Legacy Tower to be photonics HQ

ALBANY – The meeting Tuesday at the state Capitol was brief, maybe all of 15 minutes.

After weeks of private negotiations among the warring factions, one of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aides, Jim Malatras, outlined the final compromise to bring a $600 million photonics center to Rochester.

University of Rochester President Joel Seligman and SUNY Polytechnic Institute CEO Alain Kaloyeros were at the table. And the powerful leaders agreed to the deal, ending their public squabbling over the locations for the project.

The former Bausch + Lomb building in downtown Rochester will be the headquarters for the photonics center, with workplace development to be housed at the Sibley Building and manufacturing to be based at the Eastman Business Park.

Cuomo and local leaders made the announcement Thursday. The sides said they were happy with the end result, vowing that they would work together to hopefully bring thousands of jobs to the Rochester area.

“New York is incredibly proud to be chosen as the home for this new, groundbreaking photonics institute, and we are hard at work to ensure development of this job-creating, game-changing project advances as quickly as possible,” Cuomo said in a statement.

Cuomo and Vice President Joe Biden first announced in July that Rochester would be the home base for the American Institute for Manufacturing Photonics after New York won a national competition for a $110 million investment by the U.S. Department of Defense. The state is investing $250 million.

The business headquarters and “technology accelerator” for the institute will be in the Legacy Tower, formerly home to Bausch + Lomb. The Sibley Building on East Main Street will house a workforce development center to help locate companies and, in phase two of the project, provide incubator space for startup companies.

Eastman Business Park, the sprawling former headquarters for Eastman Kodak Co., will be the site of the center’s manufacturing operations.

Seligman said the key is the pledge to have the manufacturing work, which will likely be the bulk of the jobs, at the Eastman Business Park, which has been a top focus for redevelopment. The jobs would likely to go to Building 318 in the park, which has about 200,000 square feet of space.

“The biggest deal is we clarified where manufacturing would be,” Seligman said. “What this project is really about is manufacturing, and it was tremendously consequential that it will be located in Eastman Business Park.”

Questions remain, however, over how the project will proceed.

There will be a new seven-person board to oversee the project, scrapping a former governance structure: Three members from state government, two from the SUNY Polytechnic Institute, and one each from the University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology.

So state officials will have the majority on the board, which has yet to be named.

But Assembly Majority Leader Joseph Morelle, D-Irondequoit, said he’s comfortable with the arrangement. It will be Cuomo’s office, not SUNY Poly, that will have the most members on the board, which local officials suggested would ensure that the state, not the Albany-based institute, has control over the project.

As a close Cuomo ally, Morelle ultimately acted as a mediator to get the deal.

“The governor and I had spoken, and he immediately recognized that he was concerned that Rochester hadn’t had enough voice at the table,” Morelle said.

The sides had been at odds over where to locate the headquarters. Seligman preferred the Sibley Building, where high-tech work is already underway. Kaloyeros and Rochester Business Alliance CEO Robert Duffy — Cuomo’s former lieutenant governor — were angling for the Legacy Tower.

Seligman accused Kaloyeros of trying to usurp local leaders. Kaloyeros made it clear that SUNY Poly is the lead architect of the project and was working with the University of Rochester and the Rochester Institute of Technology on its creation. When the sides tried to meet in Albany last month, the meeting was scuttled at the last minute, fueling the bad feelings.

But as the jockeying drew jeers from the public and perhaps jeopardized the government grants, the sides went behind closed doors to hash out a compromise.

“Truthfully, the location of the headquarters I think we’ve been saying all along wasn’t really the issue,” Morelle continued. “There were two issues for me: One was the degree to which we were going to have a partnership that was truly a partnership that included Rochester’s voice. And the second thing, the most important thing about the facilities, was where is the manufacturing going to occur.”

Duffy said the pick of Legacy Tower for the business headquarters was important.

“We cannot emphasize enough how important the business headquarters location is for the region. Without it, nothing else is possible,” he said in a statement.

Still, SUNY Poly also owns manufacturing hubs in the town of Greece and in Canandaigua, and the research that would lead to the manufacturing will likely be done mainly at those sites. Canal Ponds in Greece is where Cuomo and Biden announced the project.

“All the pieces of the puzzle fit in nicely together,” Kaloyeros said. “All the assets complement each other and will be useful for the consortium. Honestly, Rochester should be very grateful to have Andrew Cuomo focused on it.”

Seligman said the U.S. Air Force in particular wants to move quickly on the contracts. He anticipated the headquarters and initial work would be underway in the next few months.

The research and development by the public and private entities will aim to create the next generation of photonics, which uses light to develop high-tech lasers for precision parts, computer processing and national defense systems.

Already, the Rochester area has about 15,000 workers in the photonics industry.

Other leaders said they were pleased the public fight was over — and were hopeful it would remain that way.

“Today’s announcement is confirmation of what we’ve known all along — that nowhere on Earth is better equipped than Rochester to bring the science of photonics to life,” Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-Fairport, said in a statement.

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What’s next

Rochester and state leaders in the next few months hope to start filling office space at the former Bausch & Lomb building for the headquarters of the Integrated Photonics Institute for Manufacturing Innovation, a $600 million project between the state and federal governments.

Reaction

Here’s what local leaders had to said Thursday about the agreement on locations for the photonics center:

"This state is a new hub for high-tech industries, and these new facilities will be a great example of how we are transforming the economy in Upstate. I thank all of our partners for working together to make this happen—it's another great day for Rochester."

-- Gov Andrew Cuomo

It is the biggest transformational investment in Rochester since companies like Bausch and Lomb or Kodak, so it’s only fitting that manufacturing will be at Eastman Business Park and new Photonic jobs will grow at the former Bausch & Lomb tower and at Sibley.”

-- U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer

“The reason I spent more than three years fighting to bring a photonics manufacturing institute to Rochester is the widespread economic impact it would have across our entire region.”

-- Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-Fairport, Monroe County

“I think it’s a perfect compromise and the new board that is being constituted will give Rochester equal access at the table, and the governor’s office will make appointments to make sure that they can continue to arbitrate this going forward, and it will give clarify to the Department of Defense on facilities.”

-- Assembly Majority Leader Joseph Morelle, D-Irondequoit, Monroe County

“That is a compromise, and I’m comfortable with it. We have a governance system that is going to work and we identified manufacturing as Eastman Business Park, which is by far the most important part of this agreement.”

-- University of Rochester president Joel Seligman

“We cannot emphasize enough how important the business headquarters location is for the region. Without it, nothing else is possible. The headquarters will serve as a magnet for companies and an epicenter of photonics decision making.”

-- Robert Duffy, president of the Rochester Business Alliance and former lieutenant governor