According to a budget approved by Olympic Regional Development Authority leadership, one of the biggest employers in the Adirondacks and Catskills is gearing up to bring on new full-time staff.
The authority, originally created to take care of the 1980 Winter Olympics facilities at Lake Placid, has expanded to manage ski mountains throughout the region — including Whiteface, Gore, and Belleayre.
Berkshire Bureau Chief Josh Landes spoke with journalist James Odato of the Adirondack Explorer to find out more.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: this conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Odato: The spending by order is weighed by the amount of visitations or visitors that come and are attracted to its venues and its events, and all those things help stimulate the economy because, in theory, they fill motels, hotels, B-and-Bs, short-term rentals, restaurants, steward shops — you name it — in the Adirondacks, and the dollars get sent around, and hopefully, the economy gets stimulated.
That's the way the Olympic authorities' mission runs. Also, because it's a big employer, that payroll is something you want to keep an eye on because its spending usually means dollars taken home to North Country and Catskills homes, and so you want to keep an eye on what they're doing with their their payroll and their employment levels.
Landes: Now, looking at this new budget for the coming year, there's been a lot of expansion in that budget, more jobs added.
What does that mean for ORDA, and what does it mean for, as you say, these locations in this part of New York State that rely on that for tourism, for jobs, for all these X-factors in the economy?
Odato: They're talking about adding growing from what was proposed in the past as a much smaller number of FTEs, or full time equivalent jobs, they want to increase that to 736 in the upcoming year, and that would grow to 752 in the year after.
They were talking in the 600s a year ago, and so the fact that they want to increase the number of full-time equivalent jobs gives the impression it's a signal that they're expecting a surge in business.
The CEO indicates that not only is the FTE number growing as they refine their projections of needs for employees, but they're also trying to manage their overtime budget.
And so, if you're paying a lot of money to overtime in overtime, there's a few ways to manage that. And one is to add more people, so that the people that you have now aren't working multiple shifts or long shifts and getting paid a lot of money for the hours over your normal shift.
It's an indication that the organization is moving toward hiring, and in 2025, the authority employed 2,200 people. A number of those people are seasonal, temporary, and part time, and full time. And so what they're going to what they're doing is they're adjusting.
They want more FTEs. In order to do that, you are going to be adding the number of people that are working the equivalent of full time work, and it's a signal to their financial people that their operating expenses are going to be going up.
Landes: From your experience covering the region, what are reactions like to this news? What does this mean for residents, for leaders in the state, for elected officials? How's this being received locally?
Odato: The Olympic Regional Development Authority generally has been getting lots of support from Albany. The Hochul administration has given them a lot of support financially, and they are getting lots of support.
It seems to me, from the legislature, the budgets that are approved in Albany provide literally hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of the last seven or eight years in capital money, so that they could build, upgrade, add to their facilities.
It's going to be $1 billion dollars in investment before long, in just about a decade.
Also, they get about $13 million a year in operating assistance from Albany. So, nobody's come out and said, 'We're glad you're adding jobs,' but what they have done is continuing to support the Olympic Regional Development Authority financially. And if they didn't believe in what they're doing, if they didn't support what they were doing, the money would probably have all kinds of strings, or might be reduced.
I haven't seen any serious reductions. They always don't always get what they're expecting. Sometimes it gets trimmed by a couple million during the budget pairing process, but it seems to me that they get substantial support from Albany financially.
