Tagged: empire state development

An international company that processes Medicare appeals is more than doubling its footprint in the Rochester area.

Maximus Federal Services already employs about 160 workers in Victor and Fairport.

Now, the Virginia-based company is expanding to a new Pittsford location, opening its doors in mid-May with roughly 325 workers.

A coalition of small business groups says one of their top priorities is changing a 19th century New York labor law that relates to scaffolding and worker safety.

Members from more than a dozen business groups, led by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, met with lawmakers in Albany Wednesday for their annual day of lobbying.

Business leaders say the labor regulation, known as the Scaffold Law, places an unfair burden on employers.

Currently, employers are held to absolute liability if a worker on a construction site is injured in a fall.

Business groups are pushing for bills that would change that.

"You could have a drunken worker show up at the job site, injure themselves, and that would be your fault as the employer," says Tom Stebbins, head of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York.

Former Buffalo assemblyman Sam Hoyt was in the Rochester area Friday delivering Governor Andrew Cuomo's 2012 budget address.

It was mostly a recap of Cuomo's 2011 legislative victories and a brief sketch of the governor's 2012 priorities.

But one thing was not mentioned: Cuomo's billion-dollar pledge to the state's second-largest city.

"I can assure you that Andrew Cuomo is not giving a blank check to Buffalo," Hoyt, now a senior VP at Empire State Development, said after the presentation.

"If they come up with a half-assed plan, the governor's going to reject it," said Hoyt. "There's no, 'Here's your billion dollars, spend it as you please.' If they use it as pork, or member items, the governor will say, 'Sorry, you blew it. You blew this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.' "

Xerox is bringing a new call center to its Webster, N.Y. manufacturing campus.

But not without a hefty aid package from the state.

"We've got call centers in more than a dozen states," says Xerox spokesman Carl Langsenkamp. "We could have put the call center anywhere."

Xerox is spending $4.3 million on the new customer care center and planning to create up to 500 jobs by the end of 2013, according to Langsenkamp.

To land the project, the state's economic development arm is dishing out up to $6 million in incentives and Monroe County is chipping in with $271,000 in tax relief.

One observer says the cost far outweighs the benefit.

"For the 300 to 500 families who will get a job at the call center, this is great news," Reuters columnist David Cay Johnston tells the Innovation Trail. "For everybody else, this is awful.

"It is the latest example of corporate socialism."

Last summer when Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the creation of 10 new regional economic development councils, his emphasis was on competition.

Each region was charged with developing a five-year strategic economic development plan, which would then compete against the other plans for a billion-dollar pool of state funds.

But as he announced the awards Thursday in Albany, which totaled $785.5 million, it was apparent that everyone was a winner.