[caption id="attachment_13702" align="alignleft" width="310"] Humberto Romero-Gonzalez receives a certificate on Wednesday from Deborah Tyksinski, associate provost of SUNY Polytechnic Institute. The City of Newburgh resident was one of 20 graduates of a three-week machinist training program at the Newburgh Armory Unity Center. LEONARD SPARKS/Times Herald-Record[/caption]

CITY OF NEWBURGH – A year ago, Humberto Romero-Gonzalez was working in retail sales and fretting the looming onslaught of another Black Friday.

On Wednesday, the 23-year-old City of Newburgh resident was emotional as he spoke of learning a new skill as a machinist and preparing to start a job with LSI Industries, the New Windsor-based manufacturer of LED and outdoor lighting.

“I think this is a career opportunity for me,” said Romero-Gonzalez.

That was one of the themes Wednesday as a crowd of Newburgh, Orange County and state officials gathered in a basement room at the Newburgh Armory Unity Center to celebrate the inaugural graduating class of the center’s machinists training lab.

Romero-Gonzalez and 19 other people received certificates after three weeks of training on machines used to bend and cut sheet metal. More than half are to begin entry-level jobs at LSI starting at $9 an hour.

The lab, outfitted with donated equipment from IBM and funded through a combination of federal, state and county sources, is part of a multipronged effort to train employees for hard-to-fill local jobs and to revive manufacturing in the City of Newburgh.

Partners included the Rock Tavern-based Workforce Development Institute, Kingston-based The Solar Energy Consortium and SUNY Polytechnic Institute.

“Clearly, the economic revitalization of the City of Newburgh is important,” said Carl Meyer, president of TSEC. “This is just one piece of that.”

Meyer, state Sen. Bill Larkin Jr. and Newburgh Mayor Judy Kennedy were among the officials who gathered in the lab Wednesday morning to honor the graduates and talk about the lab’s importance to boosting the city’s economy.

Last month, TSEC announced that it had received $650,000 in federal funding to continue marketing long-vacant commercial space in Newburgh to manufacturing companies.

The federal money is part of $1,380,000 in grants being used to revive manufacturing in Newburgh. The state awarded $500,000 toward the training center, which houses about $230,000 in machinery donated by IBM.

“It’s been very difficult to find reliable people,” said Joe Pedi, president of operations for LSI, which hopes to hire the whole class. “Because they have gone through training, they seem to be a dedicated, more committed group.”

Amber Johnson, 27, is a certified auto technician, but she was working as a housekeeper at the Super 8 Hotel on Route 300 in the Town of Newburgh.

For her, a job working at LSI means more money and more stability.

“You walk around Newburgh, you see different types of things that’s going on and you often wonder, is there anything for the people to do,” she said. “To have this opportunity presented, I think is amazing.”

-Leonard Sparks, Times Herald-Record

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