COMMENTARY
Donn Esmonde: Business as usual — a company lost
They do not want to go. None of them do—not Nancy Bell, not the three adult kids who help her run the business. You build a company, you grow close to the people who work for you, you get connected to friends and neighbors—all of that is hard to leave behind.
But the Bells feel as if New York left them no choice. Either they shut down and ship out to growth-friendly Florida, or they risk losing all they have built the past 49 years.
The Bells—Nancy and her kids, Aaron, Jocelyn and Nathaniel—own Science First, a supply company tucked into a dead-end commercial street in North Buffalo. Inside the blue, cinder-block building, 21 workers make science-related products to ship across the country. It will end by year’s end.
Albany’s seeming determination to drive away business and to depopulate upstate has claimed another victim. Pummeled by the double blow of a tax hike during a national recession and the pullback of tax breaks for companies creating jobs in struggling neighborhoods, the Bells and Science First are heading to Jacksonville.
“We’re pretty angry,” said matriarch Nancy Bell. “We feel like we’ve been driven out.”
The story, of course, is bigger than the Bells. Upstate has been emptying for decades, thanks largely to overly generous Albany politicians. The high cost of everything from our Medicaid public health program to public worker salaries and benefits jacks up taxes and scares off businesses. Science First is just one of countless companies that have fled in recent years.
It is not just numbers on a budget book. It is people, and lives torn apart.
Aaron Bell’s wife will leave behind her large family. Jocelyn Bell, with a new house and old friends here, will stay as her mother and brothers leave. Twenty-one employees will soon be looking for work in a job-starved region.
Bounlay Homdarack came from Laos 25 years ago. The tiny woman with quick fingers specializes in sewing plankton nets. It may not sound glamorous, but it helped Homdarack and her husband buy a house and send their kid to college.
“I like it here, very much,” she told me Tuesday. “It’s disappointing. I don’t know how long it will take me to find another job, or what I might find.”
The “three men in a room” who run the state—Gov. David Paterson and State Legislature leaders Shelly Silver and Malcolm Smith—ought to have a picture of the Bell family nailed to their desks. It would serve as a reminder of the price that is paid every time Albany politicians inflate taxes instead of cutting perks, patronage and payrolls—or otherwise pretend that our pockets are bottomless.
In a new poll, better than one in five New Yorkers say they are ready to leave, or soon will be. No surprise there.
It is as if people are being pushed out the door. The Bells said they got little help from local officials while searching for a larger building. Yet Florida officials found them cut-rate land and a low-interest loan, and fast-forwarded paperwork that they were told would take six months in Buffalo.
“The way they treated us [in Florida],” said Nathaniel Bell, “you would have thought we were bringing in 1,000 jobs.”
It is the difference between a state that wants to grow and a place where too many politicians and development officials act like prosperity never left. Meanwhile, the Bells—and countless business owners like them—head for the exit.
Aaron Bell got a call Tuesday from a Buffalo man who read about Science First’s leaving in that morning’s Buffalo News. The guy said that if they gave him a job in Florida, he would move down there with them.
One by one, that is how it happens.
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