BY JEFF CHUDZINSKI
North Country This Week

MASSENA — The company proposing to bring a green hydrogen facility to Massena is seeking a 20-year Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) agreement.

Air Products and Chemicals officials are seeking the PILOT through the St. Lawrence County Industrial Development Agency, according to IDA Chief Executive Officer Pat Kelly.

Kelly presented to the Massena Central School Board of Education recently to update officials on the proposed change to the PILOT.

A PILOT program like the standard 10-year PILOT through the IDA entails an agreement where a company pays no new taxes for the first five years of an agreement, then pays 50% of what would have been paid without IDA involved over the next five years of the agreement, Kelly said.

Over the 10 years of the deal, companies would see a 75% tax abatement on new investment, he said.

A 10-year PILOT is standard, however any change to that baseline requires final approval from any taxing entity where a project may be based.

That means Air Products would require the school district and other taxing agents to sign off on the change as well.

Kelly told board members when the IDA deviates from the standard 10-year PILOT, a process is triggered that requires the IDA to seek approval from school districts, towns and sometimes a village, depending on where the project is located.

“These are broadly speaking the terms and conditions and we are seeking the taxing jurisdiction board to pass a consent resolution, essentially affirming and agreeing to the broad terms of the PILOT,” Kelly said.

Kelly said the county currently has around 40 active PILOTS, with about half having received approval to deviate from the standard 10-year PILOT.

Some of those projects are in the Massena Industrial Park, though those projects are much smaller in scale, he said.

“It’s more the norm across our portfolio right now than it is the exception,” Kelly said.

Kelly said the IDA would need approval from the board of education to move forward with the deviation from the standard PILOT structure, followed by a public hearing in Massena. A resolution would then be brought before the IDA board for the organization to vote on to approve or disallow the deviation, he said.

Kelly said officials are excited about the prospective project, noting that it checks all of the boxes the IDA hopes to fulfill when bringing business to the north country.

“The county has a comprehensive economic development strategy that has five key goals, one of which is the promotion of the area and attraction of new investment, new firms,” Kelly said.

“Primarily within that goal are objectives that talk about utilizing our resources, our low-cost, renewable energy, our abundant water resources and workforce, colleges and universities. All of that ties together to have reached this point where we are with Air Products and with the investment that they’ve proposed to happen here in Massena,” he said.

Air Products officials presented the project to town of Massena officials earlier this year, saying the $500 million facility would encompass over 84 acres of land on Pontoon Bridge Road.

The facility would be supplied power by the New York Power Authority in an agreement approved earlier this year, allowing the company to produce liquid-hydrogen at the rate of 35 metric tons per day.

Air Product officials say the facility would initially employ 80-100 full-time workers with the potential to expand in the future if operations go as expected.

The facility is expected to be operational sometime at the end of 2026.