New hire seeking new funding
No doubt times are tough and many companies are not hiring. But Tech City is bucking the trend of the recession, hiring a new executive to help guide current and existing companies located at the facility through the intricacies of the capital markets, government grant and tax break opportunities.
John Cerveny was hired this winter as the vice president of government affairs at Tech City, to assist in navigating the shoals of financing.
“By adding me to the team here, it gives us a pilot,” said Cerveny. “There”™s all kinds of channels you can go down but you want the one that is going to get you to the ocean of money at the other end.”
He called it “very forward looking” for Tech City owner Alan Ginsberg to hire him during an economic downturn, but noted that at the facility, a roughly 250-acre commercial and industrial complex once owned by IBM, the pace of filling the 2 million square feet of space is proceeding at a steady and even increasing rate.
“If we lease space in the next five years at a rate like we did in 2009, this will be fully rented” by 2015, he said, but added it might be a different and greener facility. The Tech City master plan calls for changes that include replacing some older buildings with modern ones, putting solar panels on the acres of flat rooftops the facility encompasses and creating a new commercial and retail section.
Cerveny was the founder and President of New Energy Resources L.L.C., an Albany-based consulting firm, securing funding and developing marketing strategies for firms engaged in energy harvesting, advanced batteries and green building materials, among other fields. He was a founder of the U.S. Fuel Cell Council and served as an adviser to the state”™s Solar Energy Industries Association.Â
The federal Department of Energy is a major potential source of funding, Cerveny said, which, he said, to some degree plays to his strengths, since he has experience working with DOE officials.
He noted that of the $16 billion in funding the stimulus package earmarked for disbursement under DOE auspices, billions remain unspent, since the department spent much of last year creating a transparent process to spend the money.
“They still have a lot of money and there is pressure to actually get that money out on the street,” said Cerveny, citing a conference in March with DOE officials. “This should be a year when a lot of money starts to flow, even if the total amount is a little less than last year, the number of programs involved will be bigger.”
While the state budget is a difficult impediment to garnering state help, Cerveny said municipalities looking to go green should investigate the PACE program, Property Assessed Clean Energy. He said the idea allows for municipalities ranging from villages to counties to create local development corporations that would loan money to businesses and homeowners for use in upgrading their buildings energy profile,either through adding solar power and heating components or simply adding more insulation.
While direct government finding is unavailable, Cerveny said that the bond market would be extremely receptive to providing capital that LDCs would need, if they marketed bond sales linked to property tax payments, which are among the most predictably paid taxes. That is a reliable source of collateral bond buyers would appreciate, he said, which could inject green energy in the form of cash into the burgeoning green business sector.
Tech City would benefit from widespread use of PACE funding, he said, because already  tenants in the industrial park are engaged in the renewable energy and energy efficiency businesses. He cited the newly signed SolarTech L.L.C. that will manufacture industrial and commercial grade solar panels starting this year and and Precision Flow Technologies, which in 2009 expanded into Tech City making machinery aiding solar power endeavors produces high tech machinery for LED lighting fixtures that use a fraction of the energy of compact fluorescent fixtures.
And he said Tech City is likely to add a new tenant in coming months, a manufacturer of LED lighting, which is first moving warehouse and distribution center and then production facilities to the site. He said that is a synergy of business interests that brings added value to tenants at Tech City, who will benefit from the cluster  of solar and LED related businesses moving into the facility and the Hudson Valley area
Cerveny said he “discovered” Tech City last year as part of his work for New Energy Resources and was “amazed” by the facility. “You could tell there is a lot of momentum here,” he said. “This is a rich environment to seek funding.”