Troy’s Business Improvement District was to cease operations in the new year because of a budget deficit. But in an eleventh hour decision this week, the tourism and beautification entity was saved.
BID Executive Director Olivia Clemente didn’t believe a last-minute bailout would come, but she was pleasantly surprised. Speaking with WAMC Tuesday, Clemente said the agreement follows a handful of hours-long meetings with the city.
“It was a long meeting of going through the budget, line item by line item with the mayor and the deputy mayor, and there were a lot of compromises, a lot of cuts that we needed to make for them to release this funding for us,” Clemente said. “So really was a going back and forth of a negotiation of, ‘OK, we’ll eliminate that position.’ ‘We’ll eliminate this.’ ‘We’ll eliminate that.’ We had our accountant in the meeting, we had our lawyer in the meeting, and our accountant in real time was like making changes to our budget. So that way there was some kind of agreement that came about, but that agreement came with cuts to staff.”…