Monday, November 14, 2011

Windstream Announces Employees will Occupy Rochester

The City of Rochester will now be providing grants to facilitate the development that will be the office space leased for Windstream employees. As I see it, we are taking tax dollars from one to give to another that provides competition to the original tax payer.

If the goal is to get employees to work in leased office space in downtown Rochester, as opposed to leased office space in Victor I am all for it. I would welcome many former co-workers to join me in working downtown. As an Earthlink employee I enjoy working in the HSBC building with a pending move to our new facility on Monroe and Alexander.

With all of the empty office space available downtown at this present moment I feel we should facilitate filling it, rather than giving away dollars to build a new, not fully leased, building. Rushing into anything at this point to appear as though we are doing something should be avoided. Common sense development should be the way forward to our much empty downtown. We only get one chance with it.

1 comment:

Monkeytoe said...

We shouldn't subsidize anyone to build or lease downtown.

The market will eventually take care of it. If nobody rents the current vacant space, the prices will come down eventually until someone does.

the biggest problem with subsidizing is that it then stifles further development or leasing b/c then nobody will build and/or lease until they too get subsidized.

And the idea of targeted tax breaks are ridiculous. Just by having the program, you are admitting that taxes are too high. So - lower taxes across the board. Why does company x get a tax break while company y does not. It's insane.