Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Onondaga County executive Ryan McMahon. The Republican is in his second full term as county executive and recently delivered his annual state of the county speech. Prior to his service as executive for the Onondaga County, he served as that county's chair of the legislature. County Executive McMahon, welcome back to the program, good to see you.

Ryan McMahon: Glad to be here.

GR: All right, thanks for making the time. So let me just start with the speech. What, you know, briefly, what is the current state of the county?

RM: Yeah, I think if you look at where we are, you know, we put forward a pretty bold vision coming out of the pandemic and made strategic investments and turning the White Pine Business Park into a mega site to attract a high tech manufacturer. We're now in a position where, let alone we were successful attracting one, but now the company, Micron Technologies, the greatest memory technology company in the world, is constructing and they're building. And with that, we're starting to see the first economic boom. And to support them, there's going to be massive infrastructure investments that are about to start. And that means jobs, and it means jobs for people, and it means more people coming into the community spending money on the community, which means more revenue for county coffers to address longstanding issues related to people. And so, the way we've talked about it, you know, towards the end of the speech, is if you look at the metrics of the county and what we do, we've cut your tax rates over 40% since we've been here, your taxes, as the assessment value in the community has gone up, we've given that back to you. Our poverty rates are starting to go down, which is obviously been a core mission of my administration since we've been here. Jobs are going up. We're exceeding every metro, essentially, in the state of New York. Private sector investment is going up, and it's really just getting started. And so, I think overall, our goal was to land this project at White Pine, now our goal is to create this central New York semiconductor cluster. And we're doing that and we're starting to see the supply chain co-locate. We announced the first, at the speech, the first win. Wonik Materials, the South Korean company is going to come to Onondaga County. And then, we are going to have a lot more wins to talk about later this year as well.

GR: So, just to follow up on that last point, and you anticipated a few of my questions there on what you just covered, I'll come back to them, but it sounds like the spin off from Micron is already beginning to happen, that there are these other companies now that want to be in the same physical location because of Micron, things related to that business or things that they think they can profit from being here, correct?

RM: Yeah, I think that's, if you look at this industry anywhere around the world, but, it's a little bit easier to look at here in the US where, certainly over the last 20 years the industry, you know, kind of, moved to Asia, but if you look at the pockets where it exists today in Oregon, legacy Intel operations, they have huge clusters, right? A lot of material supply companies. If you look at what's going on in Phoenix, that's the best comparable for what's going to happen here. TSMC being the anchor, Intel does have high tech legacy manufacturing there as well. Now all these supply chain companies, the gas and chemical companies, the tooling companies, materials supply companies, they're all locating there. In Texas, you have Texas Instrument and Samsung, right? So those are really the three clusters. What we're creating is the Northeast essential cluster here in Onondaga County. And it's really going to be driven by memory technology, with Micron being the anchor. And we've all seen how well Micron is doing as a company. AI uses memory technology more than logic technology, and so having the best memory company is a big deal. And it's going to mean that this is a really strong, sustainable cluster, and a national security cluster as well.

GR: One of, you mentioned the AI, and the relationship between that and what Micron does, and I want to ask you a question that's kind of related to that, in a way. I went back and I looked at the history of Micron’s stock price. And what got me thinking of that was, it had a bad month up until a couple days ago, where it had lost 20%. But if you look at the…

RM: Had a really good year before that. (laughter)

GR: Had a really good year before that, exactly, I was going to say. Then if you go a little bit further back, it has quadrupled in price and then yesterday went back up like 10%. My question is, that's just a lot of volatility, and it's great for investors if they can ride out, you know, the dips, but does just this fact that Micron is playing in the space where there's a lot of volatility and particularly with AI, a lot of uncertainty, does that worry you at all?

RM: No, for a couple reasons. One, the stock markets are stock markets, right? It doesn't look at the health of the company. Essentially that helps drive price, but, you know, Micron, when they announced this deal, I tease the CEO, Sanjay, about this, it was a $50 stock when they announced this deal in 2022.

GR: (laughter)

RM: Now it's probably at, it hit 440, right? That's what you're referencing, maybe a little higher.

GR: Yeah.

RM: And now it's probably in the high threes.

GR: I think so.

RM: But the fact, if you follow stock trading which I, to a degree I do, not really, don't really have the time for it, but the great companies all have like these big shifts, right? You know your Apples, your Amazons, your Teslas, your Nvidia's. So now the fact that Micron is in that league, we should feel pretty good about that, right? I think what we should feel really good about is that they can't even produce the consumer demand with their existing consumers right now and their customers, and so that means they have to grow and grow fast. Their competition are the Korean companies Hynix and Samsung. Samsung, not as much anymore, but Hynix. All these companies are all investing big in more fabs. And we’ll be their largest, you know, North American investment, the largest investment in the company's history. 100 billion is the number used, but Grant, it's going to be more than 100 billion. It's going to be, the CapEx on this is going to be much more than that when it's all said and done. So, I think overall we have the right company. Out of all the mega projects that we're competing for, you know, we learned from the TSMC deal, that's what basically gave us the confidence to go grow the site. We were in on the Intel project. Essentially, we built out the site for Intel for a long period of time, and then we won Micron. It's a good thing we got the Micron project, not the Intel project, as that stalled out Columbus. So, I think overall we're in a great position. They were here last week, community week, announcing, you know, $30 million, $35 million of investments in the community, everything from housing to transportation to child care, workforce. I just met with their team again, you know, making sure that, we get all of our infrastructure projects on time so that they can be making chips on time and, you know, continuing to work together to bring suppliers here and create that ecosystem.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon. So, you mentioned this in the outset of our conversation here, but one of the issues that you originally ran on was poverty. And I know it's been, you know, one of your top priority issues. How is that challenge been going at the county level? What been happening with that?

RM: Yeah. So, if you look at our time here, you know, we walked into a global pandemic where, tough to operate, put in policies to do things that changed life for a period of time. And also, because of all the money into the, to help address families, it also kind of camouflaged where actual poverty would settle at the end of the day. Once you're getting ,families are getting, you know, money for two years that they don't get anymore, they're outside poverty ranges, right, but artificially. So, I think overall, what we've learned is there are key aspects of, you know, we'll say, things that prohibit work that need to be addressed and I think as a community, we're addressing them. If you think about child care being a big one, there's an affordability piece to that, but there's also an infrastructure piece making sure you have enough child care capacity. Between the State of New York and ourselves, we are spending a lot of money on both sides of that. So, I think we are making progress there. Micron's investing in that as well. When you look at transportation, the ability to get people to work, we're making strides there. When you look at, you know, early childhood education, I think that's the biggest thing from a long-term. Kindergarten readiness, we spent a lot of money on that, and that's been something really important to me. If you're kindergarten ready, you are going to pass that third grade proficiency exam. If you do that, you're going to graduate high school. I'll share with you this one project that we do, G...