Syracuse, N.Y. – The Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency meeting to formally approve the Micron Technology chipmaking complex in Clay has been pushed back by a day.
The agency was scheduled to meet Monday morning to vote on the project and more than $2 billion in tax breaks for Micron.
The meeting has been rescheduled to 9:30 a.m. Tuesday in the Onondaga County Legislative Chambers. The chambers are on the fourth floor of the Onondaga County Courthouse, 401 Montgomery St., Syracuse.
County Executive Ryan McMahon’s office did not return messages to explain the postponement.
A separate public hearing on evicting a 91-year-old woman from her home on the Micron site and seizing rights of way on two parcels for an industrial wastewater line is still scheduled for 9 a.m. Thursday. That hearing will be at Clay Town Hall, 4401 Route 31, Clay.
The agency will vote Tuesday on what’s known as a findings statement, essentially giving Micron the go-ahead to start work once it obtains the necessary permits. That follows acceptance Nov. 7 of the final environmental report on the project, which took three years and came to more than 20,000 pages.
On Tuesday, OCIDA will also vote to:
- Approve $2 billion in sales and property tax breaks for Micron. That’s in addition to the more than $22 billion in subsidies already granted to the project by the state and federal governments. Taxpayers will pay for about half of the estimated $51.5 billion cost to build two chip factories at Route 31 and Caughdenoy Road.
- Start the process of selling to Micron just over half of the 1,400 acres OCIDA has amassed at the corner of Route 31 and Caughdenoy Road. Micron will pay OCIDA $30 million to buy 820 acres of the proposed campus. OCIDA will reinvest that money into improvements on the site, according to a 2022 agreement.
- Award Micron $3.6 million in tax breaks to build a rail spur across Caughdenoy Road. Micron plans to bring millions of cubic yards of aggregate to the spur and bring it over Caughdenoy via a conveyor belt system 18 feet above the road.
The findings statement to be voted on Tuesday is the last step of the state’s environmental review process.
“The statement identifies the social and economic, as well as environmental, considerations that have been weighed in deciding to approve or disapprove an action,” according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
Micron still needs approval of the U.S. Department of Commerce, which conducted the environmental review along with OCIDA. Robert Petrovich, deputy county executive and executive director of OCIDA, said that’s scheduled to come Dec. 17.
Petrovich said Micron still plans to start work in December.
While construction and opening the first two factories has been delayed by two to three years, Micron is rushing to start cutting nearly 500 acres of forest as quickly as possible. The work will take four months, Micron estimates, and has to wrap up by March 31 because two species of bats protected by the Endangered Species Act return to the site every spring.
If Micron doesn’t get all the trees cut by March 31, it couldn’t start cutting again until November.
Micron still needs permission from a variety of government agencies to start clearing hundreds of acres of trees next month. Some of those permits are already being issued; DEC last week issued Micron’s preliminary air permit. That permit allows Micron to emit as much carbon dioxide as 200,000 cars.
Micron needs 10 permits from DEC alone, although most of them are related to wetlands and would likely be issued simultaneously. The company also needs a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to fill in about 200 acres of wetlands on the site.
OCIDA formally accepted the project’s final environmental impact statement on Nov. 7, declaring essentially that the report answered and offered mitigation measures for all environmental concerns raised by the massive project.
That final statement also revealed, in an appendix, that Micron has delayed construction and opening of the first fabs by two to three years. The first fab is not set to open until 2030, eight years after Micron first announced the project in October 2022. The second fab is now scheduled to open in 2033.
Each fab and its ancillary buildings will cover as much ground as the New York State Fairgrounds. Micron has formally applied to build two fabs and says it could build two more by 2041.
More than 9,000 people could work at the four fabs by the time they reach full production in 2045, Micron says.
Read more about Micron Technology in Clay
- Watch video: Hearing on Micron eviction ends with pepper spray, shouting, man’s removal
- Over 150 people pack Clay hearing to fight eviction of 91-year-old widow for Micron project
- McMahon says county has made offer to widow it’s trying to evict for massive Micron project
- County approves Micron project, giving the chipmaking complex its biggest boost yet
- 91-year-old Clay widow sues Onondaga County to stop eviction from Micron site
