County Executive Adam Bello stood at the podium, straightening his gray suit while reporters set up their cameras and microphones around him.
He had just announced some enhancements to the county’s child care subsidy program, but the reporters wanted an update on the homeless people living in the Civic Center Garage downtown, and what the county was doing to address it.
The issue was by no means a new development. In 2014, when Republican Maggie Brooks was county executive, the agency that ran the garage hired a security firm to keep the people seeking shelter there out. The move precipitated a crisis that peaked when the city bulldozed a tent encampment that for many garage dwellers had become a last resort.
Half-way through his first term as county executive, Bello saw the problem as an opportunity to try something he preached on the campaign trail: collaboration. He sent a team of county employees, from social services staff to workers from the Department of Environmental Services, to team up with Rochester police and city staff to try to get the garage’s residents into formal housing.
Bello took office at a turbulent time. Just weeks after he defeated incumbent Republican Cheryl Dinolfo in 2019, GOP legislators moved to strip him of some powers. They failed amid a fierce public backlash.
He took office on Jan. 1, 2020, and within four months the state’s pandemic lockdown went into effect. He’d also spend much of that year and the next tussling with a supermajority formed by the GOP caucus and group of breakaway Democratic legislators.
The supermajority was dismantled last year when Democrats took a one-seat majority in the Legislature. But Bello still faces a chamber that is effectively under Republican control. Sabrina LaMar, one of the breakaway Democrats, was elected president and is caucusing with the GOP, effectively giving Republicans a 15 to 14 majority.
During a wide-ranging, hour-long conversation, Bello touched on how the pandemic altered his agenda once he got into office, his plans for economic development, why he believes it was appropriate for the County of Monroe Industrial Development Agency to give tax breaks to Amazon, and how it’s still essential for the county to plan for the future.
Below are excerpts of our interview, which have been edited for brevity and clarity.
CITY: As a candidate you stressed planning for the county's future. How do you do that at a time of such uncertainty?
Bello: There's no question that my plans going into office were a little upended when the pandemic struck, as were everybody's plans for 2020. Everything changed for everybody.
As I laid out my State of the County last year, we did our budget last year, it was really pivoting to what those other priorities are. It's continued investments in public health, public safety, also looking at our economic conditions and our workforce development to get people into jobs and training for jobs that exist. And then also investments in infrastructure.
I'm talking about roads and bridges but I'm also talking about those amenities that make Rochester a great place to live to help recruit and bring in that workforce and those families. . . We just did a record $7 million investment in our county parks system that we're still working through.
We launched the comprehensive plan process in the second half of last year and right now we're working through public input sessions and working through different groups who are providing input for the county's future.
We have to be able to walk and chew gum here at the same time.
What is the county's economic development strategy at this late stage of the pandemic?
It's all about jobs. I don't know a single company in our county that isn't hiring right now and despite that, we're also leading the state in private sector job growth. We're going to be the first region in the state, in my view, to be able to fully recover our job numbers from before the pandemic. I think that speaks volumes about the foundations that we have here and the climate. But we still have to do more work because everyone seems to be hiring.
I think there's a disconnect here between people who are looking for work, because there's still an awful lot of people who still don't have work or they're underemployed. My economic development strategy here right now is to try to close that gap, that skills gap.
There are a lot of job training programs that are just training people then sending them out into the universe to look for work. We can't think of it that way. We have to think about the job that exists, link that with the training program, and then that's how you put them through. You find an individual, you train them into the job so you fill the job.
When you ran, you said that the public deserved an approach to economic development that is accountable and transparent. What have you done toward that?
What I've done is made it very clear that when a project comes looking for a tax benefit through the COMIDA board . . . there has to be some level of public benefit that comes back to the public, whether or not that's in job creation, whether that's in a public amenity or something of that nature. The example that I was referring to that was inappropriate and shouldn't happen again was the example of the Midtown Athletic Club's expansion project that they did, where I think it was just universally acknowledged that even if they didn't get the COMIDA benefit they would still move forward with the expansion.
What I've advocated for is that projects like that not be eligible to go through the COMIDA process, but instead there has to be some public benefit.
How do you square the incentives package provided for a new Amazon fulfillment center in Gates with that philosophy?
That's the due diligence of the COMIDA board and their legal team.
What happens with Amazon is when they sign up for a PILOT program like this, it provides that year-over-year certainty as to what their payments are, so that when they are working with their lenders and their business model, they know what their payments will be. It also provides certainty to the governments what their payments will be.
Amazon is in the process of hiring close to 1,000 people, so you want to talk about public benefit. Not only by the construction project are the town, county, and school district receiving an awful lot of money in payments, they've created over 1,000 full-time jobs there that are permanent jobs to work in the facility, not to mention all the construction jobs that went into that project as well. That's one of the largest construction projects our region has seen almost ever.
People have been living in the Civic Center Garage for years. Why do you think the problem persists? Are county programs set up to help these people?
The previous approach to dealing with the garage was to either, one, ignore it, or number two, try to arrest your way out of the problem, lock all of the doors, and hope for the best. Obviously, neither of those approaches worked.
We created a partnership with the city of Rochester and I cannot understate how important that partnership is between the county and the city, the county executive and the mayor. And here it worked.
This started last summer. We started bringing our support systems down there to see if something like this would work and since last summer up through last week (the first week of February) we've placed over 50 people in some sort of emergency shelter, housing, or some other support system. I think this new approach is working.
There was even an arrest made last week of an individual who should not have been in that garage. He had five warrants. What a great partnership we had with the Rochester Police Department to go in there, not to arrest your way out of the problem but to look for people who are creating that unsafe environment and get them out of there. It was fantastic.
I think this is the new model because, on a lot of issues that we face as a community, you talk about breaking down barriers and you talk about people operating in silos, you couldn't have had a better example than what was going on at the parking garage.
This intensive effort is meant to have a consistent engagement. It's not a one-and-done.
In July, you announced an effort to redesign county social services. What has happened with that project to date?
The ultimate goal is to deconstruct the centralization of services at St. Paul Street and Westfall Road and instead embed our services out into the community. [Monroe County’s social services offices are located in buildings at 690 St. Paul St. and 111 Westfall Road.]
We piloted this new way of thinking when we used our rental assistance program. We received federal dollars, as did most governments, to set up our own rental assistance program. Instead of contracting with one agency or just going through our Human Services Department, we decentralized it using community-based organizations to have them reach out to their clients in their communities that they're closest to.
It's going to take about three years. But right now we are in the interview stage to make sure we have the feedback from those who actually use the system. We've got to talk to people who actually use social services and find out how to make it work better for them. We spend over half a billion dollars a year in our social service supports programs and we still have one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the country, particularly amongst children. So something we're doing hasn't been working over the last decade, two decades.
This isn't a problem that just suddenly existed a year ago, this is something that's been built for a long time.
There’s no more supermajority in the Legislature, but Republicans more or less control the chamber. Do you see any shift in your relationship with the Legislature?
Certainly they don't have a veto-proof majority anymore, which I think does, by its very nature, will change the relationship and make it more collaborative. Functionally, the Republicans had a 19 to 10 majority for my first two years, they now have a 15 to 14 majority. Clearly a message was sent to the Legislature that people want collaboration not just fighting. Honestly, if I could survive two years with a 19-10 Legislature, a 15-14 Legislature's not going to bother me.
I view it as I've got a job to do. My priorities were clearly laid out, we fought the pandemic together with so many different community organizations despite the politics that existed upstairs and I'm going to continue to focus on my priorities: public health, public safety, economic development, and infrastructure. It's very difficult to argue with those things because they're not politics.
It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or you're a Republican, you live in the suburbs, you live in the city. These are bread and butter issues, they're common sense priorities that I think everybody can get behind.
Jeremy Moule is CITY's news editor.