Two months ago, I asked this question: “Over the past five years, four Brooklyn-based companies have relocated to New Jersey, but, with the expiration of our tax incentives, that pipeline has been shut down. Will it be reopened by Gov. Phil Murphy and the Legislature?”
Unfortunately, the pipeline wasn’t reopened, and the chickens have come home to roost.
Lee Winter of WRE Consulting represents CMS Management Solutions, which has its headquarters and over 100 employees at the Brooklyn Army Terminal.
He said: “In conducting our site analysis, we identified potentially suitable properties in New Jersey and, when factoring in the value of incentives, New Jersey became the best choice, but, when New Jersey’s incentive program expired, New Jersey fell off the radar.”
Now, CMS has a new 10-year, 37,5000-square-foot lease at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. CMS, founded in 1968, provides global logistics, distribution and facilities management to many of the world’s largest financial institutions.
CMS and its employees will not be coming to New Jersey, unlike Mesorah Publications Inc., the largest Jewish publishing company in the world, which moved its operations and 100 employees to Rahway; AP&G, a manufacturer of pest control products, which moved from Brooklyn to Bayonne; Geri Care Pharmaceuticals Corp., which moved its Brooklyn facility with 130 employees to Lakewood; and US Mobile, a rapidly growing global wholesale consumer electronics distributor and remarketer, which relocated 200 jobs from Brooklyn to Elizabeth, all as a result of tax incentives no longer available.
The results are in for a New Jersey without any tax incentives, and they do not bode well for the future economic development of the state rated the most business unfriendly state in the nation. Without any tax incentives to offset the state’s high cost of doing business, we will continue to lose opportunities for jobs for our residents and revenue growth for the state treasury.
I again call on the Legislature and Gov. Murphy to support bipartisan legislation crafted by former Sen. Joe Kyrillos and myself to make New Jersey open for business and attract thousands of jobs and billions of dollars for our treasury that will otherwise go to other states.
Raymond Lesniak is a former New Jersey state senator who authored the state’s tax incentive programs.
