An Industrial Development Agency exists to grow
the local economy. It takes legal title to a private project, which makes the property
exempt from tax, and accepts a negotiated payment instead. The exemption is the tool, and
the bet behind it is that the tax break buys something the county would not get otherwise:
a plant that builds here rather than somewhere cheaper, jobs that would not exist, a
building that stays empty without it. Chemung County is making that bet 49 times over. It
costs about $3.2 million a year once the negotiated payments are netted out, school
districts absorb the largest share of it, and the board placing the bet is
appointed, not elected. This
section is about what the county is getting back.
$3.2MNet cost, FY2024 $5.4M property taxes + $506K sales/mortgage breaks − $2.7M in PILOTs
53.2%Falls on school districts, who get no vote $2.9M of the $5.4M in property taxes exempted
$105MAssessed, nearly tax-free across 72 parcels
49Active deals the FY2024 portfolio
How a PILOT Actually Works
The mechanism is simple, and it is not a loophole. It is the law working exactly as
written. Understanding PILOTs is critical, so let's dig in.
Under a standard straight-lease deal, the IDA takes nominal title to a
property, or a leasehold on it. Because the IDA is a public agency, that title makes the
parcel exempt from property tax (RPTL § 412-a / GML § 874; it shows on the
assessment roll as exemption code 18020). The company then leases its own building back
from the IDA and pays a negotiated PILOT,
a payment in lieu of taxes, instead of a tax bill. When the term ends, the leasehold ends
and the parcel returns to the tax rolls.
What the leaseback actually costs the company. We pulled the executed
Anchor Glass lease
(DocumentCenter/View/583)
to check. The IDA leases the plant back to Anchor Glass for rent of, verbatim,
"One and No/100 Dollar ($1.00) per annum," with the company paying "all taxes or
payments in lieu of taxes." The $1 rent is the tell: the lease is not a real estate
transaction. It is a wrapper whose only purpose is to move the parcel off the tax roll.
What the PILOT should be is set by the IDA's own Uniform Tax Exemption Policy
(the UTEP, readopted 12/12/2024;
View/871).
It is four pages long, and it opens by stating what all of this is for: "to encourage the
attraction, expansion, and retention of business and industry in Chemung
County." It then sets out exactly four standard schedules:
Commercial: 50% abatement for years 1–10, then full taxes.
Manufacturing: 50% abatement for years 1–15, then full taxes.
Retail / tourist: a declining 50%→0% over 10 years.
Solar: $8,000 per megawatt, escalating ~2%/yr, 20 years maximum.
Now notice what is not on that list. There is no schedule for apartments.
The UTEP defines a qualified project as an "industrial project (i.e. manufacturing,
processing, assembly, research and development, etc.)" or a "non-industrial project
(i.e. warehouse, wholesale/distribution, commercial offices, tourist destination, commercial
revitalization, etc.)." Housing is not in that list. The words "housing,"
"residential," "apartment," "dwelling," "rental" and "multi-family" do not appear anywhere in
the document, in any form. The IDA's own
application form does contemplate them, incidentally: it offers applicants a
"Housing" checkbox and a "Mixed Use" checkbox. Its tax
policy just has nothing to say about either.
And yet apartments are now the single largest category of net
subsidy in the whole portfolio, with a further
two mixed-use deals putting market-rate apartments over
ground-floor commercial space. That is the finding, and it is worse than a broken rule:
there is no rule to break. Every residential deal the IDA writes is
necessarily a deviation, because the policy has no schedule for it to follow, no term limit
to exceed, and no benchmark to be measured against. That is how you get a PILOT running to
2051, and another that pays nothing for its first four years
and never reaches full taxes inside its 20-year term, from an agency whose own standard
commercial term is ten years at half price.
The deviation clause is the one place the policy says when departing from the schedules is
justified, and it names a jobs test: the board may deviate where it is "in the vital
interests of the economic health of the community, considerable job creation or retention,
whereby it can be substantiated that but for special tax abatement incentives these jobs
will not be created or will be lost in the community." The seven residential deals
(five apartment, two mixed-use) promise 27 jobs between
them. Read the clause strictly and they do not meet its
stated trigger; read it loosely and "the vital interests of the economic health of the
community" is a standard that nothing fails. Either way, the paperwork required is a letter:
"All chief elected officials of affected taxing entities will be notified in writing
prior to deviating from this policy." Not their consent. Notification.
PILOTs are split among the county, the town or city, and the school district "in the same
proportion as normal taxes," which is why the school districts' share of the cost is the
largest and why they are the ones the arithmetic lands on. As the table below shows,
deviation is not the exception. For the deals that cost the most, it is the business model.
Every Active Deal, by Category
The FY2024 portfolio as the IDA itself reported it to the state. Categories are ours;
every dollar is theirs.
▸ Click any category to see the individual projects inside it. Each
project links to its full record and source documents.
The industrial drift, quantified. Apartments, mixed-use, energy and the
Clemens Center are 23 of 49 projects and
70% of the FY2024 net subsidy
($2.25M of $3.23M),
against 46 promised jobs between them. Manufacturing and warehousing are
9 projects, a fifth of the net subsidy, and essentially every real employment number the
portfolio has. An agency built to attract factories now spends most of its subsidy on
apartments and solar farms.
NY Focus found the same pattern statewide.
Reading the table:
Jobs are self-reported to the state and are not verified by anyone.
Treat them as claims, not audited facts.
The Office/Commercial FTE total is inflated by company-wide reporting: Postler &
Jaeckle books 429 FTEs against a $510,000 building, which is clearly a firm-wide
headcount rather than jobs at that address.
The assessed column is not the same number as the “$105M
nearly tax-free” figure above, and the gap is worth understanding. This column
is the 2025 assessed value of each project's parcels, whether or not they are still
exempt, and $58.9M of it belongs to three deals that
have ended and are back on the tax rolls (CVS's $54.5M, Sonwil's $3.9M,
Postler & Jaeckle's $510K). The chip counts only the parcels actually carrying an
IDA exemption on the 2025 roll, and it includes the
16 parcels the agency owns outright and the three
unexplained parcels carrying its exemption code, which have no
project and appear nowhere in this table.
Assessed values are the 2025 roll; exemptions, PILOTs and jobs are the FY2024 filing.
Five filings carry no parcels of their own (siblings that share another filing's land,
or, in Alle-Catt's case, no identified Chemung parcel at all), so their assessed value
shows as “—”.
What It Costs, and Who Pays
Eight years of filings. The subsidy is real, the PILOT compliance is clean, and the bill
lands mostly on schools.
Taxes Exempted vs. PILOTs Collected, 2017–2024
The gap between the red and green lines is the blue line: the net annual subsidy.
Cumulative net cost across these eight years is $43.3M.
The 2023 spike and the 2024 drop are two big deals passing through. 120 Wygant Rd took
$2.41M of sales-tax exemptions during construction (half of it from the county's own
sales-tax pool), and the Millennium and Empire pipeline deals ended after FY2023.
Who Forgoes the FY2024 Property Taxes
Of $5.43M in property-tax exemptions, school districts
forgo $2.88M, cities and towns
$1.46M, and the county
$1.08M. School boards get no vote on any of it, and school
levies are already the largest line on a Chemung tax bill.
Credit where it is due: the PILOTs get paid. Across every project-year from
2017 to 2024, PILOTs due and PILOTs made match to within
$271, on $23.5M of payments.
There is no delinquency story here, and several agreements have ended exactly as designed:
CVS's $54.5M distribution center came back onto the rolls in 2025 as one of the county's
largest taxpayers. Whatever is wrong with this portfolio, it is not that the paperwork is
being ignored.
Who Answers for This
Nobody you elected.
The seven people who approve these deals are appointed. The chairman of the Chemung County
Legislature also chairs the IDA board. A second county legislator sits beside him. The city
manager of Elmira is its secretary. The agency has no payroll of its own. A private
nonprofit staffs it under contract, and that nonprofit's president is simultaneously the
IDA's executive director. The school districts that absorb
53% of the cost appear nowhere in the chain.
Figures are computed from the NYS Authorities Budget Office PARIS filings
(data.ny.gov 9rtk-3fkw,
FY2017–FY2024) joined to the NYS ORPTS assessment rolls
(7vem-aaz7, 2021–2025)
by scripts/build_ida_json.py → ida.json.
PARIS figures are self-reported by the IDA and are not verified by the ABO.
Jobs numbers especially are claims, not audited facts. Primary documents link to the CCIDA's
own document center; ~26 of them are archived in this repository. Full catalogue on the
Data & Sources page.