New York: Democratic New York State Comptroller Candidate Raj Goyle commented on the news that the Micron chip factories in Upstate NY will be delayed by 2-3 years:
“This is déjà vu — another multibillion-dollar boondoggle that taxpayers are being forced to bankroll because Albany failed to do its job. Micron was sold to the public as a generational investment, but now the project is years behind schedule, and New Yorkers are left holding the bag for a $25 billion promise with no accountability in sight.
“Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s silence and inaction are indefensible. His office should have been conducting aggressive, transparent oversight from day one — auditing the terms, tracking performance benchmarks, and protecting the public from exactly this kind of corporate bait-and-switch. Instead, he’s asleep at the switch while billions of public dollars hang in limbo.
“We’ve seen this movie before. Andrew Cuomo’s so-called ‘Buffalo Billion’ handed nearly a billion dollars in corporate welfare to Elon Musk’s solar panel factory — a $959 million embarrassment that never delivered the jobs or innovation we were promised. Now, history is repeating itself on a far larger scale, and the watchdog who’s supposed to guard our money is missing in action.
“The Comptroller’s job isn’t to rubber-stamp delays or wait for headlines — it’s to protect taxpayers. When I’m Comptroller, we’d have real oversight, real consequences, and real transparency before a single dollar left the treasury.”
Raj Goyle is the founder of Phone Free New York and the board chair of the 5BORO Institute, a leading think tank in New York City dedicated to solving public policy issues facing the NYC Metro area. Goyle has an extensive career in politics and advocacy, including four years of service in the Kansas Legislature, where he was one of the first Indian Americans elected to office in the country. He has worked as a civil rights lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union and was CEO and co-founder of Bodhala, a legal artificial intelligence company which was acquired in 2021.
