State of the County offered little for business

In his State of the County address in late March, Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano said one of his grandfather”™s favorite expressions was, ”˜Watch the hands; don”™t listen to the mouth.”™”
Business owners might still be using their hands to flip through the print copy of his speech to see if they missed anything that came out of Spano”™s mouth regarding economic development.
Spano made only passing references to issues of importance to most local businesses, including property taxes, devoting most of the address to citizens”™ issues such as housing and health care.
In a sense, Spano”™s silence comes from a position of strength, Westchester County”™s enviable economy. Unemployment was 3.9 percent in January, according to the New York State Department of Labor, down from 4.2 percent in January 2006, and trailing only Putnam, Rockland and Tompkins counties in New York.
Brokers predict that office vacancy rates in Westchester County will fall to 12 percent this year as employers add jobs.
Spano expects hotel vacancies to drop sharply this summer as well, when the county hosts the Empire Games, a sporting event expected to draw more than 20,000 visitors. He said the event should produce $20 million in additional revenue for hospitality, retail and tourism establishments in the region.
On the issue of permanent lodging, Spano proposed the creation of a housing land trust meant to prevent affordable housing from reverting to market rates. He wants local municipalities to donate land earmarked for affordable housing to a trust, which would then lease properties to developers on a continually renewing basis.
Some 300 units of affordable housing built 15 years ago can be priced at market rates at year-end, Spano said, and that number could climb to 500 annually.
“Even though we are building more (housing), at best we are either building and standing still, or at worst we are losing the gains we have made,” Spano said.
Spano did not use the speech to make any new proposal concerning how to move forward on a replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge. He is the incoming co-chairman of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council.
Spano reiterated his opposition to Entergy Corp.”™s efforts to renew its license for the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, saying that alternate energy sources could be found to replace the plant”™s 2000 megawatts of power, but not providing specifics in his speech. He said his staff has been meeting regularly with Con Edison officials and state auditors to discuss crippling blackouts businesses and homeowners endured last summer.
And his address was not without the occasional hiccup. A Web site he touted for businesses to explore international trade opportunities instead is an obscure dot-com site for various communications products and services.