This is what liberals do. They waste taxpayers damn money.
DeWitt, N.Y. — In 2014, the development arm of SUNY Polytechnic Institute agreed to build, with $90 million in state money, a factory in DeWitt for an LED light bulb manufacturer.
The company, California-based Soraa, agreed to create 250 full-time, high-tech jobs at Collamer Crossing Business Park and to encourage Soraa contractors and suppliers to create another 170 jobs in Central New York.
In return, the company would be allowed to lease the factory for $1 a month for 10 years.
But the deal with SUNY Poly’s Fort Schuyler Management Corp. did not require Soraa to spend any of its own money to build or equip the factory. And it contained no penalties if the company did not occupy the building or create the promised jobs. The company never even signed a lease.
So when Soraa recently said it no longer needed the factory and pulled out of the deal just as the state was completing construction of the 82,000-square-foot building, there was nothing the state could do about it.
The state was left with a factory, nearly fully equipped, but no company to use it.
One expert said using state money to custom-build a factory for a specific tenant is bad policy.
Obama did the same thing with Solyndra and liberals said nothing. Look at the beautiful facility that Socialist liberals built for nothing.
“You have a situation where the state could potentially wind up with a white elephant,” said John Bacheller, former head of policy and research for the state’s economic development office, Empire State Development. “I think it’s too much risk. When you provide a grant, the risk is limited to the amount of the grant.”
The state has found another company, but taxpayers will have to spend up to another $15 million to properly equip the building for the new company.
This time, state officials say they won’t repeat the mistake made in DeWitt again.
Empire State Development, a state economic development agency, took over the project from SUNY Poly a year ago after the college’s president, Alain Kaloyeros, was arrested on corruption charges and resigned from the university. ESD said a deal with a new tenant will include financial penalties if the company fails to meet its job commitments.
Alain Kaloyeros, seen here during a visit to Syracuse Media Group in 2015, was president of SUNY Polytechnic Institute when the college agreed to build a $90 million factory in DeWitt for Soraa, a California-based LED lighting manufacturer. He resigned in 2016 after he was arrested on corruption charges. (Ellen M. Blalock | syracuse.com)
Jason Conwall, a spokesman for ESD, said the penalties, or “clawbacks,” will be included in a grant disbursement agreement with NexGen Power Systems, a California start-up. ESD’s board of directors voted Dec. 21 to approve a grant of up to $15 million to NexGen for tooling and equipment for the factory.
In return, the company has pledged to create 290 full-time, high-tech jobs for the production of semiconductors at the facility and agreed to invest $40 million of its own money into the building. It will pay rent of $1 the first year and increasing amounts up to full market value in the 10th year, ESD officials said.
Conwall said the grant will be contingent on the company meeting its job commitments. Details of the grant’s terms will not be available until the grant disbursement agreement is executed later this month, but they will follow ESD’s standard practice of requiring companies to return a grant, or portions of it, if they fail to meet hiring milestones, he said.
ESD’s agreements generally require a company to meet a certain minimum amount of their job commitments within a specified period or be required to return a grant. In some cases, a company is required to return only a portion of the money if it falls just a little short of its hiring commitments.
ESD officials said no such “clawbacks” were put into SUNY Poly’s deal with Soraa because none of the $90 million in state grants used to build the factory went directly to Soraa. All of the money went into the building, which is still owned by the state, so there was no money to take back from the company, they said.
Former state budget director Robert Megna, who was appointed president of the non-profit Fort Schuyler Management Corp. in February 2017 following Kaloyeros’s departure, said the fact that Fort Schuyler retained ownership of the building was a good thing.
“While we can’t speak to the reasoning behind all the terms of the agreement with Soraa, which were made by the previous leadership, the facility was constructed to accommodate Soraa’s gallium nitride lighting business and no funding was provided to Soraa,” he said in a statement.
“All state funds were provided to the not-for-profit Fort Schuyler Management Corporation, and the building and the equipment are all owned by FSMC on behalf of New York State,” he said. “This model enabled the state to quickly adjust to changes in a very dynamic industry and make the facility available to NexGen for its production of gallium nitride semiconductor devices, modules and systems.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks at the Central New York Hub for Emerging Nano Technologies in DeWitt on Oct. 29, 2015, during his announcement LED lighting manufacturer Soraa would operate a state-built, $90 million factory in DeWitt. (Stephen D. Cannerelli | syracuse.com)
Conwall said Empire State Development takes a much different approach. It provides grants to assist companies with the cost of building facilities in the state, but it does not go the riskier route of building entire factories for them, he said.
He said ESD was fortunate to have found a new tenant to go into the DeWitt building. NexGen plans to make semiconductor power devices from gallium nitride, the same material that Soraa uses to make LED lighting. That means that NexGen can use much of the equipment already installed in the factory.
“It worked out because we owned the facility and found another tenant quickly that aligned really well,” the ESD spokesman said.
Though ESD has agreed to provide up to $15 million to NexGen for the purchase of tools and equipment, some of the $7 million not yet spent from the original $90 million in grants for the building could be used toward that $15 million commitment, he said. (The state had spent about $83 million of the $90 million on the factory and equipment by the time Soraa pulled out, officials said.)
NexGen was formed in California last year to make semiconductors for the electronics industry. It does not yet manufacture anything. The DeWitt facility will be its first manufacturing operation.
Dinesh Ramanathan, NexGen’s president and CEO and one of its founders, also was CEO of Avogy Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up that planned to make power sources for electronic devices such as computers.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced in 2016 that Avogy had committed to moving from California to a state-owned cleanroom facility in Rochester that the state agreed to upgrade with a $35 million investment of state money. The state never made the investment, however, and Avogy never made the move.
Avogy went out of business later in 2016. NexGen bought its technology and is starting up with new money from investors, according to Ramanathan.
NexGen has not publicly disclosed who its investors are.
Prior to Avogy, Ramanathan served as the executive vice president at Cypress Semiconductor for almost nine years, where he managed the company’s Programmable Systems Division and its Data Communications Division, according to NexGen’s website.
Prior to joining Cypress, Ramanathan held senior marketing and engineering positions at Raza Microelectronics; Raza Foundries, described as an “incubating venture capital company”; and Forte Design Systems, an electronic design automation company, according to the website.
ESD officials said they are confident that NexGen will succeed in DeWitt.
“NexGen is led by a management team and investors with a proven record and decades of combined experience building and operating high-tech businesses,” Empire State Development President, CEO and Commissioner Howard Zemsky said in a statement. “This gives us the confidence that the company will meet its commitment to bring hundreds of new, good-paying jobs to Central New York.”
The state may be fortunate in this case if NexGen is able to use the factory constructed for Soraa. But custom-built factories can be hard to sell or lease if a tenant walks away, Bacheller said.
The state should always require companies to invest more money into a project than the state does so they have a strong motivation to stick around and make the development work, he said.
“You always want the company to have skin in the game,” he said.
He said SUNY Poly may also have made a mistake constructing a factory for an LED light bulb maker, given the fact that LED light bulb production is increasingly dominated by low-cost Chinese manufacturers who have brought the price of LED bulbs almost down to that of incandescents.
“Unless you’re in a niche that the Chinese aren’t in, it’s the kind of business that is very risky,” he said.
NexGen says its semiconductor devices can be used in a wide array of applications such as LED power supplies, solar inverters, data centers and automotive applications.
The company will be getting the use of a building with up to $105 million in state money invested in it. NexGen’s capital investment will be far less by comparison – $40 million.
Bacheller said the state appears to be taking a substantial risk with NexGen, given that the company is a start-up with no manufacturing or sales track record of its own. However, he said Empire State Development may be making the best deal it could after inheriting a bad situation from SUNY Poly.
“They’ve already got a building up and they’re stuck with it,” he said.
Soraa walks away from $90M factory that NY built; $15M more brings new tenant
Soraa said they would not come without “tens of millions” in additional money from NY state.
First thing I would love to say is thank you to the Common Sense Nation for all your support. Also yes Vimeo has taken all my videos down also but that will never stop us. We are doing a Radio Show at this link https://www.spreaker.com/user/commonsensenationand we will start doing it every day for 2 hours. We have some short shows that are only 15 minutes long but that is changing.
There is ton of information to prove the DNC lied about how they cheated on Bernie Sanders. There is also information out there about how Crooked Hillary Clinton delete over 30,000 emails and lied about it. Did MSNBC or The New York Times look into the famous tarmac meeting of Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton? Also James Comes and the FBI lied about having any documents about the meeting to discuss family. I think is is so damn funny that MSNBC, The New York Times, and YouTube would go after be for calling a filthy vile Atheist who killed 27 people a possible Muslim, Bernie Supporter, or even Antifaso insulting. We have evidence of Antifa being very violent and don’t forget the Times allowed them to run a full page ad. Here is a link of Antifa being very violent against peaceful protesters. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/28/black-clad-antifa-attack-right-wing-demonstrators-in-berkeley/?utm_term=.b439518f39e9
Hell and do I need to even list the times The Religion of Peace has done violence? Here is a site with all of their beautiful and peaceful work. https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
So why is it that MSNBC and The New York Times would do a hit piece on little me? Because they have a damn agenda to spread “REAL FAKE NEWS”. They are not upset that those 27 died but they are more upset that Hillary Clinton’s Lost the Damn Elections and to make sure it never happens again they are attacking all Conservatives and “Right-Wingers” I ask Kevin Roose has he ever done a story on false reporting of the “Left” He tried not to answer me and then said he had wrote about bias on Facebook and other Social Media. Anyone whose head is not stuck up their ass and is looking for truth would have to admit that the “Left” are the real cheaters.
Who owns almost every News Outlet and every Social Media Outlet? This includes Fox News. They are all owed by left-wing American hating, Free Speech Despising social/communist pieces of shit.
So go look at YouTube, Social Media, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, And even ESPN. They all lean to the left. So ask yourself the damn question. Why would these big powerhouse go after me? But I got News for you Goliath’s. You pick the wrong one to pick a damn fight with. I will be your David and I am going to war with the phony liberal bastards and only DEATH will stop me. I FEAR NO MANbut GOD. You people are the ones that has destroyed this damn country and they are so damn upset when they lose and this is what this is all about. Donald Trump won the Damn Election so get the FUCK over it.
They are attempting to bring down every conservative voice out there so when 2020 comes around they want to make sure only the “Left” is being heard.
So please join me on the radio and don’t worry we are working on a Video Platform that do not have these vague “Community Guidelines” so all of you SJW who can’t stand to have your feeling hurt. You ain’t seen nothing yet. I’m also setting up some interviews to get the word out so stay tuned and that includes all of the troll QUEERS.
Please stand with us and if you can Dontae to the fight on the website it would really be aprieciated.
Dr. Pepper Butterfingers finally got one right: Trump wasn’t telling the truth. But he’s still an idiot.
Sanders: ‘Trump Did Not Tell the Truth in His Campaign in Terms of What He Would Do as President’
Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I.-VT) said Trump “did not tell the truth” based on what he said during the campaign and what he has done so far as president of the United States.
“Let’s be clear. I mean, the point here is that, I think, all over grassroots America, whether they’re Democrats, independents or Republicans, people are perceiving that Trump did not tell the truth in his campaign in terms of what he would do as president of the United States,” Sanders said. “He was going to drain the swamp. Well, he’s, in fact, appointed more billionaires to his Cabinet than any president in history, etc., etc. So, what I think has happened now, in Kansas, it is true that the Democratic candidate lost. It is true that the Democratic Party should have put more resources into that election. But it is also true that he ran 20 points better than the — than the Democratic candidate for president did in Kansas.”
“So, what you’re seeing in Kansas, what you’re seeing in Georgia, I believe you’re going to see it in Montana, I believe you’re going to see it all over this country, is the many so-called red states, working people are going to wake up and say, wait a second,” he continued. “Republicans want to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and education, and they want to give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the top 1 percent. No, that’s not what we elected Trump to do. Yes, climate change is real. It’s not a hoax. We got to move to sustainable energy. I think, all over this country, in red states and in blue states, people are beginning to stand up. They’re beginning to fight back. They’re demanding a government which does not just represent the billionaires, but represents the working class of this country.
With 27 GOP-controlled governorships up for election in 2018, national Democrats envision the midterm elections as a chance to rebalance the scales at the state level, where there are currently twice as many Republican governors than Democrats.
But already, party leaders are running into a complication — unresolved issues left over from the Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders presidential primary. Far from defeated, Sanders-aligned progressives are nationalizing their fight, showing less patience than ever for Democrats who don’t agree with them. And that’s generating fear and nervousness in the South — in places like Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee — where some promising Democratic candidates who are looking at running statewide in 2018 could face resistance from the left.
“Here’s the challenge in many Southern states now: You have a more liberal primary base, because the more moderate voters are less likely to participate in Southern primaries, so it makes it more dicey. That certainly presents an opportunity for candidates who want to make a point rather than win an election — those candidates are less likely to be successful in a general election,” said South Carolina’s last Democratic governor, Jim Hodges. “In Southern states you’re going to need candidates who have more moderate stances to be successful.”
No Sanders-wing candidates have declared their candidacies yet in these Southern races. But the ambitions of Sanders’ post-presidential political operation, Our Revolution — and the wake of the Tom Perez-Keith Ellison proxy battle for the DNC chairmanship — has establishment-oriented Democrats worried about the prospect of grueling primaries or policy litmus tests in a region where the party can least afford to be divided.
“It is critical to recognize that there is a different set of policy issues in the Deep South that are not in play in the coastal areas or the West,” said Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, a likely 2018 gubernatorial candidate, pointing to organized labor’s historic economic centrality in parts of the Midwest, and its relative absence in the South, as an example.
“My hope is that Our Revolution — or anyone else — will understand that purity to a progressive ideal does not [necessarily] mean purity in service of the community,” she added.
People close to Sanders’ political arm insist there’s no evidence that the group or its affiliates will try to mount candidate challenges or ideology tests — especially not in the Southern states where the senator was squashed by huge margins in the 2016 Democratic primaries, and where his relationship with local leaders has been strained.
After Sanders lost across the South by wide margins — from North Carolina by 14 points to Mississippi by 66 — in early 2016, party chairs and top regional officials sent him a stern letter asking him to stop minimizing Hillary Clinton’s wins there by characterizing the South as especially conservative. That dismissal of Southern primary results was viewed as a diminishment of the importance of African-American voters, who make up much of the Southern Democratic electorate.
Among Sanders loyalists, though, there’s disbelief and frustration that other Democrats remain wary of their movement, rather than more eager to channel its energy and money.
“The party needs to not see the progressive, Bernie wing of the party as a problem, but rather see it as an asset,” said Mark Longabaugh, a senior Sanders advisor. “The fact that, broadly speaking, candidates and operatives in the establishment wing see the Bernie wing — the activist part of the party — as a problem? That’s a problem in and of itself.”
Georgia state Sen. Vincent Fort, the Our Revolution-backed candidate for Atlanta mayor who made waves during primary season for switching from Clinton to Sanders, said the party establishment still fails to understand or believe in the power of Sanders-style grassroots organizing.
“What people have been talking about, they talked about it last year, and the discussion of it this year is increasing, is 2017 and 2018 are part of a whole, that we need a progressive mayor elected in Atlanta in 2017 as a prelude to electing a Democratic governor in 2018,” he said. “We need a progressive Democrat running in 2018, somebody who understands that trying to be Republican-lite is not a way to get elected. … I anticipate this playing out in the primary, I know progressives are going to say, ‘which of the candidates is a real progressive? Which candidate can we depend on to remain progressive?”
With Republicans in near-unified control of every governorship and legislature in the South, the region remains little more than an aspirational target for national Democrats. But the emergence of strong potential gubernatorial candidates like Abrams and former state Sen. Jason Carter, President Jimmy Carter’s grandson, in Georgia, and former Nashville mayor Karl Dean in Tennessee, has spurred hopes that a 2018 snapback election framed as a Trump referendum could sweep out some Republicans associated with him.
That’s also the hope in South Carolina, where GOP Gov. Henry McMaster was one of candidate Trump’s loudest early supporters.
“I hope all of these [progressive] groups will go out and help recruit candidates, because the hardest job for any party is recruiting candidates: there’s no mythical candidate tree where you can go and pick candidates. So they can help fill some of the holes we have,” said South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison, who is considering a governor run of his own. “I’m looking for who’s going to be my gubernatorial candidate here in South Carolina: I’m looking for someone who can reflect the values of our party and energize our base, but also who can win. So I don’t know if there needs to be a litmus test.”
In several states, establishment efforts to work with Sanders backers are picking up. Georgia Democratic Party chair DuBose Porter noted his vice chair for recruitment was a Sanders supporter. And candidates such as Florida’s Andrew Gillum are openly courting the Sanders wing — the Tallahassee mayor is speaking to his state’s Democratic Progressive Caucus later this month.
“No one should be afraid of folks with differing views or differing stances on policy. We’re all in the same party,” said Tennessee Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini.
These Democrats believe that as Sanders turns his movement toward near-term battles — he was in Mississippi for a unionization drive last weekend — his supporters’ firepower can be directed toward 2018.
“Our Revolution has expressed interest in having a 50-state strategy, and while their depth of field in the South is weaker than in the coastal areas, any group that can generate additional voters is a benefit to candidates in 2018,” said Abrams. “There is a specific group of non-engaged midterm voters who I think were animated by Senator Sanders’ campaign and who could tip the balance, especially in states like Georgia where you’re talking about a narrow window of 200,000 voters.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — A cache of more than 19,000 emails from Democratic party officials, leaked in advance of Hillary Clinton’s nomination at the party’s convention next week in Philadelphia, details the acrimonious split between the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s former rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Several emails posted by Wikileaks on its document disclosure website show DNC officials scoffing at Sanders and his supporters and in one instance, questioning his commitment to his Jewish religion. Some emails also show DNC and White House officials mulling whether to invite guests with controversial backgrounds to Democratic party events.
Although Wikileaks’ posting of the emails Friday did not disclose the identity of who provided the private material, those knowledgeable about the breach said last month that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC computer system. At the time, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the breach was a “serious incident” and a private contractor hired to sweep the organization’s network had “moved as quickly as possible to kick out the intruders and secure our network.”
On its web page, Wikileaks said the new cache of emails came from the accounts of “seven key figures in the DNC” and warned that the release was “part one of our new Hillary Leaks series” – an indication that more material might be published soon. Among the officials whose emails were made public were DNC spokesman Luis Miranda, national finance director Jordon Kaplan and finance chief Scott Comer, but other DNC and media figures and even some White House officials communicated with them between January 2015 and last May, Wikileaks said.
The emails include several stinging denunciations of Sanders and his organization before and after the DNC briefly shut off his campaign’s access to the party’s key list of likely Democratic voters.
The DNC temporarily curtailed Sanders’ access to the list in December 2015 because the organization accused the insurgent campaign of illegally tapping into confidential voter information compiled by the Clinton campaign. The Sanders campaign briefly sued the DNC but the party reached an accord with Sanders and the suit was dropped in April.
The emails show that after the furor over the voter records was resolved, hostility simmered from top DNC officials over the Sanders campaign.
In mid-May emails with Miranda, his deputy, Mark Paustenbach, questioned whether the DNC should use the voter record furor to raise doubts about the Sanders campaign.
“Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,” Paustenbach wrote. Miranda spurned the idea, although he agreed with Paustenbach’s take: “True, but the Chair has been advised not to engage. So we’ll have to leave it alone.”
The same month, in another email to DNC officials, another official identified only as “Marshall” said of Sanders: “Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps.”
The Associated Press emailed Miranda, Paustenbach and DNC chief financial officer Brad Marshall about the Wikileaks releases but they were not immediately available for comment.
Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said Saturday that the emails show “what many of us have known for some time, that there were certainly people at the DNC who were actively helping the Clinton effort and trying to hurt Bernie Sanders’ campaign.”
Weaver said the emails showed that the DNC’s “senior staffers” attacked Sanders about his religion and had roles in “planting negative stories about him with religious leaders in various states.”
Weaver also said the emails may make it harder to promote party unity as Sanders’ supporters mix with Clinton’s majority at the Philadelphia convention. Sanders endorsed Clinton and appeared with him earlier this month in Vermont, but there are concerns over whether some of his embittered supporters might sit out the election this fall.
The new Wikileaks releases also included exchanges between DNC officials and White House event planning officials about whether to allow several influential Democratic party donors to attend events where President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama were scheduled to appear. The emails contained lengthy discussions about the donors’ backgrounds, including, in some cases, criminal histories.
One email exchange concerned whether to allow singer Ariana Grande to perform at a DNC event in the wake of an infamous online video posted on the TMZ website that showed Grande licking other customers’ doughnuts at a bakery in California. DNC officials also worried about the singer’s comment in the same video that “I hate America.” Grande, whose real name is Ariana Butera, later apologized for the comment.
According to the emails, White House officials vetoed Grande’s performance.
