The IDA as Landowner

Beyond the 49 abatement deals, the IDA owns property outright: 16 parcels, about $10 million of assessed value, with no project attached and mostly no tax paid. Some of it is the agency doing exactly the job it exists to do. Some of it is an arena it has been trying to resell since 2016. And three more parcels carry the IDA's exemption code with no explanation we can find.

First, the Fair Part

Land banking for industry is a legitimate IDA function. Most of this inventory is exactly that, and it would be dishonest to present it as a scandal.

Eight parcels, about $2.9M, are the industrial land bank: vacant lots along the Airport Corridor in Big Flats and Horseheads: Speer Dr and Kahler Rd, 254 Industrial Park Rd, Daniel Zenker Dr, Hibbard Rd, Lowe Rd and County Route 77, all held for resale to employers. Buying land, holding it, and selling it to a company that will build on it is a core, uncontroversial thing an industrial development agency does. It is the reason the agency has the power to own property at all. We flag it here for completeness, not as an accusation.

The questions on this page are narrower and specific: the arena, the aviation building, and the parcels nobody can explain.

First Arena — Ten Years of "Temporary"

The agency's single most conspicuous asset does not appear in the state's project data, and it does not appear in the IDA's own document center either.

In June 2016 the IDA bought First Arena at 155 Main St for $3.5 million, $1 million of it from Casella landfill community funds, and said it planned to resell the facility (NY1, June 14 2016 ↗; Chemung County Matters, Dec 2018 ↗). Ten years later it still owns it, assessed at $2.0M and exempt.

The county money trail, from the IDA's own audited statements. The FY2023 financials record that Chemung County provided $1,000,000 to the IDA "to keep the building accessible to the public for ten years," booked at $100,000 a year, with $300,000 still unearned at the end of 2023, so the obligation runs to about 2026, plus $375,909 toward an arena capital-improvement project. Since 2023 the arena's management agreement sits with the Capital Resource Corporation: the same seven people as the IDA board, under a second letterhead.

It is invisible in the agency's own transparency portal. We enumerated all 749 documents in the CCIDA's public document center. Not one of them mentions the arena, and no filename matches "arena" or "155 Main". The agency's largest single asset, bought with public money and carrying a public-access obligation, does not appear in the place the agency publishes its records. It is also outside the state's PARIS data entirely, because it is not a "project," so the IDA's operating subsidies to it appear in no project dataset at all.

The arena sits across the street from the Mark Twain block, in the densest and most valuable land in the county. Our value-per-acre analysis shows what downtown parcels generate when they are on the roll. This one isn't. The city's exposure to the IDA →

17 Aviation Drive

The second-largest holding, and we cannot tell you who is in it.

The former warplane-museum building in Big Flats, assessed at $3.0M, the largest single parcel in the inventory. The IDA acquired it in January 2020, and during the pandemic it served as the county's mass-vaccination site (mytwintiers ↗). The roll classes it as High-Tech Manufacturing. Its current tenant is unknown to us. We could not establish from public records what, if anything, occupies it today, and we would rather say so than guess.

The Parcels That Don't Fit

One where the IDA pays tax, and three nobody can explain.

1316 College Ave is the inverse of everything else on this page: an office building the IDA owns and pays full property tax on, assessed at $1.3M. It is the agency's only significant taxable holding. We note it because it cuts against the grain of the story. The IDA is not reflexively exempting everything it touches.

And then there are three parcels that carry the IDA's exemption code with no project, and which the IDA does not even own. Together $1.1M of assessed value, exempt, unexplained. Two are owned by Chemung County itself, 88 Kahler Rd (classed "Air") and 682 Lowe Rd, and may be related to the GEM Energy solar deal, though we could not confirm it. The third, 157 Yawger Rd, is privately owned and we have no explanation for it at all. These are open questions, not allegations: somebody at the county or the assessor's office can almost certainly resolve all three in five minutes. Nobody has been asked.

All 16 Parcels

Everything the IDA owns outright on the 2025 assessment roll, largest first.

About the "in our data since" column. Our roll extract begins with the 2021 roll, so a parcel marked "≥ 2021" has been there at least that long and probably longer. First Arena, for instance, has been IDA-owned since 2016 but only enters our extract later, when the roll's owner name matches. The column tells you when a parcel first appears in this dataset, not when the IDA acquired it. Assessed and taxable values are the 2025 roll.

← Back to the IDA overview · related: IDA & Elmira, The Board, Tax Value per Acre.
Parcels: NYS ORPTS assessment rolls (7vem-aaz7, 2021–2025), filtered to parcels owned by the Chemung County IDA or carrying exemption code 18020, by scripts/extract_ida_parcels.py → scripts/build_ida_json.py → ida.json. The arena's purchase price, the county's $1,000,000 public-access payment and the $375,909 capital payment come from the CCIDA's audited FY2023 financial statements (View/469), verified against the archived PDF. The 749-document enumeration is our own crawl of the CCIDA document center. Full catalogue on the Data & Sources page.