Good News York by Growth Mode Content - GNY.195 | feat. Ryan McMahon

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Micron Project Update: Bechtel, Local Hiring, and Major Investments Coming to Central New York Host Matt Masur interviews Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon about major developments tied to Micron at White Pine Business Park in Clay, including preparation for foundation pours and a roughly $1B initial construction contract leading to vertical construction. McMahon highlights Bechtel as the phase-one builder for two fabs and describes local labor requirements and the project labor agreement prioritizing hiring through union halls before bringing in outside workers, alongside regional training efforts. He also notes major wastewater infrastructure investments, including an industrial project won by Kiewit, and addresses that CHIPS-related benefits are performance-based and tied to job creation. Additional updates include Clay’s $30M community host agreement with Micron, Micron’s $250-per-child boost to federal “Trump Accounts,” TTM Technologies’ expansion, and broader regional momentum in high-tech manufacturing and supply-chain recruitment. 00:00 Construction Oversight Plan 00:23 Welcome to Good News York 01:21 Micron Build Begins 04:20 Local Hiring Commitments 06:47 Tax Incentives Explained 08:52 Clay Host Agreement 12:21 Kids Savings Boost 15:40 Beyond Micron Growth 19:11 Investing in Future Sites 22:04 Wrap Up and Next Steps

This company will oversee the massive construction. They'll be bringing on big subcontractors, small subcontractors, working with us on the local labor requirements that we have to make sure that we source every local person in this community on this construction site that we can before we go outside. Hey folks, Matt Meager from Clickstream Studios. Welcome to another edition of Good News, York. And man, do we have some good news. You might notice joining me here is our returning champion.

He's been here a few times. First time in the new space, which is pretty cool. Welcome, Onondaga County, Executive Ryan McMahon. Welcome back to the show, my friend. Thanks, Matt. And congratulations on the space, by the way. It's dynamic, and certainly everybody should check this out and consider coming here and utilizing what you've built here.

I appreciate that. That means a lot. So we've worked hard to get it in shape, and it will always continue. continually evolve. I feel like I'm never quite happy with it, but it's, uh, uh, that's labor love, right? That's right. Uh, anyway, enough about me. Uh, you're here to talk to us about so many different things. We originally talked about coming in and there was one, uh, great story that we wanted to cover. Uh, in, in the time it took to get here, which was only a day or

two, there's a whole list of other things. So if you wouldn't mind, let's dive right in and tell us a little bit about our new neighbor's, Mike Ron. Yeah, I think what, when you think about, kind of just the moment we're in. I think right now is when things are really coming into action. When Micron at the White Pine Business Park in the town of Clay right now is essentially preparing for foundation pores with their first contract, which is about a billion dollars that they've been investing in this community in 2006 in construction, hundreds of workers. Once the foundation pores happen, you'll start to see vertical construction. And, you know, you. the major player they announced this last few weeks is Bechtel, one of the world's greatest

companies as far as building. And they're coming in, they're going to build phase one for Micron. Phase one is two fabs, the fab that's going to be built right now and then the second fab. But when Bechtel comes in, they come in and they're part of this community. They're going to be hiring and transferring in people from around the country to work here and live here. I met with the Bechtel team just a couple days ago, and five out of the people in the room with me have already located in out of the county or have housing that they're going to

have here. And so I think it's just kind of the power of what's happening here. This company will oversee the massive construction. They'll be bringing on big subcontractors, small subcontractors working with us on the local labor requirements that we have to make sure that we resource every local person in this community on this construction site that we can before we go outside. But we do know that we will go outside, right? We don't got enough, right? And hopefully by FABs three and four, we'll have enough right here. But that's an opportunity, right? We're going to bring in hundreds of workers. They're going to call out of county home, hopefully forever. And that spending power comes in. That's going to help drive small businesses to do more. Think about restaurants.

You know, think about hospitality industry, right? All these people coming in that don't have houses. So they're going to be here living, but they're going to be out in the community spending money. So that's a big deal. In addition to that, when you think of what has to happen for Micron's project is our huge wastewater projects, an expansion at the municipal wastewater facility at Oak Orchard, we're going to announce who wins that contract in the next few weeks. but the industrial project, which is about a billion dollar investment over, over, you know, about four or five years, Keywitt has won that process.

And Keywitt, again, is this major national player who's going to be coming into the community. They're going to be here. They're going to be having their offices here, hiring people full time here. So again, you're talking about hundreds of jobs to support the construction here, which is just really exciting. Yeah, no, that's great. And I'm glad you touched on the hiring because that's one thing I hear from a lot of folks is, you know, they're going to bring in all these other people for these jobs. And I think the thing that I try to reiterate is, yeah, after we take everybody we can get here, you know, and that's the thing that I don't think folks necessarily realize is we can take everybody we got in town and it's not enough. So there's two things to help protect that too.

before we announced this project in 2022, Sanjay, the CEO of Micron, said we will not announce this unless until the project labor agreement is done, meaning that I'm not going to go announce a project and then get leveraged later on, right? That's smart business. But what it also did for us is it guaranteed the terms for our builders and trades, our union labor, in a process that basically, yep, you're going to go to the union hall on hire. And then if you don't got anybody at the bench in the union hall, you have a certain amount of time to then bring someone in from outside the area. But as far as the county benefits go,

that was part of the overall process for state, for local, for federal benefits. The county, we have a local labor policy and we have goals. And certainly if you can show that you just, there's a specialty, you can't find people here for that specialty. We will be flexible, right? We, We did that with the Amazon project. But the idea is you're going to hire in Central New York to receive the county benefits. And so you have a project labor agreement that dictates a lot of this, but then you have our requirements on top of that. And so local folks are going to be working on this. And the workforce development programs that are going on with all of our partners from on ramp to Center State to McNee to smaller partners like Jubilee Homes and others,

there's so many different training programs right now, getting people equipped and ready for the jobs, whether it's the jobs in the facility, but right now focusing on building the facility. Yeah, it's incredible. And, you know, this is a thing that's had me excited as a business owner since the project was very first announced. And it's not because I thought that Micron was going to become my new big client. It's because of all of these kind of supporting ancillary businesses that are coming to town, staying in town and needing the things that I offer. So it's awesome.

Well, that's the thing, right? So yesterday, and like my phone went dead when I was going to respond to somebody on Facebook, I wanted my posts. So he got lucky because I was about to prove him wrong. But I think the message was like, geez, we're talking about something else exciting that we'll talk about, you know, another thing in Mike Grounds doing to invest in the community. And they kind of said, well, you know, but they're getting all of our tax dollars.

A couple things here. the every layer of benefits from chips in science to New York State green chips to county benefits are all performance based they get nothing literally nothing unless they create the jobs okay so what do the jobs mean with Micron and the you know let's say the tier one suppliers right the ones you can that are servicing there that wouldn't be here it's about three billion dollars in payroll a year. So I don't, we look at what that is, multiply that out over 30 years. And that's a lot more than the tax dollars they got.

And by the way, for the county resident or central New Yorker, we don't pay $3 billion worth of tax benefits at the federal state or local level to, it's not like our dollar, those are all our dollars. What it is is dollars that would have gone into coffers from across the country, are being focused here in central New York. We are the net beneficiary of this and driven by the White Pine Business Park, right? And that process.

So overall, yes, Micron's getting benefits. We are the big winner in that process because we are getting all that money here. And I think everybody needs to realize, too, this is a critical national security project. This technology, memory technology specific, drives national security applications. AI applications.

So it's got to be done somewhere. We're really lucky it's being done here. Yeah. I'm very excited. It's such a neat project and so many cool things coming about. And, you know, as you talk about money, that kind of leads us into the next thing is they just

created an incredible agreement with their... I'm going to say their hometown of Clay, right? Tell us a little bit about what Micron did there. Yeah, so I want to give a big shout out to Joe Beck and his team in Clay. The supervisor, what they did is essentially when you have a big project, you have a building permit. And the building permit fee, the code in clay or any town doesn't factor in 120, $150 billion

projects, right? And so the number would be so massive based off of the formula. But the law says you can only charge for what your essential work is. So essentially your engineers and your co-eastern. inspectors, you can only charge for what work they do. So what Joe did in the town of clay is they created a community host agreement, which is a lot more money than what they would have cost them. And so $30 million over essentially $20 million over three years and then a $10 million investment from Micron in the town of clay. And so $30 million is going to come to the town of clay

and that's going to create flexibility for the town board when it comes to issues like infrastructure and property taxes. And then that $10 million investment from Micron, you'll see in issues to help support the community, whether it's senior centers, whether it's housing, whether it's other community investments. And I think that's important because we were talking about this for a minute. If you live by the site, it's going to get tough. We're not going to sugarcoat that. Sure.

All right. It's going to get tough. You're already seeing all the traffic. It's going to be one of the largest construction sites in the country. And so it's important that everyone acknowledges the community that's hosting this is actually sacrificing before we get the benefit. So I think that was a great thing for Mike Ryan to do. That's going to give the town board flexibility to invest back in the community.

And at the county level, we're going to continue to co-invest to in the town of Clay to make sure that these folks know it's going to get. better, but right now it's going to be an active construction site for a period of time. Listen, there's an active construction site pretty much everywhere you turn these days. So it's, I feel like it's unfortunately sort of becoming the norm. But I always try to be the optimist of going, man, this road is going to be awesome when it's done. Try to think of that.

It's progress, right? Think about a lot of things are getting fixed, and there's a lot of new investment. So if it was just that these things weren't getting fixed and there wasn't any new investment, we'd be complaining that there's no investment here and that the road sock and this is all that, you know. And so, but that's not where we are. We are literally the hottest community in the northeast in this country. And there's only two other communities across the United States that are seeing this type of investment.

It's Phoenix, Arizona, and it's essentially Austin, Texas, in that area, driven by high-tech manufacturing. And that's what's going on here. That's so exciting to see. It's just a nerd. I just love to hear. high-tech manufacturing. I started my career many years ago in the IT world deploying Micron PCs. They used to make desktop computers back in the day. And that was how I got my start, actually. It's so funny how things come together. Full circle.

There's even more good news from Micron. They're doing something for our kids. Tell me what this is all about. Yeah. So the federal program, right, that the federal government's labeled as Trump accounts, right? they're going active with $1,000 per kid, and everybody should, you know, essentially look at that, right, 18 and under and figure out how you get that. Because essentially it's $1,000 for your kid that goes into a savings account that can compound and turn into like an IRA instrument. Micron has agreed for the central New York counties in the counties in Idaho and Virginia where they are to invest in additional $250 per kid. So for me, I got three kids right now under 18 and I got a baby on the way. That's essentially $250 per kid that is going to go into an account. It's going to compound over time.

And eventually when my children are of age to retire, they're going to have that there. And you can get the $1,000 at the federal level. So I think $12.50 per kid. And again, most communities don't have an anchor like Micron that is doing that. Most communities, I think the Dell family started this with the White House, and they're seeding a bunch of accounts for kids in different income brackets, which is tremendous. But when you think about financial stability and retirement, it's just an added benefit. And certainly I want to thank Sanjay and his team for not just Anadaya County, where we are, but Central New York as a whole. No, that was the neat thing about it is, you know, I keep calling them our neighbor, and they are just being a great neighbor, I feel.

like because yeah we're home here in onondaga county but it's uh i believe keuga madison oswego i may even be forgetting another one but i think courtland's in that too yeah all of these counties are going to benefit which to me really speaks to the bigger picture of this whole project right right we're very excited here locally but what has transpired uh is really this massive effect on the whole state yeah and if you think about it we we label it and branded the central new york semiconductor cluster. Certainly in Onondaga, we are the community that supports our bedroom community and counties, essentially, is the economic club of the region and our investment in the infrastructure and the white pine and will help drive opportunities in Oswego and Madison and

Cayuga and Cortland and other parts of the state, right? This is going to be massive. And we're proud of that, right? We want to get our investments first, right? Yeah, of course. We're paying the money for all the infrastructure so we need to get the jobs and then once more jobs come eventually though they'll get into these other communities as well for sure um and mike ground and all these companies are going to be hiring their residents creating wealth for them uh but overall uh it's it's something special and i think people are gonna like they're finally feeling it um you know my friend was a flying just on an airplane i think like two days ago and he sent me a picture of like the site looked from the air and i just posted it on facebook but it's just awesome yeah it's just awesome and for people um now they're

that site will be as visible as a lake when you're flying in and out of central New York. It's pretty awesome. That's neat. That's neat. What else we got? Anything else that we should talk about? I got to give a big shout out too because this is right now what the strategy of, you know, the alignment of leadership, the key industry partners, bringing together all your universities, you know, the critical investments in infrastructure. It's not just semiconductor.

Defense Aerospace Affiliations in high-tech manufacturing, radar, you unmanned aerial systems, the TTM technologies expansion, which is really badass. You know, we cut the ribbon this past week. That's going to solidify the 600 jobs that were here with TTM Anoran, 400 new jobs. Kathy Gridley and her team are amazing. I know they're going to continue to hire here,

but those are the circuit boards that the memory chips will go on for defense applications. And so that's a huge win. We won that process through a site selection process after the Micron announcement. So that was really validation in people believing that this has got legs, right? Micron is not just going to eat up all the workforce. This is a community that will be able to recruit talent. retained talent, and we made that. If we weren't talking about micro on the $130, $140 million investment at TTIM,

would be the second largest private sector investment in our county's history. So we've got to celebrate it. And that's what we're doing. And I'll tell you, we went to, I go to this conference, Select USA, and this year we had our own booth on the Idaq County. Normally you team up with your state. And we just didn't have, you know, the state wasn't going to give us enough, you know, enough real estate on the booth, right?

We got a big story to tell. We had our own booth, and dot com wrote a good story about it. They actually came and witnessed it, because I don't think even they believed it. But we had more activity at our booth than probably 35 other states. Wow. And it was, I felt a little bad for our friends in the northeast, like New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont.

They're all around us, and everybody was coming. And they all wanted to talk about high-tech manufacturing semiconductor, certainly defense, aerospace, radar, but unmanned aerial systems, UAS, everybody's heard about the drone corridor here. Yeah. We had Ukrainian companies, Taiwanese companies, all coming and wanting to talk. So something special is going on here. I think what everybody should do is just figure out how you plug into that.

And that doesn't mean you need to go work for some of these companies. Maybe you have a small business that can tap into the supply chain. Maybe you're a restaurant that can figure out how to get in front of. of 8,000 construction workers for lunch or breakfast or dinner. Sure. And that all creates jobs. And certainly as these people come into the community, you know, spouses will be coming in, families will be coming in, which will create population growth and opportunities for everyone

else. That's incredible. It's just so much good news, which is just what we're all about. And I love that it's happening here. And just thank you so much for all your efforts and your team and all that everybody who continually, not even just, you know, it's almost. like, all right, we won the project and now the real work begins, right? Yeah, I can tell you that, and that's true.

You know, selection is awesome. It's like a major rush, right? That you're competing and, you know, for a project we were flying all over the country, you know, hidden meetings so the media doesn't report, and then you win, it's awesome, right? But to actually execute from the permitting to now the construction to the infrastructure construction. and now focusing heavily on the supply chain recruitment, which we have wins. We're going to get more, and we're going to have to invest more, right?

I think that's the thing is like, you don't, to stay on top once you get there, you need to continue to invest in yourself and your cultural and entertainment infrastructure. We're going to have to continue to do that. We're doing a lot of that, right? We've got a great aquarium project that's going to be up and running here in weeks. but in addition to that, supply chain sites. The reason Micron's here is because we took a lot of risk and we built out the White Pine Business Park

and we took it from a 300-acre site to a 1,400-acre megacite. We're going to have to do some things, not at that scale, but we're going to have to make multiple bets, you know, multiple supply chain sites across the community so that we can continue to host these companies that want to be here. If we don't do that, the companies will go somewhere else. And so I think that's like the next step for the community to get ready. We're going to be active.

Construction is going to be active. It's going to not be pretty at some moments in time. But we're going to continue to invest in ourselves to make this community some place where you and I want to live and our kids want to live. And we're going to continue to invest in the formula that has gotten us to where we are. I think that's incredible. And, you know, just quickly, something to note on that is what a lot of folks, and I've mentioned this many times, but what a lot of folks really need to understand is this white pines became a thing long before there was a micron. Yeah.

And it's because we prepared this site that we were an option. And it sounds like like you're saying, we need to do the same thing, so we're ready for everybody else. Without that site, unequivocally, micron is not a new one. There was nowhere else, right? And because we had that site, that's how microns started talking to us. That's how we were talking to Intel for the whole time. And then they eventually went to Ohio and we got Micron. We were the big winner there.

Yeah. You know, that's why there was other companies that were in line if we didn't win Micron, right? Sure. It was about the site. You know, then it goes site, community, business deal. And without the site, you don't get to showcase your community. Right. And then once you're done showcase your community, then you cut the business deal, right?

And so the power of developing sites is really one of the, of the key economic tools that you need to do if you want to see economic development. Sure. I love it. I'm excited to see it. I can't wait to figure out where the next site is. And then we can play the game of what the company is going. That's right. That was fun for a while with Mike Ron. We knew something was happening in the community, but we didn't know exactly what. Right. There's a lot of guessing games going on. But, man, it's great. This is so awesome to have you. Anytime you want to come by and continue to share the good news of what's happening here, we are all about it. So we have been so excited to be able to help share this story from the groundbreaking on to until the day the fab opens here, hopefully, and beyond.

So this is awesome. Yeah, I think soon, too, we'll probably have some of the leadership. I think Sanjay and some of the federal leadership will probably be back in town. You know, we're certainly going to have foundation poor soon. You know, that will be a big deal. Yeah. So it's funny because, like, when you're working with the supply chain, you know, they're like, oh, yeah, you're doing all that. but you haven't poured concrete yet.

Well, you know, now we are, right? So, you know, that's going to be the next big celebration. And that's really going to trigger when Bechtel comes on board and starts doing the foundations for the whole site. Yeah. And then certainly getting ready for vertical and weathertight construction. It just reminds me recently we had one of our clients who was a local commercial realtor. And she was commenting on how many sites she's seen with elevator shafts going up. Yep.

And she got, you know, that's your first indicator. that a new big building is going up. And she's like, I've never in my life seen so many of those as we drive around the area. And it just shows us expansion. And like you say, that'll be something to really show for it. And at that point, it's just off to the races. So I love it. I love it.

Ryan McMahon, On Dog County Executive, like I said, anytime. Come on back to Good News, York. Happy to share the stories. And we just really appreciate you spending some time with us. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. And again, congratulations on your success. This is a great facility. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Hey, folks, that's it for this episode of Good News York. We will see you next time. Peace out.