It’s not easy bringing a business to Onondaga County.
In addition to the state’s notorious bad reputation among businesses, there are a number of hoops a would-be business owner has to jump through in order to get things rolling.
“It’s always been kind of the bane of county existence,” said County Legislator Casey Jordan, who represents the 14th district (including part of the town of Clay and the village of North Syracuse). “You have the IDA of the city, the IDA of the county, Community Development, economic development offices at the city and county level, the MDA — there are all kinds of disparate groups and departments at different levels of government, and they’re all doing similar things if not the same thing.”
In order to make things easier for businesses, Jordan and fellow legislator Kathy Rapp, who represents the fourth district (parts of the towns of Salina and DeWitt), held a press conference Wednesday announcing that they intend to try to facilitate communication between those groups.
“We basically want to make it one-stop shopping,” Jordan said. “We want to streamline the process and make it less cumbersome for businesses.”
Under the proposal, all of the aforementioned agencies, as well as those at the town level, would come together as one committee to meet with business owners.
“There would be a representative of every agency available literally under one roof to sit down at the conference table and discuss what people want to do and what they have to do to make that happen,” Jordan said. “That way you don’t have all of these agencies working at cross purposes. We’re basically looking to synergize all of these different government agencies and private agencies and nonprofit agencies so that they’re all working together.”
The proposal was expected to be voted on by the legislature next week. At that time, if approved, the legislature will ask the county executive to formulate a plan to achieve the goal.
