Officials celebrated a groundbreaking for the expansion of Oswego County’s industrial park in Phoenix, an expansion project that took 10 years to launch.
A decade ago, officials of the county’s Industrial Development Authority recognized that the Phoenix park was filling up. Two years later, in 2018, the county made its offer to buy 185 acres of land at the back of the current industrial park. It took three more years to close on the purchase and another five years to get approvals, make site plans and get the money to turn empty land into 10 shovel-ready sites.
“This is a process that started 10 years ago, and we're getting started today,” said Austin Wheelock, who heads Operation Oswego County, the county’s industrial development agency, moments before officials lined up at a ridge of dirt and used gold-painted shovels to toss dirt ceremonially into the air.
When the project was first proposed, no one had heard of the semiconductor manufacturer Micron and few would have bet that it would decide to open a massive plant 10 miles from this industrial park. Now that the Micron project and its promise of tens of thousands of new jobs has become a reality, it has provided both justification and urgency for the investment in an expanded industrial park.
“We've run out of space down here. When you run out of space in economic development, you don't get projects. It's a key part of economic development strategy is to keep a pipeline of sites to support the pipeline of projects,” said Wheelock. “We're being proactive and we're also addressing the moment that we have. This is a generational moment in front of Central New York and we’re really making sure that Oswego County is going to have the most amount of impact and benefit from what's happening in Central New York as is possible.”
“In today's global economy, businesses move fast,” said Oswego County Legislature Chair Jim Weatherup, who is also a candidate for State Assembly. “They don't want to wait years for site prep. They want to put shovels in the ground on day one. By creating shovel-ready sites here along the Route 481 corridor, Oswego County is positioning itself at the very center of central New York's manufacturing boom.”
Daniel Kolinski, regional director for Empire State Development Corp., the state’s economic development agency, said this groundbreaking needs to be just the beginning.
“The problem is, we need a dozen more of these. So while this is a great day,” he said, “Let's get on to the next one after this.”
