GENESEE COUNTY, N.Y. — At a cost of $4 million per job, the subsidy deal designed to bring the first tenant to a vacant industrial park in rural Genesee County would be the richest in Western New York history.
Plug Power is in line for an estimated $269.5 million in tax breaks and power discounts in exchange for building a plant that would create 68 jobs.
The cost per job dwarfs other local subsidy deals. Subsidies for a data center built nearly a decade ago in Lockport worked out to more than $2 million a job. Government money invested in the Tesla solar plant in South Buffalo cost a little more than $500,000 per job.
Tom Speaker, a policy analyst for Reinvent Albany, a good government group, termed the Plug Power subsidy per job “completely unjustifiable.”
“We have never seen a number that high, not in recent memory anyway,” he said.