‘BOONDOGGLE’

$1 Billion Tesla Factory in New York Has Been a Total Flop, Lawmakers Say

“A cautionary tale is you can’t give governors too much power to get on the phone with egotistical billionaires,” one lawmaker said.

In 2015, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo exalted the plan for Tesla’s billion-dollar factory in Buffalo as “too good to be true.” Now, state lawmakers say he might have been right. Elon Musk’s vision for the site to be the largest solar-panel factory in the Western Hemisphere has fallen short of those lofty expectations. “It was a bad deal,” state Sen. Sean Ryan, a Democrat representing Buffalo, told The Wall Street Journal. “A cautionary tale is you can’t give governors too much power to get on the phone with egotistical billionaires.” The state paid to build the quarter-mile-long factory, which it leases to Tesla for just $1 a year. But despite Musk saying that the factory would make enough product to cover 1,000 roofs every week, it’s reportedly only averaging 21 weekly installations. “In terms of sheer direct cost to taxpayers, this may rank as the single biggest economic development boondoggle in American history,” said E.J. McMahon, founding senior fellow at the Empire Center for Public Policy.