Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Onondaga County executive Ryan McMahon. The Republican is in his second full term as county executive and recently delivered his annual state of the county speech. Prior to his service as executive for the Onondaga County, he served as that county's chair of the legislature. County Executive McMahon, welcome back to the program, good to see you.
Ryan McMahon: Glad to be here.
GR: All right, thanks for making the time. So let me just start with the speech. What, you know, briefly, what is the current state of the county?
RM: Yeah, I think if you look at where we are, you know, we put forward a pretty bold vision coming out of the pandemic and made strategic investments and turning the White Pine Business Park into a mega site to attract a high tech manufacturer. We're now in a position where, let alone we were successful attracting one, but now the company, Micron Technologies, the greatest memory technology company in the world, is constructing and they're building. And with that, we're starting to see the first economic boom. And to support them, there's going to be massive infrastructure investments that are about to start. And that means jobs, and it means jobs for people, and it means more people coming into the community spending money on the community, which means more revenue for county coffers to address longstanding issues related to people. And so, the way we've talked about it, you know, towards the end of the speech, is if you look at the metrics of the county and what we do, we've cut your tax rates over 40% since we've been here, your taxes, as the assessment value in the community has gone up, we've given that back to you. Our poverty rates are starting to go down, which is obviously been a core mission of my administration since we've been here. Jobs are going up. We're exceeding every metro, essentially, in the state of New York. Private sector investment is going up, and it's really just getting started. And so, I think overall, our goal was to land this project at White Pine, now our goal is to create this central New York semiconductor cluster. And we're doing that and we're starting to see the supply chain co-locate. We announced the first, at the speech, the first win. Wonik Materials, the South Korean company is going to come to Onondaga County. And then, we are going to have a lot more wins to talk about later this year as well.
GR: So, just to follow up on that last point, and you anticipated a few of my questions there on what you just covered, I'll come back to them, but it sounds like the spin off from Micron is already beginning to happen, that there are these other companies now that want to be in the same physical location because of Micron, things related to that business or things that they think they can profit from being here, correct?
RM: Yeah, I think that's, if you look at this industry anywhere around the world, but, it's a little bit easier to look at here in the US where, certainly over the last 20 years the industry, you know, kind of, moved to Asia, but if you look at the pockets where it exists today in Oregon, legacy Intel operations, they have huge clusters, right? A lot of material supply companies. If you look at what's going on in Phoenix, that's the best comparable for what's going to happen here. TSMC being the anchor, Intel does have high tech legacy manufacturing there as well. Now all these supply chain companies, the gas and chemical companies, the tooling companies, materials supply companies, they're all locating there. In Texas, you have Texas Instrument and Samsung, right? So those are really the three clusters. What we're creating is the Northeast essential cluster here in Onondaga County. And it's really going to be driven by memory technology, with Micron being the anchor. And we've all seen how well Micron is doing as a company. AI uses memory technology more than logic technology, and so having the best memory company is a big deal. And it's going to mean that this is a really strong, sustainable cluster, and a national security cluster as well.
GR: One of, you mentioned the AI, and the relationship between that and what Micron does, and I want to ask you a question that's kind of related to that, in a way. I went back and I looked at the history of Micron’s stock price. And what got me thinking of that was, it had a bad month up until a couple days ago, where it had lost 20%. But if you look at the…
RM: Had a really good year before that. (laughter)
GR: Had a really good year before that, exactly, I was going to say. Then if you go a little bit further back, it has quadrupled in price and then yesterday went back up like 10%. My question is, that's just a lot of volatility, and it's great for investors if they can ride out, you know, the dips, but does just this fact that Micron is playing in the space where there's a lot of volatility and particularly with AI, a lot of uncertainty, does that worry you at all?
RM: No, for a couple reasons. One, the stock markets are stock markets, right? It doesn't look at the health of the company. Essentially that helps drive price, but, you know, Micron, when they announced this deal, I tease the CEO, Sanjay, about this, it was a $50 stock when they announced this deal in 2022.
GR: (laughter)
RM: Now it's probably at, it hit 440, right? That's what you're referencing, maybe a little higher.
GR: Yeah.
RM: And now it's probably in the high threes.
GR: I think so.
RM: But the fact, if you follow stock trading which I, to a degree I do, not really, don't really have the time for it, but the great companies all have like these big shifts, right? You know your Apples, your Amazons, your Teslas, your Nvidia's. So now the fact that Micron is in that league, we should feel pretty good about that, right? I think what we should feel really good about is that they can't even produce the consumer demand with their existing consumers right now and their customers, and so that means they have to grow and grow fast. Their competition are the Korean companies Hynix and Samsung. Samsung, not as much anymore, but Hynix. All these companies are all investing big in more fabs. And we’ll be their largest, you know, North American investment, the largest investment in the company's history. 100 billion is the number used, but Grant, it's going to be more than 100 billion. It's going to be, the CapEx on this is going to be much more than that when it's all said and done. So, I think overall we have the right company. Out of all the mega projects that we're competing for, you know, we learned from the TSMC deal, that's what basically gave us the confidence to go grow the site. We were in on the Intel project. Essentially, we built out the site for Intel for a long period of time, and then we won Micron. It's a good thing we got the Micron project, not the Intel project, as that stalled out Columbus. So, I think overall we're in a great position. They were here last week, community week, announcing, you know, $30 million, $35 million of investments in the community, everything from housing to transportation to child care, workforce. I just met with their team again, you know, making sure that, we get all of our infrastructure projects on time so that they can be making chips on time and, you know, continuing to work together to bring suppliers here and create that ecosystem.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon. So, you mentioned this in the outset of our conversation here, but one of the issues that you originally ran on was poverty. And I know it's been, you know, one of your top priority issues. How is that challenge been going at the county level? What been happening with that?
RM: Yeah. So, if you look at our time here, you know, we walked into a global pandemic where, tough to operate, put in policies to do things that changed life for a period of time. And also, because of all the money into the, to help address families, it also kind of camouflaged where actual poverty would settle at the end of the day. Once you're getting ,families are getting, you know, money for two years that they don't get anymore, they're outside poverty ranges, right, but artificially. So, I think overall, what we've learned is there are key aspects of, you know, we'll say, things that prohibit work that need to be addressed and I think as a community, we're addressing them. If you think about child care being a big one, there's an affordability piece to that, but there's also an infrastructure piece making sure you have enough child care capacity. Between the State of New York and ourselves, we are spending a lot of money on both sides of that. So, I think we are making progress there. Micron's investing in that as well. When you look at transportation, the ability to get people to work, we're making strides there. When you look at, you know, early childhood education, I think that's the biggest thing from a long-term. Kindergarten readiness, we spent a lot of money on that, and that's been something really important to me. If you're kindergarten ready, you are going to pass that third grade proficiency exam. If you do that, you're going to graduate high school. I'll share with you this one project that we do, Grant, and it's a project where we take moms and dads who are essentially second or third generation poverty, meaning that their parents were on and potentially grandparents were on some sort of county assistance, and we look at all these barriers to employment that create challenges. We look at child care, we look at housing costs. We look at, obviously, food costs, we look at transportation, then we look at the job, right, the end goal, the job. And we help address every one of those issues in this program. And we have over 200, you know, different individuals in it. We've had a lot of success. Over 60 of those individuals now, after we help support them, to get them comfortable in a career path, now aren’t on public assistance. But what we've learned is that if you don't have that high school degree at minimum, you're going to have a hard time, right? And so how do we get there? There's got to be short, mid and long-term approaches to it. We really view kindergarten readiness as being the long-term approach. And so overall right now what we've seen is, you know, we're making investments to make it easier so that poverty is a moment in time, not a way of life for people. But the one thing we've missed over the last 20 years since I've been in public life, essentially, is the jobs. We could educate every kid and graduate every kid, but if we don't have jobs, we're just creating workforce for another community. And now we got those jobs and we're getting them in a big way. And so now it's putting everything together. We're starting to see the rates drop, the city of Syracuse, the school district, just came out with data about a month ago showing that the rates dropped, I think 8 to 10% for childhood poverty rates there. We’re starting to go down, but they're really going to go down when we get to continue to this building boom. And then obviously, as we start the mass of hiring for manufacturing, with all these technician jobs and engineering jobs that are coming.
GR: All right. So, one of the things I wanted to ask you about related to this is there's been a lot of political rhetoric about affordability. Most of it, I think, is being pushed by the Democratic side, affordability seems to be a word they've latched on to. Whatever it is we want to call that, that emphasis on housing, food costs, other kinds of things, do you think that that's going to help you in a way, like put a little bit more wind at your back of trying to get certain programs through? Will there be a synergy there, do you think that you might be able to take advantage of?
RM: Yeah, you know, if you look at data or polling, I think the issues related to pocketbook issues from a inflation concern to taxes to housing, when people are talking about housing, they're talking about how much it costs, right, for the most part. You know, I think about 55% of the public is concerned about that. I think overall, the real challenge right now is energy costs. And we talked about this in our state of the county, Grant. The CLCPA is about to, if enacted as-is right now, NYSERDA put out a memo saying it's going to cost 4 to $5000 more than the increases we just saw per household. These are not sustainable. Like, this is this is crazy. And this issue is like triple taxation because you are going to pay that with your NiMo bill, and then you're going to pay that for your school tax bill, your town or city tax bill, your county tax bill. Because my costs, and our wastewater treatment facilities are like $2 million more than we budgeted, and we budgeted huge increases. So, I think the one issue that, like, everybody's got to focus on from the state level that impacts New Yorkers and impacts us locally, is energy. I think there should be a reset on the CLCPA mandates for a lot of reasons. But, give us time to get this nuclear technology going, the cleanest energy, let that be the basis, recognize, let's have an honest conversation about natural gas. This isn't the coal burning facilities from 20, 30 years ago, right? It's gotten cleaner. That still needs to be a piece of this. Because if you have supply, that's going to help keep costs low. And then continue to do renewable projects. But what we've learned is the solar projects and wind projects, they don't generate enough power, and now they're being put in areas that the communities don't want them in. And so, I think overall, when I think of affordability, I think of two things. I think of the energy and I think of our ability to create more housing inventory so that the price points stabilize, your rents stabilize, and you have growth that is, you know, smaller than where we are now. And then, you know, if you're buying a home, my wife's a real estate agent, I see it all the time when people pay for houses now. You know, we want appreciating markets, we didn't have that for a long time here. But, you know, 15% a year, it's a little much. And so, I think what we're doing, a lot of the things we're doing this year are related to housing, make it cheaper for building, from a regulatory standpoint, incentivize so that more projects happen so that we can create more stability in the market.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Ryan McMahon. He's the Onondaga County executive, a Republican who's serving in his second full term. I have to tease you politically a little bit, County Executive, when you were talking about the overall picture of energy costs, you're beginning to sound like a governor there (laughter) and putting all the pieces together across the state, I'm just saying. But let me shift and ask you another question. It's been in the news almost since the beginning, what's the status of the county aquarium?
RM: Yeah, no, we're excited about the aquarium project. Construction wise, it will be complete. We have this really, amazing tank, right, this piece of glass that was made in Italy. We finally got it to the Italian port and into the ocean. That means we're going to be open late summer. But I think overall outside of the project, and I understand folks that either didn't share the vision or understand the comprehensive vision we have and why we do what we do. But overall, you're starting to see some of the partnerships come out. We have a partnership with film. This is a significant piece of infrastructure that gives us a competitive advantage to film more movies. And if you look at some of the films and TV series that have had aquariums, I mean, "Pitch Perfect", "Ted", "Aquaman" obviously, there's "Big Little Lies" from TV series, and we have a growing film industry, so this is a good piece of infrastructure for that. If you look at our economic partnership with the MOST, if you look at our new research partnership, we announced in the state of the county, was SUNY ESF, right there on the shores of Onondaga Lake and its tributaries at the harbor. These are all things that are happening. We actually got kids involved with the naming. We asked the students to help us name this. And so we got some amazing recommendations from the young people and we'll go through that. So, I think overall, people need to understand this is a piece of educational infrastructure for the community, it's an economic piece of infrastructure to help tourism. Certainly it's a catalyst for more investment in the inner harbor and people will start to see that over the next 12 months as we announce more projects. And, you know, just if you think about county government, we do entertainment infrastructure and we do professional sports infrastructure, we do the zoo, this is really an extension of the zoo just in another location. And we run our $1.6 billion budget on sales tax. And so when we're making decisions about spending your money, we always want to invest in areas that will drive more spend, either capture spend that's leaving here or bring in new spending, and that's what this project does. So, if you like some things we do, but you don't think you like this, this is going to help us pay for the things you do like.
GR: I'm really curious to ask you why you think this project has been such a lightning rod in the press and among Democrats over the years? And you mentioned the zoo, I'll just tell you a story to illustrate where I'm coming from here in my surprise about this. I first got here over 30 years ago, I think you were probably a kid learning to play baseball when I first got here. I was surprised to discover when I first arrived that the city had a zoo. I thought, you know, is this city big enough for a zoo? But I can never remember it generating all the snarky comments that I've heard about the aquarium. Maybe it did in 1914 when the zoo was first built, I suppose. But anyway, what's this fuss all about?
RM: Well, I think like a couple things, right? Obviously, I think there are certain elected officials that saw this as an opportunity to attack me. And that's something they probably couldn't do coming out of COVID. They attacked me on White Pine, but obviously those attacks failed miserably and they view this as an opportunity to attack me, I think that's literally what it is. I will give them credit, like they've created like this echo chamber of attacks where it's almost become like a little bit of a folk hero narrative where people can say, go do this instead of the aquarium, do that instead of the aquarium, right? It's like crazy, like, go pave everybody else's roads, fix their roofs and everything, even though it's not your job because you can build an aquarium. The reality is like, we're not an either-or community anymore, Grant. We're an all of the above community, and we're going to make investments to help people, to modernize infrastructure, to create opportunity and it's working. And this is going to work. This will be the only, this will be the second county asset that makes money. The first one being the amphitheater, which people hated when we were going through that process, and now they love. And so, I think overall it was a little bit of an attack. Some of it has become like, it's kind of like a just a common ground if you look at the blogs where people can just make fun of it and kind of get along with others. I'm cool with it all, right? Like, I like proving naysayers wrong. This is going to work. We announced the tiger shark going to be there, right? Like we're announcing all these amazing species that are going to be there. It's going to be at a price point lower than other aquariums. So, I think overall, it's going to be one of those things that once again, my political opponents are going to be on the wrong side of history on this one.
GR: Last question on this. And it's one, you're not going to like this one, but I have to ask it. It's the cheeky side of me that sort of overcame my other side in asking this. But the president's been on a naming spree lately. I mean he's, we're going to have it on our money even, so he's been putting his name on a lot of things. Do you think your name is going to end up on the aquarium? Is this going to be the Ryan McMahon Aquarium? (laughter)
RM: No, I don't think so. I think they have a wastewater treatment plant reserved for me. (laughter)
GR: (laughter) If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon. Quickly here, I have some other things I want to get into, but are there any other big challenges that you see coming up for the county in the coming year? Big issues that we haven't discussed so far, or did you already sort of touch on the big ones?
RM: Well, I think there's a, you know, the housing issue is one where we need to continue to lead, and continue to push some of our partners that control some of the regulatory laws and rules that are slowing things down and driving costs. Like, there's some things we can do at the local level, and we're going to continue to lead on that. We'll continue to invest to help spur more projects. These infrastructure projects we're doing are critical, they're going to create capacity for industry and community growth and new development, new housing. And we have a timeline, so we got to get those done, certainly. I think really the, but a lot of what we're doing is playing offense, whether we're playing offense on public health, whether we're playing offense on investments in a new vision for our convention center district, or new centers. One of the things at the zoo we're looking at now, we're going to get some land from the city, the old developmental center, they're doing a great housing project, great neighborhood. We're looking at creating what we're going to call the Savannah Connections and create, you know, a new investment at the zoo where we have giraffes and other habitat. So, we're playing a lot of offense right now, not forgetting our core competencies and our core missions. And that's why when we come back saying, comprehensively we've never been stronger, I believe that.
GR: Okay. And you've got a new legislature to work with, Democrat controlled. How has that working relationship been?
RM: So far, so good, right? I mean, these are things that I have experience being in the minority as a city councilor, being the majority, being a county executive. I think people don't realize the amount of work I do working with the state and federal government in this role, protecting us from what they do and asking them to help us and partner with us. So overall, we work with Republicans and Democrats every day. I think the challenge for these legislators, as many of them were elected, not based off of what's happening locally, but what is happening nationally. And so, all of a sudden, you have the most successful project in the country right now and this opportunity, do you become part of that, or do you try as you think you need to make partisan hay, which I think will hurt them electorally. They'll all be up again in November and we'll see how it shakes out. But I think I've had a good relationship with Chairwoman Watts. I think she's a professional and I enjoy working with her. And I think some of these other legislators are new, they're green, you know, still, you know, trying to figure it out, and we'll see. If you want a partner, we're going to partner, but if you want to try to stop progress, you know, we're not going to let you.
GR: I'll just to let you and our listeners know I'm trying to get a couple of the leaders from the legislature on the program next week. So we'll have a nice little…
RM: Yeah.
GR: You know, the two of you together. So, I'm sure they'll be keen to hear what you just said about the working relationship. Really quick on this, because I do have a couple other things I want to squeeze in in the couple minutes we have left. You mentioned the seats are all up again in November. It would seem to me that it's still probably not a great year for a Republicans. Do you foresee any major changes in the composition of the legislature after November?
RM: I think you will. Whether it's radical or not, I don't know, but I think it's not, I think for the Republicans it won't be as bad as last year. You'll have a top of the ticket, we didn't have a top of the ticket last year. The focus was totally on national issues. We had a government shutdown, SNAP was an issue for us at the county level weeks before, and again, people look at those who are in charge and they expect results. So, at the national level, the Republicans, even though the Senate, you need 60 votes and they don't have 60 senators, people don't really look at that, right? And so, I think the party got punished. I think this year you have a governor's race, which I think will be competitive at the end of the day. And the focus is going to be more on state issues, and some local issues. So, I think there's opportunities there for Republican legislators to make their case.
GR: Real quick, I know you were pretty serious athlete in high school and college. Who do you have winning the men's NCAA basketball tournament?
RM: I think Michigan's going to win. I think the championship game is Michigan / Arizona, really. And then, although if UConn beats Illinois, I mean, they have a DNA, a winning DNA. I hate to say it, but, you know, I do think Michigan does win.
GR: Okay. And I don't know if you're following the women's tournament enough to pick a winner.
RM: I think South Carolina is going to win.
GR: Okay. Really? I was going to say I think they're the underdog in this, correct?
RM: Yeah, I mean UConn is going to be there too. But I do think South Carolina, they've been playing very well.
GR: All the number one seeds made it through.
RM: Yeah.
GR: All right, great, well, we’ll have to leave it there. Those are your two picks, we’ll see if you’re right. That was Ryan McMahon, county executive…
RM: And I’m a big fan of Gerry McNamara, Grant.
GR: Oh yeah! I didn’t even… geez, yes, that’s right. I mean, that’s the big news here, right? I think everybody’s happy to see that. Well, that was Ryan McMahon, county executive. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I enjoy it as always.
RM: Thanks, Grant.
GR: You’ve been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
