Buffalo Business First: RiverBend signals a $5 billion investment
and a
'New Buffalo'
Published:
Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - 23:23
Buffalo Business First
There has not been this many people at the former Republic Steel site in South Buffalo in decades and what they heard came as a big surprise.
Hundreds turned out Tuesday afternoon to hear Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other elected officials join with the chief executive officer of SolarCity Corp. to lay out plans for what they say will be the biggest solar manufacturing facility in the Western Hemisphere.
And for Buffalo that means billions of dollars in investment and the creation of thousands of jobs.
“We’re just starting to get the generator turning. The New Buffalo is going to be bigger and better than ever before,” Cuomo declared at the 184-acre Riverbend site.
It was expected the public and private development would have a price tag of $1.5 billion; that figure has been raised to $5 billion over the next decade. And the number of jobs projected with the arrival of the SolarCity GigaFactory has more than doubled to 3,000 in Buffalo from about 1,300 and, statewide, another 2,000 jobs are expected. New York state’s investment in the development is expected to rise to about $500 million from $225 million, officials estimate. What started with plans for a 250,000-square-foot complex off South Park Avenue has now grown to encompass 1.2-million square feet.
