Business View Civil and Municipal | Volume 2, Issue 7

61 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7 Committed to being accessible, Ruffino will take those meetings at any time, ensuring that new and potential businesses know the town is always there for them. “When they reach out to us and that call comes in, I make sure I’m available,” he says. “Whatever time it is, whether it’s a weekend or not. Honestly, I look at businesses like they are partners in our community.” According to Paul Leone, Consultant for the Lancaster Industrial Development Agency (LIDA), “We have Robert James Sales, which just put up another 100,000 square-foot warehouse in the Town of Lancaster. They are already located in seven different areas within the United States and they opted to build this new warehouse in the Town of Lancaster. Another building was just put up by a foreign-owned company called PCB Piezotronics Inc. You can see that our draw is not just local, it’s worldwide businesses that we are dealing with.” In addition, global technology manufacturing business Derrick Corporation is currently in the process of building a 271,000-square-foot warehouse in the town. “They were talking about going to Texas, then I met with them and they’ve turned around and now they are doing it here in Lancaster,” says Ruffino. He attributes Lancaster’s appeal to the wide range of services and resources available, as well as the way the town approaches each new potential business. “The reason that we are so user-friendly in this town right now is the fact that we have all the infrastructure that’s necessary for a lot of major growth to come into Erie County,” Leone reports. “A lot of the other towns and villages may not have sewers, they might not have this, they might not have that. Lancaster has all the infrastructure necessary for all the different projects that we are talking about. What we do is we look at every single plot of land and everything that is necessary to make this happen TOWN OF LANCASTER , NEW YORK LIDA Consultant, Paul Leone