"BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset management firm, has selected an Amherst site for the home of a nearly $80 million data and back-office center.Key to the project moving forward is an incentive package crafted by the Amherst Industrial Development Agency as well as an allocation of low-cost hydropower from the New York Power Authority and grants from the Empire State Development Corp.
BlackRock has selected a vacant parcel inUniland Development Co.’s CrossPoint Business Park for the 31,000-square-foot building and the firm has agreed to hire at least 25 new workers, each earning an average annual salary of approximately $68,000.
At $79.8 million, the project is one of the largest private sector-driven developments in Amherst’s recent history, dwarfed only by Mensch Capital Partners proposed $238 million residential-based makeover of the Westwood Country Club property. It would also be one of the largest projects every handled by the Amherst IDA.
Amherst was selected the New York-based BlackRock over several other Upstate sites as well as locations outside of New York including those in Pennsylvania and Canada.
“We are thrilled to be working with BlackRock,” said Paul Pfeiffer, Buffalo Niagara Enterprise vice president of investor relations and public relations. “BlackRock is a huge name in the financial industry. This should put us over the top in a lot of ways.”"
The company is seeking a 10-year payment-in-lieu-of-taxes package, primarily to cover the cost of the building’s advanced technology. BlackRock has agreed to pay a graduated property tax rate during that period and pay full taxes by the 11th year.Amherst IDA benefits could, potentially, save BlackRock $6.8 million in sales taxes, another $2.15 million in property taxes and $164,919 in mortgage recording taxes.
IB4 the morons show up and scream about how we’re “giving them 9 million dollars for 25 jobs” because they’re too stupid to understand the difference between tax breaks and actually giving someone money.
Fails to take into account the opportunity cost of the tax breaks and assumes that we couldn’t get someone else to create more than 25 jobs for a $9m tax break. Having said that, this seems cool, as long as they put in the proper conditions so they can’t take off in year 11 and move for another sweetheart deal.
Yeah, the one I worked for. That year in between when they announced the closing (and that all the people would be losing their jobs) and when the migration was complete was a fun time for production support cases. Oh look at that, another outage, and someone just happened to take down the backups too. Again.
THIS, sadly. If we want companies to come here and provide jobs we pretty much have no other method of enticement. No major company would come here without subsidy/tax breaks, they’d be all but guaranteed to lose money. Good news LZ, my options are expanding it seems.
It creates 25 direct jobs. Then it creates support positions within the HVAC, Electrical, Plumbing, Bldg Maintenance. Just constructing it will be a boost to a lot of local companies.
By comparison the Buffalo Medical Campus employs 12000, and expects 17000 by 2017. You can build a regional economy around projects like that. 25 68k jobs is nice for 25 people (and the short term construction boost) so I’m ok with the tax breaks but you’d need 680 data centers just to equal the job creation of the one medical campus project.
The idea here isn’t to have one or two companies just build data centers…You get them to build datacenters and shift their IT operations here also.
Look at Yahoo it started with a datacenter then built another and now allows employees not directly related to the datacenter work out of the office space…Same thing with IBM coming here they laid off thousands of people in the NY over the last few years only to “create” 500 jobs here.
It’s still to fun to watch people excited about those manufacturing jobs(solar) directly related to companies that have never turned a profit in a quickly changing industry.
Exactly - the reason Yahoo is expanding their Data Center and tech presence. Yahoo just purchased another 18 acres. It is cheaper to own than lease space, power, etc. for large Companies.
Well that explains why there are people doing land surveying on the plot across from Geico. Our new building is 90,000 sq ft with about 5000 sqft Datacenter. If our growth continues they plan to have 4 building campus here with a ramp in Crosspoint from what I was told.
