Editorial: Saratoga County's secret

THE ISSUE:

A secret plan is underway to create a secretive economic development entity for Saratoga County.

THE STAKES:

How does this serve the public's right to know how its money is being spent?

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With all the taxpayer money that's been squandered in New York in the name of economic development, citizens and watchdog groups for years have rightly been demanding more accountability. So a move in Saratoga County to create an even more secretive entity to recruit businesses and create jobs is especially tone-deaf.

The plan is itself so secret that the president of the Saratoga County Economic Development Corp. says he was unaware of it until a draft proposal was uncovered by the Times Union's Brendan J. Lyons and Wendy Liberatore. Members of the Saratoga County Prosperity Partnership, the county's official economic development arm, aren't talking about it.

The draft plan calls for creating a nonprofit corporation that would contract with the SEDC and Prosperity Partnership, and be set up so that it would not be subject to oversight by the state Authorities Budget Office. It would also be exempt from the state's Freedom of Information Law.

Prosperity Partnership would funnel county money to the new corporation, whose spending and possibly even audits would be private. How public money was spent, and how responsible that spending was, would be none of the public's business.

This comes after years of lackluster performance by Prosperity Partnership, which in three years of existence, on an annual budget of $775,000 to $800,000, has delivered all of 12 jobs.

This scheme comes at a time when economic development endeavors are under intense scrutiny and pressure to justify their massive public expense. Billions are spent annually on economic development in New York by a wide range of state and local entities through grants, low- or zero-interest loans, and tax breaks. All too often they yield dubious results, creating no jobs or far fewer jobs than promised. Sometimes the benefits merely boost the profits of projects that would have happened without public support.

Yes, in some cases economic development lives up to its name. But the public deserves to know how its money is being spent and for what purpose: how many jobs are promised, what other benefits — such as new businesses or services or housing units — its money will help buy, and what clawback provisions are in place if those promises don't materialize.

Citizens should know just how big the salaries are, how generous the benefits, and how lavish the expense accounts are of the people doing this work — if they're actually doing work at all, not just enjoying one of the no- or little-show patronage jobs that seem to turn up in these sorts of programs.

County supervisors should demand that this fledgling deal be brought out into the open, and insist that any new economic development entity be fully accountable to the public it would presumably serve. Hidden spending by a shadowy organization hardly seems like a selling point for any county that wants to lure business — or, for that matter, people.