For 20 years, Amos Post-Kosco, a home-heating fuel supply company, occupied a site in Kingston on the Rondout Creek, leasing the property from Getty Realty. But a year ago, after Getty Realty exercised its option to purchase all the properties it had leased on the waterfront strip and resold them to developer Robert Iannucci, Amos Post-Kosco had to find other quarters.
The company, which has close to 170 employees and serves tens of thousands of customers in Ulster, Dutchess, Greene and Columbia counties, planned to consolidate its service facilities at Kingston and Catskill into one location and was looking for a spot midway between the two towns. Lack of suitable properties and a fairly strict time limit meant there was a possibility the company might relocate its service facility over the Ulster County line into neighboring Greene.
“Finding commercial properties in Ulster County is extremely difficult,” said Dan LeFevre, a commercial counselor for the real estate firm Deegan Sanglyn, based in Kingston, who served as the broker. “Companies want to locate at shovel-ready sites with the proper zoning and municipal services, but we don”™t have them. We”™re not that business friendly.”
Barry Motzkin, vice president and general manager at Amos Post-Kosco, said that the company was looking for buildings between 5,000 and 20,000 square feet. “There aren”™t industrial sites ready to go, especially as you move toward the middle” of the region between Kingston and Catskill, he said.
By early spring, time was running out. LeFevre called a contact in Saugerties on a whim and hit pay dirt: The man owned five acres just north of Saugerties on Route 32 that had 14,000 square feet of space distributed among three block buildings. It wasn”™t for sale, but the owner agreed to make it available to Amos Post-Kosco, which subsequently signed a 25-year lease.
After the landlord and company jointly undertook some improvements, including renovations to one building for office space and repair to a concrete loading dock, Amos Post-Kosco moved into its new quarters in November. Motzkin said the new space has enabled the company to streamline its service department. Before, there were redundancies in dispatch service and management, so the change means the company can operate more efficiently.
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“We had two groups of people doing the same thing. Now there”™s just a few people doing the job,” Motzkin said, noting that the 25-person service staff consists of employees who were reassigned as well as new hires. Duplicate jobs were eliminated through attrition and no one had to be laid off.
Meanwhile, the company is expanding its customer service department. In the last three years, it”™s hired 13 additional service technicians ”“ currently there are between 60 and 70 ”“ and it plans to add more as it continues to grow. “We don”™t want to build infrastructure, but we do want to build our customer service,” Motzkin said.
Amos Post-Kosco is the largest supplier of home heating oil in the four-county region, he said. Its headquarters are in Port Ewen and it is only one of two companies in the area owning waterfront tanks for oil and propane, located at Port Ewen and Catskill. It also has offices in Rhinebeck and Wappingers. Kosco has been serving Ulster County since the 1940s and has been buying up fuel companies over the years, including Amos Post, which started out in the early 1900s as a coal and kerosene supplier, in the 1980s.
Motzkin said one of the buildings at the new service facility is being used to store boilers, tanks and other equipment. It has a loading dock to make it easier for the service technicians, who visit the facility once or twice a week, to restock their supply of parts. A second building was renovated for office space, and the third structure is used for storage. Eventually, the company plans to consolidate other business activities in that building, such as showrooms and sales, which are currently at Port Ewen and Catskill.
Amos Post-Kosco also plans to establish a state-of-the-art training facility in the building, which has much more space than the Kingston facility. Motzkin said the company trains all its technicians in-house and has hired two full-time trainers, one of whom conducted the oil burner-training sessions at Ulster County BOCES, the adult-career education center. The hands-on classrooms will be equipped with heating, propane and water-treatment equipment. “It”™s tough to find people interested in this business these days,” he said. Providing the training not only ensures the technicians”™ readiness for servicing customers, but also helps attract workers.
Lance Matteson, president of the Ulster County Development Corp., praised Deegan Sanglyn for its role in finding the location and keeping the Amos Post-Kosco”™s Kingston workers in the county. “It”™s welcome news for a county which continues to strive to maintain and grow employment against intense competition to pull business away from our borders,” he said in a statement.
Greene County in particular is a threat, and Ulster County has been late coming to the game, said LeFevre. Greene County legislators “got together and put together a plan for a shovel-ready industrial zone. They”™re getting businesses and we”™re not.” Although earlier this year the Ulster County Legislature did approve $1 million to help pay for the planned extension of town water and sewer to King”™s Highway in Saugerties, which has been designated a shovel-ready industrial zone, LeFevre said it”™s taken years for that to happen, and so far it”™s the only such effort in the county.
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“Since IBM pulled out (in the early 1990s), companies looking for new buildings has been an issue,” LeFevre said. “How come the county never stepped up to the plate to get the correct zoning and municipal services, the way Greene County has done?” Furthermore, he said “too much attention has been on TechCity. There are many things involved at TechCity that has resulted in its not being leased up” ”“ one being large companies”™ preference for new buildings, he said.
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