Two Syracuse-area business groups, once chilly, plan merger to promote local economy

Syracuse.com reported that the Syracuse area’s two most prominent business organizations today will announce a proposal to merge, a combination that would give the region for the first time a unified voice for economic development.

The Greater Syracuse Chamber of Commerce and the Metropolitan Development Association of Syracuse and Central New York began in July to study the feasibility of merging the two non-profit organizations. An 11-member committee led by former Syracuse University Chancellor Kenneth Shaw and Mary Anne Tyszko, the chairpeople of the board the MDA and the chamber, respectively, recommended merging the two groups.

“The real opportunity here is to build the most effective organization to promote business in Central New York,” said Robert Simpson, who became president and CEO of the MDA one year ago and would lead the new group.

It’s a union that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago.

Historically, the two organizations have represented different constituencies, with the chamber looking out for small businesses and retailers and the MDA representing the area’s large employers, particularly its big manufacturers. While the chamber enthusiastically endorsed developer Robert Congel’s Destiny USA mall expansion project and its unprecedented tax deals, the MDA remained silent.

Previous leaderships at the chamber and MDA would sometimes battle over who should get credit for recruiting companies to the area. When the chamber organized the Syracuse Economic Growth Council in the late 1990s to coordinate business retention efforts by the area’s government and private economic development organizations, the chamber’s leadership privately complained that the MDA sent only a lower-ranking representative to the council’s meetings.

Under the proposal to be made public today, the chamber and the MDA would create a new, still-unnamed organization. The chamber and the MDA would continue to exist as separate legal entities, but the new organization would employ their staffs and operate both groups as a single organization.

The proposal would have to be approved by the organizations’ boards of directors and by their member businesses. Read more here.