Union members and supporters urge City Council to appoint IDA members who will insist on family supporting jobs

About a dozen speakers at the City Council’s March 12 Citizens To Be Heard session pressed the new Council to fill two vacant seats on the Board of the city’s Industrial Development Agency (IDA) with supporters of good, family-supporting jobs and real affordable housing.  Addressing the Council at City Hall, many of the speakers demanded that the new appointees include a representative of organized labor.

Since the 2015 rezoning of the downtown, the IDA has given out hundreds of millions of upfront tax breaks (sales and mortgage recording tax exemptions) and future property tax breaks through the Payment In Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program that stretch out for 20 to 40 years. The School budget is impacted most, as 67% of the tax revenue goes to the schools, 22% goes to the City and 11% goes to the County.

Gus Marciante, a representative from Carpenters Local 279, urged the City Council to include labor representation on the IDA board.  He spoke about how membership in the union had allowed him the opportunity to own a home in New Rochelle and live a middle class life.  He spoke of the failure of the prior administration to hold developers accountable for the creation of family supporting careers while the IDA gave away hundreds of millions of tax dollars to developers.  He urged City Council to “…appoint people to the IDA who will look out for the interests of the community and not just those of the developers and investors.”

Gus Marciante

In the past, the City Administration has argued that having a labor representative on the IDA would be a “conflict of interest.”Meanwhile, real estate interests, the industry reaping the most rewards from the IDA’s public investment of taxpayer dollars, are well represented on the NRIDA. Residents who are aware of this see a clear double standard.

Eugene Tozzi asked, “The New York State law that governs IDAs, Section 856, … specifies that IDA members may include,‘representatives of local government, school boards, organized labor, and business.’  The only one of these four groups that has not been represented on the New Rochelle IDA is organized labor…. If state law sees no conflict of interest, why has our Council been advised differently?”

Eugene Tozzi

 Several speakers also pointed out that the Westchester County IDA includes a labor representative. 

Other speakers representing local trade unions included Miguel Ayala of IBEW Local 3, Anthony Umbro of IUOE Local 137, and Jeff Loughlin, President of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Westchester & Putnam Counties.  Other community members who spoke in support of labor representation on the IDA included Lisa Burton, Michael Cammer, Myriam Decime, Fatimah Gilliam, Maxine Golub, Marianne Machman, and Bruce Soloway.  The full video of the Citizens To Be Heard session is available here (starting at 2:35:30).

The New Rochelle IDA has two open spots as of  March 2024, another opening in March 2025, and three more in March 2026.  The City Manager is a voting member of the New Rochelle IDA, but her term does not appear to have an expiration date.

The next New Rochelle IDA/CLD meeting is Wednesday, March 27, at 7:30 pm.  (The Corporation for Local Development, or CLD, does related work and has the same Board as the IDA.)  The agenda for this meeting includes a presentation on Workforce Development & Economic Opportunity Policy Monitoring by the City of New Rochelle and Anchin, Block & Anchin LLP.