IDA to add labor representative

At the Dec. 16, 2020, meeting of the Tompkins County Legislature, a resolution to change the composition of the Tompkins County Industrial Development Agency (IDA) to include a labor representative, filed by then-Legislator Anna Kelles, pass unanimously, according to a recent press release.

Kelles said there was an outpouring of interest from the public for adding a labor seat, shown by the union leaders and public advocates who joined the privilege of the floor to express their support and by the considerable amount of positive public feedback after the move.

“If it was something that people weren’t already interested in, then it would have required a lot more time to get people up to speed to what it actually meant,” said Kelles, who is now state assemblyperson for the 125th District. “The minute it was public, everybody was like, ‘Yes, I know exactly what this means. And this is exactly something that we would like to support.’”

This resolution removes one Legislature seat from the IDA, replacing it with a seat designated for a representative from local labor, according to a recent press release. The resolution as it was passed does not require New York state approval.

Kelles, when describing her decision to file the resolution, explained that the move was a group effort of several legislators, and the conversation started back in 2013, before Kelles was a county legislator.

Kelles said that, at the time, requests were being made of both the city of Ithaca and the county to have more consideration for local labor, affordable housing and environmental considerations. Soon after, discussions began about the affordable housing and environmental pieces, while labor depended on significant research before it could move forward.

The Advisory Board to the Planning, Energy and Environmental Quality Committee started looking at green workforce and recognized that workforce development is a fundamental part of economic recovery, Kelles said. The committee then started looking at the policies of the IDA and was specifically interested in seeing a stronger labor voice on the IDA.

“It was a confluence of those three things coming together — my interest that had already been there from the original work that I’ve been doing with a group of citizens in 2013, 2014 and my interest in that all the way through that three-legged stool, the environment, the affordable housing and the local jobs creation,” Kelles said.

As for the data gathering piece crucial to this move’s journey to the Legislature, Heather McDaniel, president of Ithaca Area Economic Development (IAED) — which provides administrative services for the IDA — explained that back in 2015, a broad group of stakeholders conducted research on a local construction labor policy.

At the time, the IDA adopted a local labor policy that required any project applicant to prove that they’ve solicited bids from local contractors and report on their construction labor.

“The reason for that step, rather than requiring a percentage local labor, was out of all the research and all the discussion with all the stakeholders,” she said. “It’s not just about having an available workforce. It’s about having available subcontractors and general contractors, subcontractors that will bid on large projects, subcontractors that have the capacity or the desire to bid on large projects. And we have a really small construction labor force here compared to other markets.”

IDA and IAED (then Tompkins County Area Development) staff found that, with so many big construction projects in the area, contractors were so busy that they didn’t want to bid on projects.

“We decided it would be really important for us to get that information about, OK, what is feasible, what’s being done now, so that we could then revisit the labor policy and hopefully establish a percentage requirement,” McDaniel said.

In the five years since those moves, the IDA has received monthly reports from a variety of local development projects and continued to track data related to local labor. In 2020, members decided to take a deeper look at the data and talk next steps.

As McDaniel explained, analyzing the data was no easy task, considering that the IDA received reports from every single subcontractor on the job every month with each of their laborers, hours, classification and other details, with many in different formats like PDFs or emails.

“It was actually a lot of data, and it wasn’t really in a format that we could quickly manipulate it,” she said. “So, in steps Kurt [Anderson], who works for Ithaca Area Economic Development, and he was able to go through really with a fine-tooth comb, put the data in a format that we could manipulate it not just to understand what the total local labor percentage was but to look at some of the key larger trade groups that were represented.”

Anderson, who is the director of development and strategy for IAED, provided research that eventually aided the creation of a local construction labor committee, which Legislator Anne Koreman currently chairs. The committee met several times last summer to go through the data and identify gaps to establish a proper percentage of local labor.

When discussing the resolution, McDaniel and others expressed that adding a labor representative will be a considerable step up from what was being done previously. As Legislator Rich John, who serves as the current chair of the IDA, clarified at the meeting, the IDA has respected the input of local labor in the past. John said including a labor representative was a good move for the IDA.

“It hopefully will make us smarter,” he said. “The whole idea of having a board is that you get different perspectives. And just like crowdsourcing — the whole idea of thinking better that way because you see things from different directions — we’re hopefully going to get that. It’ll be a good thing.”

McDaniel added that including a labor representative will also ensure that all local labor is considered, not just construction labor.

“When you talk about labor, construction labor is short term,” she said. “It’s an important part of our economy, but for the most part, we like to look at long-term, quality job opportunities. And one of the main goals of the IDA is to support business and industry, and those are companies that are creating long-term, quality job opportunities.”

Also at the Legislature meeting, legislators debated a substitute resolution raised by Legislator Mike Lane to expand the IDA to nine members, but Legislator Deborah Dawson challenged the motion because it would need state-enabling legislation. The substitute failed 3-11.

“It might happen later,” John said. “I voted to say, ‘Alright, let’s do that.’ But … I think the reservation was, let’s keep this a clean resolution and just address the labor seat, and we’ll think about this and decide on going to nine members later.”

The Legislature is currently taking applications for the new position. Sources shared what their hopes are for the eventual candidate.

“My hope is that it will be someone that is able to work to understand all of the complications in IDA projects and someone that’s willing to compromise because compromise is key to getting a lot of these projects done,” McDaniel said.

Kelles added that the ethos of that person should be to prioritize the creation of good-paying jobs within the actions of the IDA.

“Regardless of what sector of labor they come from, it is extremely important for this person to keep in mind and to represent all of labor because … one of the goals of the IDA and tax abatements is to create good-paying jobs that lift up the whole economy,” she said. “So, not just temporary jobs, for example, not just construction jobs, but that it actually creates jobs.”

For now, McDaniel explained IAED’s plan for local labor in 2021.

“I’m just really pleased with the progress that our IDA has made on this,” she said. “The [labor] policy, as it stands today, has made developers more aware, more willing to seek out local labor, which is a positive thing. Our goal is to wrap up our conversations at the Labor Committee of the IDA sometime early this year and make a recommendation on an upgrade to the policy.”