Upstate businesses rally to retain, improve and grow

Rally, brainstorm, come up with a workable agenda. That was the order of the day Wednesday as business leaders from throughout upstate New York met with the intent to improve commerce.

About 60 men and women converged at Bristol Harbour Resort as part of the second annual Unshackle Upstate confab.

Its slogan, printed on lime-green fliers, is "We want our economy moving. Not our people."

After years of seeing a dwindling work force, smothering taxes and a lack of enterprising initiatives to grow and attract business, upstate business leaders seem to be closing ranks to take on government.

"We've doubled our participation from last year," said Sandy Parker, head of the Rochester Business Alliance. "There's more participation and more discussion. The energy is higher."

Parker said about a half-dozen specific goals will be gleaned from the planning session and included in Unshackle Upstate's 2008 agenda, which will be released soon.

Unshackle Upstate's goal is to "tell Albany the state we're in."

According to the Business Council of New York, the area is behind the national average in job growth, average annual wages per job, total personal income and population growth.

Indications are the commercial-roots movement is not going unnoticed by lawmakers. For example, they made progress in reforming workers' compensation, the council says, but more needs to be done - primarily tax reform.

Although the event was announced to the media, when a reporter showed up and started taking notes, she was told the confab was off limits to the press "because this is a planning session, and the presence of the press would change the tenor of the room and make people less likely to share their ideas," one of the organizers said.

Unshackle Upstate says it includes 57 organizations representing more than 32,000 employers. It contends that New York is the second costliest state in the union for businesses.

The coalition said it would share with the public ideas from its brainstorming session in two weeks' time.