Expanding for labor’s sake

With Labor Day approaching again, we find New York’s Governor George Pataki this week announcing that a recent survey found that 25 percent of the businesses statewide planned to add new jobs during the fourth quarter of this year.

Pataki was heralding an increase of four percent from the previous year.

In the Hudson Valley, the numbers were higher, with 38 percent of the businesses planning new hiring late in the year.

We don’t know if the survey numbers reflect the prospective job market in the river valley. Traditionally, they would not, as the post-Labor Day season over the years has been the time when the region’s summer economy slowed down for the long winter’s nap.

But as we, and other media, have been telling you in recent months, Sullivan, Pike and Wayne counties are looking at some big changes in the ways we are going to be making our living. Casinos, performing arts centers, a new federal prison and the new businesses that will spin-off from these major projects are expected to bring thousands of new jobs and thousands of new residents to fill those jobs.

In the past, wary valley residents chalked up proposals for major change to speculation until the day someone began to move earth on a building site. We’d seen many promises for economic improvements come and go unrealized. Amid today’s bright forecasts there is many a skeptic still willing to express doubt about the projects on today’s drawing boards.

But this week you will read that Home Depot, already developing in Westfall, is proposing to locate in Monticello and Lowes Home Improvement Warehouse, another major home improvement retailer, is also looking for a Monticello location.

So whether our local skeptics agree or not, we are now faced with the fact that corporate America believes that something is going to happen in these parts.

The nation’s major retailers don’t build on speculation, they build on market analysis and financial forecasts. Home Depot isn’t putting up a 95,000 square-foot store in Monticello to serve some 70,000-odd people spread out over hundreds of square miles. Someone has already determined that a lot of people are going to be building, decorating and maintaining a lot of new homes. To paraphrase the popular line, “They’re building it, because they’re going to come.”

But where will they build and will local planning and zoning boards be prepared to deal with the new pressures?

While she knows zoning is a town issue, Sullivan County Legislature Chair Leni Binder says the towns, and the people who would develop, should have the most complete tools to make decisions about how it’s done. “We want to avoid the problems Mamakating had with industrial proposals. We want someone who’s planning a $500,000 home in an agricultural district to realize there may be a manure smell,” she said.

Upon taking office this spring, Binder said her principal goal was to provide an updated, comprehensive county plan and planning map and she has directed that work to begin. “It’s really critical in county that we begin to overlay and map out everything that exists.”

The coming building boom is “one of the reasons why we’re doing it. We’re looking at Orange County’s problems and what had happened in New Jersey. We, at least, have some planning time. If we make a decision at least it’s open minded, but nobody can say we didn’t look at it… Hopefully the towns are trying to upgrade their planning and zoning. That’s also why we’re looking at it now,” she said.

Sullivan County, apparently is doing its part to make preparations for the interesting times that lie ahead. But as she said, the real responsibility would lie with non-professional, local planners who will, according to veteran Realtor Davis R. Chant, see “a demand for housing the likes of which we’ve never seen.”

The specifics are still lying on developers’ drawing boards, but the overall challenge is becoming clearer every day. If we’re to accommodate some portion of the new labor pool that the region will need and retain the character of the communities we live in, we are all going to have to get involved. And that means more labor for all of us. Have a safe and happy Labor Day.

David Hulse, News Editor