The jobs the 'Salina 29' rallied to keep in eminent domain fight 5 years ago didn't have fancy high-tech titles, but they were real.
Jessie Motell, of Syracuse, still has his job making foot-measuring devices at Brannock Device Co. in Salina, thanks to the lobbying efforts of the "Salina 29." Mall developer Robert Congel wanted the county to evict 29 businesses to make room for a research park for his huge Destiny USA retail plan. That plan evaporated, but the small businesses are still providing livelihoods for 400 workers. Salina, NY -- Carole Salisbury has spent many years working in manufacturing, and she has the calluses on her hands to prove it.
“I’m a factory girl,” said Salisbury, 67, as she assembled foot-measuring devices at the Brannock Device Co. in Salina. “I like a routine, and this is it — working.”
The routine could have come to an end for Salisbury and the other 13 people who work at Brannock if mall developer Robert Congel had his way.
In 2005, Congel proposed building a $2.7 billion, 325-acre energy research park to support his planned Destiny USA retail and entertainment center down the road in Syracuse. He asked Onondaga County government to use eminent domain to acquire the land — and evict the 29 small businesses and their 400 workers.
The businesses banded together to fight it. Calling themselves the Salina 29, they waged a public campaign against the wealthy mall developer.
They won. They kept their businesses.
Now, the companies are investing in their properties again, making improvements they put off during their battle with Congel. Salisbury and the other workers still have jobs. They are buying cars, paying their mortgages, upgrading their homes and contributing to the local economy.
Meanwhile, the energy park went nowhere.
With her job at Brannock Device Co. saved from the eminent domain attempt, Carole Salisbury, of Weedsport, felt secure enough to buy a new Pontiac G6 last year. “This would have been one of the greatest economic development disasters in Onondaga County,” said John Sposato, the group’s president and owner of Pilot Travel Center and Sposato Floor Covering Co., which employ 125 people.
A spokesman for Congel’s Destiny USA development company declined to comment Saturday.
Salisbury, the factory girl from Weedsport who worked for 22 years at General Motors’ Inland Fisher Guide plant before it closed in 1993, said she dreaded the prospect of finding another manufacturing job.
“I was concerned that it could all end,” she said. “Us older ones, we thought it could just be tremendous bad luck that government could have the last word.”
Feeling more secure, Salisbury last year took on a $380 car payment and bought a new Pontiac G6.
Sky-high plans
The region had never seen anything like Congel’s plan. Complete with futuristic drawings of a giant arch over Interstate 81, it called for 6.5 million square feet of laboratories, office space, testing facilities and a 325-room hotel. He called it the Petroleum Addiction Research Park.
As a private developer, Congel could not force the landowners around 7th North Street to sell. Only government could. So he asked the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency to do it, then sell the land to him for his research park.
Congel planned to wipe out the businesses — whether they liked it or not. The developer predicted the park would employ thousands of people in high-paying technology jobs, more than making up for the 400 jobs it would displace.
Those jobs were old school: the Gianelli sausage-maker, Butch’s Automotive and Transmission, Syracuse Crank and Machine, and Solvents and Petroleum Services.
Faced with their stiff opposition, the county Industrial Development Agency negotiated with Congel for months, mainly over how much money he would put up to relocate the businesses.
The agency never reached a deal. Its refusal to vote amounted to a rejection, so the developer withdrew his request and filed new plans for a much smaller research park on a 51-acre site that would not require the taking of private property.
Michael Bush is co-owner of Bush Electronics, one of the Salina 29 businesses that rallied to save their properties. Five years later, the Salina 29 believe they dodged a bullet, especially in light of what has happened to Congel’s Destiny USA project a mile away.
Congel began construction on Destiny’s first phase, a 1.3-million-square-foot addition to his Carousel Center shopping mall, in March 2007. But after two years of construction, work stopped last summer over a dispute between Congel and his lender, Citigroup.
The bank refused to continue advancing money on a $155 million construction loan, calling Destiny a failed project with no tenants.
The matter remains tied up in court as the huge concrete shell of Congel’s mall addition sits empty, its unfinished exterior reminding many of prison architecture rather than dazzling with the promised re-creations of old-time Italian villages and the Erie Canal. The proposed smaller research park appears dead, too, though it remains on file with the county development agency.
Back to normal
Sposato said his floor covering business suffered because the two-year battle distracted him and caused him to put off needed roof repairs and upgrades to his storefront.
“If you’re not going to own your own building, why would you put a new roof on?” he said.
Sposato recently did the repairs and upgrades to the business, but he had to do it during a recession when he could least afford it, he said.
“When business was good, that’s when we should have been doing it,” he said.
Paul Krawczyk, senior project manager for the floor covering business, said he made similar choices with his personal spending.
“You cut back,” he said. “All of the little extra things you spend money on, you stop spending money on.”
With the threat gone, he recently fixed up his 24-year-old home in Onondaga. He renovated his home’s stone facade, re-landscaped his front yard and is getting ready to replace his deck.
Phil Jakes-Johnson, owner of Solvents and Petroleum Service, said he recently opened a second facility, in Syracuse’s Near West side, safe in the knowledge that his main facility in Salina was safe from takeover.
Craig Peterson, owner of Peterson Plumbing and Heating, said he spent $5,000 repaving his parking lot only after the battle with Congel was won.
“I had put off everything,” he said. “It was very distracting.”
The fight
Under eminent domain law, Congel would have been required to pay the businesses the fair market value of their properties. But the businesses feared that they would receive much less than what the properties were worth to them and would receive little, if anything, to pay for relocation. Many worried they would be driven out of business.
So the Salina 29 went on the offensive.
They attended nearly every hearing and meeting of the county development agency for two years. They held rush-hour rallies in a field overlooking Interstate 81. They hung signs denouncing Congel’s plans on their buildings and on a large trailer they parked in the field where they held their rallies.
They borrowed an ice cream truck from one of their members, Husted Dairy, covered it with anti-eminent-domain signs and handed out free ice cream at a community parade in Mattydale.
“They heard the noise,” Jakes-Johnson said of the development agency. “They knew they could not do eminent domain quietly.”
Their efforts helped to inspire businesses in Auburn to launch a similar public campaign earlier this year to block a move by the Pioneer Cos. to use eminent domain against three businesses for an 88-room hotel and conference center.
Encouraged by the Salina 29’s success, the Auburn businesses drew 150 people to a rally in April opposing Pioneer’s request. In May, the Auburn Industrial Development Agency voted unanimously to reject the company’s request.
“People brought babies and dogs,” said Renee Smith-Ward, who runs an Auburn dog-grooming business that was among the targeted properties. “It was our local community people just showing their support.”
Salina 29 members say they came close to losing their battle with Congel. They said they believe the county development agency and Congel were only $1 million apart on the issue of relocation costs.
But Gregg Kidd, co-founder of Pinnacle Investments LLC and then a member of the development agency, said he insisted — and the rest of the agency’s directors agreed — that the developer should pay all relocation costs. That could have easily reached $10 million to $20 million, he said.
That may sound like a lot of money. But compared with the projected multibillion-dollar cost of building such a big research park, the relocation costs should have represented nothing more than a “rounding error” to the developer, Kidd said.
Congel offered $2.16 million for relocation costs, plus another $1 million if the development agency determined the initial amount was insufficient.
Butch Strutz, owner of Butch's Automotive & Transmission in Salina, wonders what the land along 7th North Street would look like if the businesses there had been kicked out for a research park that was never built. He was active, along with other "real people, real businesses," in fighting the eminent domain attempt. Nevertheless, Butch Strutz, owner of Butch’s Automotive & Transmission, said he believes the businesses came close to losing the battle. In the end, their public show of solidarity made the difference, he said.
“Nobody has sympathy for an attorney,” he said. “Whenever there was a meeting, we showed up with 10 or 15 people. Real people, real businesses. When we spoke, we were speaking from the heart.”
Strutz wonders what the acres of small businesses along 7th North Street would look like today if they had all been uprooted for Destiny.
“Would it look like the mall down the road there?” he said. “I’m still looking for the Tuscan Village.”
--Reach Rick Moriarty at rmoriarty@syracuse.com or (315) 470-3148.