WESTCHESTER & FAIRFIELD COUNTY
BUSINESS JOURNALS
APRIL 24, 2017 | VOL. 53, No. 17
3 | BOUGHTON ON BUSINESS YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR REGIONAL BUSINESS NEWS
27 | STILL BOOMING? westfaironline.com
Business, political leaders give lame duck Gov largely damning reviews BY KEVIN ZIMMERMAN kzimmerman@westfairinc.com
A This 2004 Business Journal file photo shows Chicken Island in Yonkers, an environmentally contaminated parking-lot site behind Getty Square that remains undeveloped more than a decade later. The city has razed the business block on New Main Street, seen in foreground, as part of its downtown redevelopment plan. Photo by Bob Rozycki.
Yonkers ex-master developer lured back by brownfield credits BY ALEESIA FORNI aforni@westfairinc.com
T
he former master developer who a decade ago floated an ambitious plan to redevelop downtown Yonkers and its waterfront plans to foot the bill for an estimated $5 million to $7 million cleanup of a six-acre lot at the heart of the city’s revitalization efforts. More than three years after the city approved a termination agreement with developer SFC
Yonkers LLC, the reformed and reorganized firm will fund the environmental remediation of the brownfield site historically known in Yonkers as Chicken Island. “As far as the city is concerned, our benefit here is to obtain a certificate of completion once the site has been remediated,” said Michael V. Curti, corporation counsel for the city of Yonkers. The lawyer said the remediation of the property will likely make the site more attractive to potential developers, which would “obviously be for the better.”
As part of the termination agreement, SFC retained its interest in the brownfield cleanup taXxcredits related to Chicken Island. Those credits fell under a state program set to expire at the end of this year. Curti said the former brownfield tax credit program was more “lucrative” for developers than the current program, where the state’s reimbursements are far lower and the thresholds for meeting the requirements for the credits are higher. In order to take advantage of the older program and preserve the brownfield credits, SFC must complete the cleanup of the site by the end of the year. “So they have an interest in preserving those rights,” Curti said. At its April 11 meeting, the Yonkers City Council approved » BROWNFIELD, page 8
lthough he still has some 18 months remaining in his second term, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy’s recent announcement that he would not seek a third term has already engendered talk about his legacy to the state’s business community. For the most part, the reviews aren’t very good. “The governor came in at a really difficult time, when the state had enormous fiscal problems,” said Joe Brennan, president and CEO of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association. “And he was not able to get us out of tough economic times. In general, we didn’t see the economy rebound as we all hoped it would.” “It’s worth remembering that when Malloy came into office he inherited a very big deficit,” saidd Chris Bruhl, president and CEO of The Business Council of Fairfield County. “And that was the result of more than a generation of reality avoidance, both by his predecessor governors and the General Assembly.” That Connecticut routinely finishes low in business-related national surveys — CNBC’s most recent Top States for Business survey placed it 43rd, while it received an overall F grade in last summer’s Thumbtack Small Business Friendliness Survey — is indicative of the incumbent’s overall failure to move the state’s business needle in a positive direction. “A governor probably gets
too much credit when things go well and receives too much blame when things don’t go well,” Brennan said. “We disagreed with him on some of his fiscal policy decisions. The tax increases he pushed in 2011 and 2015 were a little more than we thought was good for the state of Connecticut.” On balance, the CBIA chief said, “We had a good relationship. I think the governor would be the first to say that we haven’t seen the growth in the economy and the creation of new jobs that we’d like to see.” Criticism of the governor has only grown louder over the past year. In January, the criticism escalated when he announced that his plan to solve the state’s $1.7 billion deficit included $1.36 billion in new spending reductions and asked Connecticut’s municipalities to contribute onethird of the cost toward their schools’ teacher pensions. In his recent State of the Town address, Fairfield First Selectman Mike Tetreau said that while General Electric’s exit from the town last year will have a significantly negative impact on tax revenue, “The major component of the revenue shortfall is caused by instability at the state level. This instability is leading to dramatic and immediate reductions in aid, leaving us with little time to adjust.” Tetreau, a Democrat, has given no indication that he’ll run for the governor’s office next year. But several of his Republican counterparts who are expected to run in 2018 have their own » MALLOY, page 8