Marina/campground owner says state changed rules with Lake Ontario REDI money

Editor:

In response to the article titled “NY approves 17 million in funding for Lake Ontario businesses,” we were originally stated in this publication to receive $542,000 of which we would have to pay 15% which would have been $81,300. Since we had our own equipment and could do the work ourselves, we could use that as payment towards the $83,100.

A couple closed-door meetings and it got adjusted to $200,000 at 50%. In other words, if we spent $400,000 and everything was approved by the state they would reimburse us $200,000.

Trick is we don’t have $400,000 to spend. Add to that where the representative we were dealing with from the DEC retired in the middle of our paperwork and the new DEC representative working from home and not having access to all the document because of Covid-19 delayed all of our paperwork. Now our case has been closed with no funding.

The Governor said he wanted to make sure businesses had skin in the game but we didn’t have enough skins to play his game. Meanwhile two miles down the road at the little used Yates Town Park they were awarded $2.5 million of which they had to pay 15% which according to my understanding was dropped to 5%. Funny how that works.

In the first round in 2017 we were told we would receive $50,000 but again we first had to spend $100,000 and hope we would get refunded $50,000. We ended up with about $6,500.

That’s how they can afford to give $2.5 million to other government pet projects like the Yates Town Park.

Don and Barb Anderson

Green Harbor Campground and Marina

Lyndonville