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Albany County holds public hearing on local law to authorize backing convention center debt reserve
Summary
County held a public hearing and discussed a local law to authorize funds and an administrative arrangement that would let Albany County serve as a backstop for the Convention Center Authority's debt reserve in exchange for a share of hotel-occupancy tax revenue; resolution details and numbers will be provided later.
Albany County legislators held a public hearing on a proposed local law that would authorize the county to enter a funding arrangement with the Albany Convention Center Authority, including serving as a backstop for the authority’s debt reserve.
Monica Kuzieski, identified as the head of the convention center, attended the meeting and county staff described the local law as the first step; the detailed mechanics will be set forth in forthcoming resolutions. "This is step 1, which is a local law, and, again, the mechanics and the articulation of what is essentially the funding agreement ... will be introduced via resolution," a county staff member said.
County staff said the arrangement under discussion would make the county a backstop for a bond debt reserve the convention center is seeking, and in exchange the county would receive administrative fees drawn from some of the convention center’s hotel-occupancy-tax receipts. The staff presentation emphasized that the local law establishes the project and an appropriate government purpose; the resolutions to follow will lay out numbers and protections to ensure the county is made whole if the county must provide funds for the reserve.
Committee members asked procedural and substantive questions. One legislator asked whether the proposal requires state legislative ratification; staff said it does not and described it as an intermunicipal funding arrangement. Another member asked if the plan would change an existing hotel-occupancy-tax distribution formula; staff replied, "No. It doesn't change" the formula but said the county is exploring alternative mechanisms to capture additional hotel-occupancy-tax revenue linked to the convention center project.
The public hearing was followed by a motion to move the local law forward. The committee took the public-hearing motion; county staff said detailed resolutions will follow to provide the full funding and administrative terms. A later staff comment indicated one abstention was recorded for the related procedural vote at the meeting.
The resolutions that will follow are expected to show the actual numbers, administrative-fee structure and language that would allow the county to recoup any funds it provides from hotel-occupancy-tax receipts collected by the county.
