Ulster County is RIPE for a Data Center

In the first year of George Pataki's tenure as Governor he and his economic development administration worked hard to "broker" a deal with IBM so that the recently abandoned IBM Kingston campus could reopen in some fashion. Unless you are an out of town reader we all know that Alan Ginsberg, a real estate broker from the New York area, ended up buying the property from IBM. He renamed the property TechCity and proclaimed that within three years the property would be filled.

While history and "should haves" and "maybes" have become foggy since 1993 there was a great deal of discussion at that time that Pataki would consolidate 49 state owned data centers across New York State and bring them to the IBM/TechCity Campus. One might say that Pataki saw consolidation [from a cost stand point] as a good thing. Folks in Ulster County applauded the idea. Unfortunately, no one else in the state did. Workers did not want to relocate to Kingston and various Legislators joined in on the protests because they saw voters leaving their districts. As such the idea died quickly. Oddly, over time consolidation and outsourcing did slowly occur and today there are just six across the state.

Currently, the State Office of Technology is evaluating 18 proposals by developers to build a 72,000 square foot Data Facility which was again proposed by Pataki just before he left office in 2006. In 2006 he proposed using Utica's SUNY IT campus as the site. In 2006 the estimated employee count to run the facility was 200. Four years later with modernization of software and equipment it would seem that the facility would employ less.

The RFP issued last summer and due back to the Office of General Services late last August, stated that the facility would now be built in the Albany area. OGS spokesman Paul Larabee did not immediately know the status of the proposals, but he said that building the center in the Capital Region was a requirement not likely to be changed.

Why was Kingston's two IT areas [TechCity and the Hudson Valley Business Center] or Poughkeepsie and Fishkill not even considered? Clearly, TechCity has the land and other infrastructure that a data center requires - like power and [fiber] access lines.

Isnt it time that folks in Albany stops talking the talk and walks the walk when it comes to helping Ulster County [and the Hudson Valley] with economic development?

Lets get IT jobs back to Kingston!