The battle lines appear to be drawn with this economic czar and czars… How can anyone from downstate know what the 5 different economic regions need? They can’t, one has to focus strictly on upstate.

Paterson in tiff with Upstate business leaders

The Governor had visited upstate, but he hadn’t yet had upstate angry at him. “And I know that I was never contacted, I know that my coalition partners in Binghamton, Buffalo, Syracuse and Utica,” Sandy Parker said last week, the CEO of the Rochester Business Alliance. The outrage hit fast, news that the Governor was considering the elimination of Upstate’s economic chief. It had been considered a positive step taken by Paterson’s predecessor to beef up upstates economy.

Today, the Governor fired back at angry Rochester business leaders. “I would invite some of those people who said they were irked to please call me, because I let them know from the time that I became Governor two months ago, if they had a problem, they should call me, and not one of them dialed my phone number in the past few days,” Gov. Paterson said. But the Rochester Business Alliance says they’ve gotten the word out in other ways.

Articles ran across the state, they say, so figuring out they were angry shouldn’t have been too hard. The Governor said today he hasn’t even made up his mind yet about the fate of the Upstate economic czar position, only that no one should panic if he *does* make the move. “I want to centralize leadership, I don’t want to diminish any services, I don’t want to get rid of anybody per se, I just want to try to respond to some institutional problems to which I was made aware when I first came into office,” Paterson said.