ALBANY COUNTY — More than $170 million in public and private capital sits on an 85-acre industrial pad on the Hudson River. There is no tenant. There is no settled purpose.

Beacon Island — the Port of Albany’s flagship development site — was supposed to host the nation’s first offshore wind-tower manufacturing facility. 

Beacon Island is but one chapter in a larger record — one that begins with an ambitious plan, tracks its collision with reality, and ends with questions about Albany County’s economic development institutions. 

With offshore wind on indefinite hold, the Advance Albany County Alliance recently declared it would pivot toward the semiconductor supply chain. A look at recent history is instructive.

For manufacturing wind towers, the partnership with Danish tower-maker Welcon and Quebec-based Marmen was designed to produce up to 150 turbine towers annually for Equinor’s Empire Wind project, with thousands of permanent jobs projected and thousands more in construction to boot. 

The Albany Port District Commission deployed over $170 million across three development phases from 2018 through 2025 — a 6,000-PSF heavy-capacity wharf, new bridges, grading, utility connections — backed by an $18.8 million FAST NY grant and $9.9 million from the state’s Department of Transportation.

The project wasn’t killed by local opposition. It wasn’t killed by zoning failure or financing collapse. It was destroyed by a convergence of forces no county-level institution was designed to survive.

The first blow was self-inflicted, and federal. 

Port contractors clear-cut roughly 80 acres of trees on Beacon Island before obtaining full federal environmental approval. The United States Maritime Administration and Department of Transportation threatened to pull a $29.5 million grant, demanding a complete National Environmental Policy Act review. 

Rather than endure what would have been months of regulatory paralysis, the Port forfeited the grant outright — sacrificing the $29.5 million in federal funding to escape the review process it had triggered by moving too fast. 

The project was then hit by macroeconomic shock. 

Post-pandemic inflation drove steel prices and logistical costs sharply upward between 2021 and 2024 — fracturing the economics that had made the project pencil out in the first place. Regional construction costs surged from 25 to 40 percent. Equinor and New York State failed to renegotiate the power-purchase agreement for Empire Wind 2. That contract was terminated in 2024.

Then the decisive blow — one no strategic plan had planned for. 

In January, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum withdrawing offshore wind leasing areas, directing the Department of the Interior to suspend all permitting. The administration then went further: issuing cease-and-desist orders to shut down projects already under construction; a court ruling eventually overturned the work stoppage. 

Today, Beacon Island is what’s legally known as a strategically rigid asset. The Port had secured a complex stack of federal authorizations tied to the site’s federal marine highway designation.

Each permit was narrowly tailored to the offshore wind industry. Any material deviation in use, footprint, emissions, or operations risks triggering a full reopening of federal environmental review, meaning delays, costs, and uncertainty measured in years, not months.

By April 2025, in a formal acknowledgement of the halt, the Port issued a Request for Expressions of Interest, reopening the site to data centers, defense manufacturing, general logistics, but explicitly warned respondents to stay within existing permit thresholds or face new federal review processes on their own dime.

Also in 2025, the port issued a request for proposals for external government relations and representation — an institutional admission, in procurement language, that navigating federal permitting and funding systems had exceeded internal capacity.

The plan

Albany County’s current economic development ambitions lay in a 2020 strategic plan which positioned alternative energy manufacturing — like offshore wind — as a central pillar of its industrial future. 

The five-volume, 198-page strategic report was “designed to enhance quality of life and accelerate economic growth throughout Albany County,” stating the county needed two things: “a clear economic agenda for county leaders to follow and an organization that can respond quickly to economic opportunities … .”

In the other seven counties of the Capital Region, economic development is centralized under a “go-to public or quasi-public organization,” but Albany County relied “on a loose network of local municipalities and regional organizations that conduct some but not all core economic development functions.”

One of the plan’s four explicitly-stated goals was to transform the county’s image “to counter perceptions of old-school approaches” — though unstated, almost assuredly a reference to the O’Connell political machine’s six-decade reign over Albany.

To overcome that past and “create a business-friendly environment that encourages new investment and establishes the county as a magnet for talent and investment,” the plan called for the formation of a local development corporation that is now partially funded with tax dollars “to meet the objectives of addressing unmet economic development needs in Albany County.”

Local development corporations are private, not-for-profit entities that, according to the state comptroller, “are exempt from many of the constitutional and statutory provisions that guide the operations and financial transactions conducted by local governments,” such as public-procurement laws that require a competitive process for awarding contracts, the Freedom of Information Law, and Open Meetings Law.

Public authorities, like the local development corporation, came into widespread use in the 1930s and ’40s, when Robert Moses used them to become the single-most powerful person in both New York City and New York state for four decades in the middle part of the 20th Century. 

Albany County would take a page from the past it was attempting to shed and entrust all things development in the county to one person, Kevin O’Connor, whose name appears at the top of a half-dozen county development-related entities and did not respond to an Enterprise request for an interview. 

The report cited the Schenectady Metroplex Development Authority as one of the public-benefit corporations in the area that has been able to “coalesc[e]  leadership to create economic opportunities, attract and retain businesses, generate new revenue, and diversify the county’s tax base.”

Ray Gillen, chairman of the Metroplex, told The Enterprise in 2020 that, when the new development authority was created, Schenectady, as a county, was in pretty rough shape; lacked a centrally-focused economic-development effort; and was home to one of the most-distressed downtowns in New York state. Metroplex placed a “particular emphasis” on reviving the city of Schenectady’s downtown neighborhood. 

Economic development, Gillen said, has evolved from the former practice of “chasing smokestacks,” or, what the Albany County report called a “transaction-oriented” model; for example, when taxpayers help to finance the building of a privately-owned sports stadium. That is a model Albany County has championed.

Gillen said that the Metroplex model is “investing in yourself,” the community. The century-old former Labor Temple on Schenectady’s Clinton Street, for example, had at one time been the home of 30 area unions but by 2017 had housed just one. 

In 2017, the last union moved out and the property was put up for sale, purchased by a union bricklayer from Queens who converted it into a mixed-use venue, with six apartments on the building’s upper floors and street-level retail.

“We put a little money in there, we put a little help in there,” Gillen said of the Metroplex’s $22,000 grant to help restore the former Labor Temple’s facade; another $21,000 grant went toward the first-floor retail. 

    “You do that hundreds of times, and you rebuild your economy,” he said. Development is a momentum business; the more projects you do, the more projects you can do, Gillen said.

Albany County has meted out its fair share of grant money to businesses, like $50,000 for the Albany Food and Wine Festival, with the explicit purpose of “Marketing and Business Recruitment,”  but also has taken on bigger projects.

Big swings, size of the miss:

To be determined

A number of the projects receiving public subsidies from Albany County fail the But-For Test, a legal and policy framework used to determine whether a public subsidy is necessary to induce a private action, effectively asking: Would the private investment or development have occurred but for the public action?

For a number of big-ticket projects in Albany County the answer appears to be yes, the development would have occurred. 

Regeneron purchased its Menands site months before the county IDA signed off on$2.5 million in tax breaks.

The 335-mile Champlain Hudson Power Express transmission line running the length of the state to bring hydroelectricity generated in Québec to New York City received approximately $67.6 million in total tax incentives — roughly $47 million in property tax discounts through a 30-year PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes), $18.3 million in sales tax exemptions, $2.3 million in mortgage recording tax exemptions — on in-county capital investment estimated between $228 million and $254 million.

Transmission Developers Inc., owned by private equity giant Blackstone, will make $163.7 million in PILOT payments over 30 years, a 22.3 percent discount from the approximately $211 million in full taxes it would otherwise owe. The Enterprise reported in February 2024 that the project “won’t create a single permanent job in the county.”

With Plug Power, under the terms of its deal, the company was required to have 1,087 employees in Slingerlands by the end of 2025. Instead, it had just 848 workers in Slingerlands, less than 80 percent of the requirement.

Rather than trigger the recapture clause written into the agreement for precisely this scenario, the Albany County Industrial Development Agency in February of this year voted to retroactively cut the job requirement.

Per the Business Review, “The board voted … to lower employment level targets for 2026 and beyond to 40% of the original milestones. Plug will need to end this year with 534 full-time employees at Vista, rather than the originally agreed upon 1,335 jobs. The new target for 2027 is 650 employees, rather than 1,625.”

The job subsidy was just one handout received by Plug, which also was awarded $5 million in county grants, a 100-percent property tax abatement for the first two years of its 30-year agreement, additional tax exemptions and PILOTs for property’s physical owner — all told, the public is on the hook for  between $9 million and $18 million depending on the incentive layers counted. 

Hecate Energy’s massive solar farm in Coeymans, whose amended and approved county IDA resolution said would create construction jobs and no permanent full-time positions, received well over $4.5 million in tax breaks: $4 million from sales and use tax and $625,000 in mortgage recording taxes, in addition to a PILOT agreement. 

Pivot

With offshore wind on indefinite hold, the Advance Albany County Alliance recently declared it would pivot toward the semiconductor supply chain, framing it as the county’s most promising economic opportunity and a matter of national security. 

Albany County, which lacks the thousands of vacant acres and massive utility infrastructure needed to host a fabrication plant, will, in a manner of speaking, provide the picks and axes — a localized supply chain to support the packaging, design, and advanced materials needed for chip production — to the microchip gold rush taking place in Saratoga County. 

Lucky for the fabrication industry, the county already has experience with sector giveaways. 

Catemer Inc., a Pennsylvania-based chemical company apparently paid cash, $4.8 million, for its facility in Latham. The company plans to create a semiconductor industry vendor consortium, per the Business Review.

Catemer received a $2 million grant from the Advance Albany County Alliance, a million-dollar loan from the alliance, in addition to a quarter-million in local tax subsidies.

Also of note is an employee of a Catemer affiliate, Kalark Nanostructure Sciences, both of which share the same chief executive.

Listed as a member of the Kalark Nanostructure Sciences Team is Alain Kaloyeros — the former SUNY Polytechnic president who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in December 2025 after his earlier Buffalo Billion bid-rigging conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court.