Subsidy Sheet: Congress Could Make OZs Even Worse, Micron Road Upgrades to Cost NY $375m

A Donald Trump’s Opportunity Zone program was already working out spectacularly poorly for New York, mostly going to subsidize luxury housing while threatening to cost state coffers hundreds of millions of dollars in lost capital gains taxes. Now Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” promises to overhaul the program — but according to a new analysis by Good Jobs First, it looks to be more of the same money transfer to the rich:

• While it would require governors to select rural census tracts for one-third of its OZ districts, there are no limits on which tracts can be selected — meaning developers can continue to focus on more profitable land that likely would have been developed anyway.
• OZs would now allow investments of up to $10,000 in “ordinary income” (lifetime limit) along with capital gains, as a way to make the program more accessible to non-millionaires. One problem: Most OZ funds have investment minimums that start at more than $10,000.
• The transparency provisions in the new OZ bill were in the original one as well, only to be stripped because they weren’t allowed in reconciliation bills. The new OZ bill is currently headed for, you guessed it, reconciliation between the House and Senate, meaning we can expect transparency rules to be rejected once again.

A bill in the U.S. Senate, meanwhile, would make Opportunity Zones permanent, eliminating the 2033 sunset date included in the House’s version of the bill and instead having OZs automatically renew every 10 years. New York state could still end its version of Opportunity Zones by decoupling how it treats capital gains from how the feds do it — a bill sponsored by state Senator Michael Gianaris and Assemblymember Jeffrey Dinowitz passed the state Senate this session but got stuck in the Assembly and was not passed. With any luck, the Legislature will reconsider the Gianaris/Dinowitz bill next year so that New York State won’t be forced to continue down the same wasteful path as Congress seems ready to pursue.

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More NY corporate giveaway news from this week:

• Micron’s proposed chip plant near Syracuse may have had its groundbreaking delayed amid an uncertain future, but the state is still moving ahead with plans for an estimated $375 million in road and bridge upgrades to carry the cars of all those Micron workers, if they ever actually show up. New York State should have learned from the billion in taxpayer dollars it spent on Tesla Riverbend in Buffalo not to front subsidy money for speculative mega-projects. 
• Plug Power, which received $270 million from Genesee County in 2021 to create 68 jobs in what was dubbed “the mother of all subsidy deals” and subsequently laid off 300 Albany-area workers amid financial woes, has revealed that it also cut CEO Andy Marsh’s salary last year — from $7.25 million all the way to $2.24 million, which Times Union reports is still 34 times the company’s median salary. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
• The New York City comptroller’s office announced it had successfully reached a settlement of $650,000 in back wages and benefits, civil penalties, and interest from the owners of 160 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, which had received 421-a tax exemptions but then failed to pay its building workers prevailing wages as required under the tax break law.

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