NORWICH – Bytheway Typesetting Services Inc., located at the Airport Industrial Park in North Norwich, has received a second, 10-year, 60 percent real property tax exemption agreement from the Chenango County Industrial Development Agency.
No public hearing on the matter is required because the exempting amount is less than $100,000, according to Maureen Carpenter, the IDA and county’s economic development director.
The company’s 50 percent co-owner, Betty Bytheway, is also a board member of the IDA. She officially recused herself from any discussion or voting on her company’s request during a meeting of the IDA Wednesday.
Taxing entities representing the county, the district’s school board and the City of Norwich were on hand to be advised of the extension. Norwich City Schools Superintendent Gerard O’Sullivan asked members of the IDA why the tax burden is shifted to others and why the payment in lieu of taxes agreement doesn’t carry a payback clause if, in case, a company’s aims aren’t met.
Bytheway Typesetting Services’ previously-filed PILOT application indicates plans to invest the benefit in order to retain 10 jobs, to add another three over the next 3 years and to make $50,000 in capital improvements.
IDA legal counsel James Downey weighed out for O’Sullivan the difference between “the school systems’ culture” and its budgetary obligations versus the “corporate culture” that is responsible for offering companies tax breaks in order to create jobs. By law, the IDA is the entity that makes such economic development decisions for the county, he said, and the taxing entities “need to take what’s being offered or you get nothing. ... You can go and complain... (to the media), but whether you agree with it or not, this is the process.”
“Unfortunately, often times in these days locally, we’re seeing more PILOT applications to retain jobs rather than create new ones,” he said.
Downey also said that no corporate executive would sign a payback clause in any PILOT contract. “What if a company decides to move out of the area in two to three years? You can’t get a corporation to sign up for that.”
City of Norwich Mayor Joseph Maiurano said he thought the initial negotiations between those applying for PILOTs should follow meetings with the taxable entities rather than before.
“If we had more alternatives in the beginning,” he said, “we could all start out with the correct figures, at least.”
Carpenter said the IDA’s current PILOT negotiating process was standard policy.
“No tax entity likes PILOT agreements. Those going for the second time... those are the hard ones,” Downey said.
Downey offered a resolution suggesting a one-time project fee of $1,000 and 1 percent of the savings over 10 years. It passed unanimously.
Bytheway Publishing Services provides composition, editorial, and digital pre-press services to publishers of scientific, technical, and medical books and journals. The company was begun in 1978.