The IDA Board — Open Elmira

The Board

Seven seats, as currently constituted. The "day job" column is the point: these are not obscure private citizens, and several of them sit on both sides of the deals they approve.

Member	IDA role	Day job / other public office
Mark Margeson	Chairperson appt. 3/18/2021, reappt. 1/1/2023	President, Margeson Insurance Agency, and Chairman of the Chemung County Legislature (5th District). He chairs the body that appoints the board he chairs.
P. Michael Collins	Secretary appt. 1/14/2019	City Manager, City of Elmira, the city that hosts most of the subsidised property. See the city's exposure →
Chad A. Keenan	Treasurer 1/1/2023	Division VP, Corning Inc. shared services
Michael Cantando	Member 1/1/2023	Executive VP, Hilliard Corporation
Martin Chalk	Member 1/1/2023	Chemung County Legislator (10th District), and President of the Elmira Water Board, an office he won in 2024 with eight votes. Three public hats at once.
Liane O'Brien	Member 1/1/2023	Incubator Works (Elmira program manager); Town of Veteran board. Unmentioned in the November 2025 – January 2026 minutes, so we cannot tell from the record whether this is a vacancy or a run of absences.
Warren Roman Jr.	Member Res. 25-47, 2/10/2025, replacing Dawn Burlew	Business Manager, IBEW Local 139, whose union hall at 415 W Second St has held an IDA abatement since November 2013. The deal predates his appointment by more than a decade, and we make no claim that he had any part in it.

Board members are unpaid by statute (GML § 856: "no compensation… but… necessary expenses"). Counsel is Harris Beach PLLC. The IDA's own posted board list (DocumentCenter/View/219) still shows Dawn Burlew, who resigned in early 2025; the minutes and Resolution 25-47 correct it. Roster verified against that PDF and the 2025–26 board minutes, archived in this project's repository.

How They're Appointed — and the Charter Change Almost Nobody Saw

In 2022 the county quietly rewrote its charter to move this board's appointments from the County Executive to the Chairman of the Legislature. The Legislature's chairman also chairs the IDA. The public documents still describe the old rule.

The state law that created the agency, General Municipal Law § 896, has always said the same thing: "Its members shall be appointed by the governing body of the county of Chemung" — in a county with an elected executive, that is the Legislature. How the county's own charter implemented that is what changed.

When	What the charter said about IDA appointments
Before 2022	Article XXVII § 2704, "Additional Appointments by County Executive," listed the "Industrial Development Agency" among boards appointed by the County Executive subject to confirmation by the County Legislature. This is still what the IDA's own About page tells the public today.
Local Law No. 2 of 2022 Resolution 22-273	Struck the IDA out of § 2704 and created a new § 2706, "Appointments by the Chairman of the Legislature," which now reads: "Industrial Development Agency (N.Y.S.I.D.A. Art. Sec. 856), Soil Conservation District Board…, Legislative member to Jury Board…" The appointment power moved from the Executive to the Legislature's chairman.
February 2025 Resolution 25-47	The Legislature seated Warren Roman Jr. on the IDA "pursuant to General Municipal Law Article 18A, Section 896 and Chemung County Charter Article XXVII, Section 2706," on the written appointment of the Chairman of the Chemung County Legislature, to serve "at the pleasure of the Chemung County Legislature." It cited the new section correctly.

What actually happened, plainly. The 2022 charter amendment took the IDA board out of the County Executive's hands and gave it to the Chairman of the County Legislature — who is Mark Margeson, the same person who chairs the IDA board itself. So the chairman of the Legislature now signs the written appointments to a board he chairs. In February 2025 that is exactly what happened: Margeson's written appointment seated Roman, and Margeson voted aye on the resolution accepting it. The IDA board had already "recommended" Roman to the Legislature at its own February meeting.

The public record still shows the old rule. The 2022 change aligned the charter with what state law already required, but the documents a resident would actually check have not caught up. The IDA's own About page still says its directors are "appointed by the Chemung County Executive and ratified by the Chemung County Legislature" — the pre-2022 arrangement, which the charter no longer contains. Anyone relying on the agency's own description of itself would get the answer wrong.

Either way, the practical loop is closed tighter than before: the Legislature's chairman now both appoints the IDA board and chairs it, a second legislator sits beside him, the appointees serve at the Legislature's pleasure, and nobody in the chain faces the voters as an IDA decision-maker. The school districts that absorb 53% of the cost appear nowhere in it.

For what it's worth, the overlap has been a bipartisan habit rather than a factional one: the January 2019 CRC roster included both the then-Majority Leader and the then-Minority Leader of the Legislature, plus the Deputy County Executive as chair. The board was rebuilt in January 2023.

Who Actually Runs It

The IDA has no employees. A private nonprofit staffs it under contract, and that nonprofit's president is also the IDA's executive director.

Southern Tier Economic Growth, Inc. (STEG) is a private nonprofit that staffs the agency under contract. Joseph Roman is simultaneously STEG's President, the IDA's Executive Director, and CEO of the Capital Resource Corporation below. The money runs in a circle: the county funds the IDA, and the IDA's audited FY2023 statements record that fees to STEG for these services "totaled $200,000 and $50,000 for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022," a four-fold increase in one year. The IDA's own minutes of 6/12/2025 describe the county's funding for STEG as "a pass through from the IDA."

STEG staff run the public hearings, and sometimes they are the only ones there. At the June 11, 2026 public hearing on the Hammocks at Big Flats, a $57.6 million, 300-unit apartment complex seeking a 30-year abatement, not one IDA board member attended. STEG staff ran it. The board approved the deal the next day, over the objections of the Town of Big Flats and its residents. Town Supervisor Lee Giammichele's summary: "We're at the mercy of the IDA."

WSKG, June 19 2026 ↗ · WENY ↗ · the deal's terms and documents →

On the "no payroll" point, our evidence is the agency's PARIS salary filings, which report $0 of staff pay from FY2021 onward, alongside the STEG contract described in the audited statements. We have not independently confirmed that the agency has no employee of any kind, and we say so rather than overstate it.

The Mirror Entity

The same seven people meet again, under a second letterhead, to do the thing IDAs lost the power to do in 2008.

The Chemung County Capital Resource Corporation is a local development corporation (N-PCL § 1411, established 2012, with the County of Chemung as its sole member). Its own FY2024 audit describes it as "related through common management and Board of Directors membership" with the IDA. In plain terms: it is the same seven people, convening after the IDA meeting, issuing the tax-exempt bonds that IDAs lost the authority to issue in 2008.

Its FY2023 statements drew a disclaimer of opinion: the auditors declined to express one at all. (FY2024 came back unmodified.)
Since 2023 the CRC holds the management and operations agreement for the LECOM Event Center: First Arena, which the IDA has owned since 2016 and has been trying to resell ever since. The arena's story →

Where the Leverage Actually Is

You cannot vote an IDA board member out. You can vote for the people who put them there.

Every route to this board runs through county government — and since the 2022 charter change, it runs through the Legislature in particular, whose chairman now appoints the board and whose members confirm the deals' fiscal effects. Those are elected offices with real elections. The IDA approves thirty-year abatements; the Legislature's chairman appoints the people who approve them. That is the lever.

Worth asking your legislator, specifically: why did the county move IDA appointments to the Legislature's chairman in 2022, and why does the agency's own website still describe the old rule? · why did no board member attend the Hammocks hearing? · did the IDA ever recover Wayfair's remaining PILOT years after it closed in 2021? · why is the Clemens Center paying $0 in PILOTs?

Contact your county officials →

← Back to the IDA overview · related: Every Project, The Water Board, Contact Your Officials.
Sources for this page: the CCIDA's posted board list (View/219); Chemung County Legislature Resolution 25-47 and its 2/10/2025 minutes; the Chemung County Charter as amended by Local Law No. 2 of 2022 (§ 2706, "Appointments by the Chairman of the Legislature") and the county's Local Law Directory (Res. 22-273); the CCIDA's audited FY2023 financial statements (View/469) and the CCCRC's audited FY2024 statements; CCIDA and CCCRC board minutes 2025–26; GML § 896 and § 856; the CCIDA About page. Roster, the Res. 25-47 text, the § 2706 charter language, the STEG fee note and the CRC's related-party and opinion language were each verified against the archived PDFs, which are kept in this project's repository at research/source-docs/ccida/ (both the amended charter and the superseded pre-2022 version). Full catalogue on the Data & Sources page.

Who Approves the Tax Breaks