Show us the money

Everyone out there who EVER expects to see a nearly billion dollar entertainment complex in Brasher, raise your hands.

The project made headlines again Friday when we reported that the parcels that make up the proposed site are $35,000 in tax arrears for two years and will go through tax foreclosure and sale in less than five months.

The proposal has been out there for three years. While it has slightly changed shape, Johnson Newspapers writer Bob Beckstead reported this:

Mr. Dawson had also noted in September that officials were scaling plans back slightly. But the projected complex still called for a number of amenities including a 3/4-mile racing facility, a 1/4-mile sanctioned drag strip and a harness racing track with the possibility of paramutual betting and video slot machines onsite.

Mr. Dawson said they're also planning an 18-hole championship golf course with a skeet and trap shooting range, four or five upscale hotels and some "high-end retail shopping facilities."

One hotel could contain a water fun park that will be open 12 months a year, and they were also talking about an 8,500-seat hockey arena that could double as a convention center.

A year and a half ago, Times staff writer Chris Garifo reported this: According to an economic impact study, the project, to be developed over six years in three phases, will generate $195 million in direct and indirect spending during the entire construction period. The complex also will inject $165 million annually into the region's economy, create a net 3,480 jobs and result in estimated tax payments of $18.7 million at all levels of government.

Wow – the new Yankee Stadium developers didn't promise anything like that. In terms of dazzlement, at least in Northern New York, there isn't anything that dazzles more than 3,480 new jobs and an injection of $165 million into the local economy. (Well, maybe the 12,000-job pipe dream of building wind turbine parts in the old Massena GM factory. But we know that plan has no financial backing.) And the dangling of $18.7 million in tax payments will glaze over elected officials' eyes in less time than it takes to say the number out loud.

But, at what point does reality set in? Five hotels in Brasher? At a complex accessible on local highways? A championship golf course? In an economic climate in which golf courses all over the country are in severe financial distress? A hockey arena and convention center in a location that is a hundred miles from the two nearest cities of at least 100,000 population (and they're in Canada) and a three and a half hour trip from Syracuse, the nearest major U.S. airport?

And yet, Brasher officials refuse to admit that this tax foreclosure dims the prospects of what was always a dim proposal. Supervisor James J. Dawson Jr. has never publicly expressed any skepticism about this proposal. And indeed, he follows a long line of elected officials who have eagerly embraced every development proposal that has come down the pike.

If you look at the minor successes the area has scored in economic development, you see projects that seem to play on the region's assets, and don't ignore its deficits. Stream International and the chicken hatchery in Watertown had every chance to be successful because the city offers two things those businesses were seeking: a moderately priced and trainable pool of employees and a relatively low real estate cost. The major expansion of the Adams Great Lakes Cheese plant was possible because of the proximity of raw material – milk – and the willingness of the state to play a financial role. In St. Lawrence County, Clarkson University's high-tech initiative has yielded modest but measurable gains because the college helps to provide the technological assistance that companies it may draw will require and Newton Falls Fine Paper has found a niche market that it can use an existing facility and already-trained labor to fill.

Note the overarching theme here: Things that play to our assets are possible. Things that ignore our rural location, our transportation deficits (the nearest airport to Northway Island's property flies nine-seat airplanes in and out three times a day – there's your convention possibility) and our low population density don't tend to be successful.

I'm not sure of the solution. We can't, and probably don't want to, ban dreamers from our midst. On the other hand, it would be nice if we took a little more sanguine look at the dreams before we start full-fledged endorsements of them. In fact, it would be a great idea for north country officials to have a one-size-fits-all question to throw at people who come in here with grand or not-so-grand development ideas: Show me the money!