This morning's Journal notes that RPM Ecosystems' Dryden facility is on its way. Infrastructure is nearly complete, and the greenhouses - for rapidly growing trees - will be operational in March 2007:
the company is expected to create as many as 56 full-time low- and moderate-income jobs, a prospect that generated much community support....
The 159-acre regional nursery plant will be situated on Route 13 in the Town of Dryden, where native hardwood seedlings will be cultivated in 20 greenhouses. Marshall said one greenhouse will be capable of producing 250 seedlings a year.
Briefly in Tompkins notes that the Town of Dryden Conservation Board is looking for two new members.
On the editorial page, Jay Gallagher notes that the New York State Senate miraculously escaped the Democratic deluge this year, perhaps because:
certainly carefully crafted (a.k.a. "gerrymandered") districts, lax campaign-finance laws and the doling out of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to local projects at the direction of GOP senators also have had a hand in the survival of the Senate Republicans.
They also have an air of inevitability about them. Lobbyists tend to give more money in campaign donations to the side they think will win, and that side has been for decades the Republicans in the Senate (and the Democrats in the Assembly). That assumption, of course, makes it far more likely the Republicans will keep control.
I also haven't heard of any Assembly seats that shifted from one party to the other. (Update: Woops. Gallagher notes three, making that body 108-42.) I really wonder how much change Eliot Spitzer will be able to accomplish on Day 1 with a legislature so deeply entrenched in its seemingly eternal incumbency. I know New Yorkers are looking to him for reform, but genuine reform is going to require changing more than just the governor.
I wish that we could draw good paying jobs into our town.
Only today did I stop to read the Auction Sign on route 13 at the RPM site. Only recently have I been visiting you site.
When I first heard about RPM 5 years ago, I said " this is bullshit".
"Propietery system for growing trees"? Yeah , right.
56 jobs? Did they even hire 10 people?
$500,000 in a start up grant, I think, after they had already file for bankruptcy.
Plus a long term tax abatement. This was a scam from the get go. And, once again, the people pay.