacturing. In 2001, the County developed a lean manufacturing training center at the Applied Technology Center. Manufacturers use this facility to train managers and line workers in lean manufacturing techniques and even run simulations of their own production lines to test various lean manufacturing approaches before introducing them on the shop room floor. The County also plans to invest in a campus wide technology upgrade at Onondaga Community College to ensure all students have access to, and mastery of, the technologies used by today's employers. These initiatives are aimed at improving the productivity of the area's workforce, the competitiveness of the County's employers, and therefore the area's attractiveness as a place to do business.
The County is equally pro-active in preparing sites for major developments. Through its Industrial Development Agency, the County has assembled a large-scale, 245-acre industrial development site as a part of the statewide effort to attract semiconductor fabrication firms. The site lends itself to a variety of other large-scale industrial developments seeking large, properly zoned, permitted sites with supporting infrastructure in place. The County has also secured three of the first 36 "Build Now New York" designations for development sites, which will be marketed by New York State as "shovel ready" for development. One of those sites, the 100-acre County-owned Hancock AirPark, underwent $2.5 million in site improvements in the spring of 2001. This has vastly improved the marketability of a major business park adjacent to Hancock International Airport that can offer a range of Economic Development Zone benefits. The County is progressing toward its goal to have a number of permitted sites, improved with infrastructure and access, which can be developed immediately in response to a fast-moving economy.
For more about the major economic development projects underway, business
resources available, news and events, the Empire Zone Program, real estate
and more go to www.syracusecentral.com.
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