Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has recently announced a plan to attract new jobs and businesses to Western New York’s STAMP (Science, Technology, and Advanced Manufacturing Park) Tech Campus in Genessee County. The goal of the plan is to boost the economy in Western New York while also boosting the country’s efforts to go green in manufacturing. Federal funding, Schumer says, will help to provide STAMP with the ability to become a regional leader in the tech industry.
What Is the STAMP Project?
The Western New York STAMP project is a development site that’s up to 1,250 acres in size. The site is located between Rochester and Buffalo in the low-cost hydropower zone of the New York Power Authority (NYPA). According to Unicon, the location will help to provide the tech hub with highly reliable power, which is imperative to modern enterprises alongside storage security and data transmission. The site’s location is also meant to be highly accessible to Western New Yorkers, located just five miles north of the I-90 48a exit.
Rochester’s Growing Tech Hub
Since the practice of P2P file-sharing first became popular over 20 years ago, the tech industry in the U.S. has significantly grown, and Rochester has grown its own fair share of tech industry experts. Rochester recently made Brookings’ top 15 cities for STEM sector employment and High Tech Rochester is just one key player in the current upstate tech revolution.
In an effort to fuel the fire of potential in the region, Buffalo-Rochester region businesses began pushing for greater federal funding. This past June, Schumer announced that the region would be chosen as one of 18 tech hubs in the U.S. that would receive a combined $10 billion. Buffalo News reports that the funding would be used to promote technological and scientific innovation.
Fighting Unemployment
Federal funding for the STAMP project will not only help to promote tech innovation in the Buffalo-Rochester region but will also help to supply jobs and careers for Western New Yorkers. As of July 2021, approximately 8.702 million Americans are unemployed, largely due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy. Additionally, with the pandemic still impacting the country, unemployed Americans are looking specifically for jobs that also provide health insurance, dental insurance, and other benefits. The STAMP project can help to supply Western New Yorkers with stable careers in the tech industry and a way to come back from the pandemic’s economic impact.
It’s no secret that the tech industry has changed. For instance, in 2016, up to 47% of senior managers said their employees dressed too casually, but now the U.S. is seeing a start-up boom where casual attire is the norm and remote work is an expected benefit. With new investments in the STAMP project, the development and businesses interested in investing in the development could bring over 2,000 new jobs for Western New York. One such business is Plug Power, which is currently making a $125 million investment in the Innovation Center in Henrietta. The center is expected to bring 377 more new jobs to Rochester.
