Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Don Keelan, a certified public accountant who lives in Arlington.
On June 11, Rod Adkins, IBM’s senior vice president for the Systems & Technology Group, made this comment in the Burlington Free Press:
“It is clear that the tremendous amount of data around us can help improve the world. We just need to work together across industries to invent ways to do it. The path to this kind of useful, smarter computing runs directly through the mid-Hudson Valley, where IBMers are helping to build a smarter planet.”
In late May, Dave Gram of the Associated Press, reported the following comment by Gov. Peter Shumlin: “The Circ—-will not be built.”
The Circ is a euphemism for what is officially known as the Chittenden County Circumferential Highway. In other words, when it was first proposed over 50 years ago, it was to be a “Beltway”—an Interstate highway (I-289), approximately 16 miles in length that would move vehicular traffic from the northern end of Burlington, eastward, with a termination near Essex Junction.
Why Essex Junction? Well, if you are not familiar with this part of Vermont, it is the location of the state’s largest private employer, IBM-Burlington, with an employee roster that exceeds 5,000.
In the late 1950s, the Burlington area lost several thousand jobs when American Woolen Plant closed and General Electric went into a major employee cutback. To the region’s rescue came Thomas Watson Sr. and the establishment of IBM-Burlington. About six years later IBM opened another plant 250 miles south of Burlington, in the mid-Hudson Valley, in the small village of East Fishkill, N.Y., not far from IBM’s sprawling plants in Poughkeepsie and Kingston, N.Y. The difference in manufacturing was that Fishkill, not unlike IBM-Burlington would be in the business of making semi-conductors as well as research and development.
In the world of electronics and computing, where semiconductors have been replaced with zettabyte technology, what takes place at IBM-Burlington is also accomplished at East Fishkill. The Shumlin administration would be wise to make a trip to East Fishkill with an “eye” on the possibility that his state’s largest employer could one day pull up stakes and leave Vermont.
Within the last 10 years, the state of New York and local entities have worked with IBM to improve local economic conditions for the Fishkill plant:
a. The state of New York gave the company hundreds of millions of dollars to “re-start” the East Fishkill facility. In the 1970s the plant had close to 16,000 employees dropping to a few thousand in the late 1980s.
b. Dutchess County government provided millions of dollars for the same reason.
c. The company invested over a billion dollars into upgrading the plant, site, buildings and state of the art equipment.
d. IBM worked with other major chip manufacturers at the East Fishkill site.
e. Joint working relationships with N.Y. State Energy Research and Development Authority.
f. Joint working relationship with the N.Y. State Department of Transportation for ingress and egress connections to and from the plant to nearby Interstate 84.
Back to Vermont—where the following has been in the press:
a. Close down building the Circ regardless of the daily traffic congestion to and from the Essex Junction-IBM facility and the $60 million plus that have gone into planning the highway.
b. Close down Vermont Yankee nuclear electric generating facility—IBM can find another source of power for its facility.
c. Continuing to harangue the company over changing its employee pension program.
d. Proposing to assess the company an 11 percent tax for its health care contribution—despite the fact that it has one of the best employer-ased healthcare systems in the country.
IBM recently celebrated its 100th anniversary—it was able to reach this milestone by planning not for tomorrow, but thinking ahead to a generation of tomorrows. The state’s planning has been and continues to be as far out as the next election, generally two years.
Gram, noted in his piece that Sandra Levine, an attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, said “she was encouraged by the announcement (closing the Circ), and particularly Shumlin’s statements that he wanted to focus on smaller projects…”
It would be wise for our state officials to pay attention to Rod Adkins’s last sentence noted above—he’s referring to the Hudson Valley, not Chittenden County.
