A father-son team working on a housing development near Kodak Tower are being ordered to repay project tax breaks after officials learned of “egregious” labor violations.
Work began two years ago on the vacant three-story building at State and Factory streets, on the northern edge of the High Falls district. The $1.3 million project would convert the building to 16 apartments, mostly market rate, but with a couple of affordable studios, while adding a rooftop deck.
Local officials welcomed the investment, granting tax incentives in exchange for the developer’s promise to hire locally when it came time for construction.
“It's good to have development anywhere, particularly housing right now,” said Ana Liss, executive director for the County of Monroe Industrial Development Agency. “It's not a bad project."
And initially, everything was fine — until it wasn’t.
"It's just willful and egregious violations of our local labor policy," Liss said of the problems that arose. But that is "pretty easy to remedy: You just hire local workers to do the work on the project, and don't lie to our local labor monitor.”
Broken promises
Monroe County’s IDA is one of the few in New York state to require 100% local labor, with limited exceptions that require prior approval.
“What often happens is, if there's an issue with local labor compliance, it's remedied, it's addressed, it's taken care of,” Liss said. “And then this situation doesn't rise to the level where COMIDA has to terminate benefits.”
That would not be the case here.
COMIDA awarded mortgage and sales tax exemptions as well as property tax breaks valued at more than $260,000 — all with the local labor policy attached. Most of those benefits were to come upon completion and occupancy of the building at 350-362 State St. But the developer already has claimed thousands of dollars in tax reductions.
“They gave us something, and they arbitrarily took it away,” said Robert Feld, a Manhattan attorney representing the developer, Neville Greaves and his son, also named Neville, and their Brooklyn-based company NKG.
Liss offered a different account.
Between February and March of this year is when she says things went off track.
The local labor monitor found workers from outside the area. He also noticed — or suspected — that others were trying to stay out of sight, told on at least one occasion there were no workers on the upper floors as he heard banging upstairs, officials said. Other times there was no activity at the site. Officials now suspect workers were hiding.
The problems resurfaced in June. Then in July, a man claiming he worked at the site showed up at COMIDA’s door.
The last straw
“He claimed he was asked to lie about his residence and state that he's an employee of Sovereignty Plumbing,” Liss said. “And he was provided with an insurance form with a name, a company name, and an address, a local address, to share with the local labor monitor. And the person told COMIDA staff he had taken the bus from Brooklyn.”
Three times, to be exact, staying 10 days each time, officials said, relaying the man’s account.
Sovereignty Plumbing is a Rochester business operated by Marcus Parker. Reached by phone, he said he doesn’t have any plumbers from Brooklyn and hasn’t been on site nor spoken with Greaves in months — since early May, by his account and city records.
Yet, in June, the local labor monitor reported finding an out-of-area worker on site, saying he was with Sovereignty Plumbing. The man was from Brooklyn.
This is the Greaves’ first development in Rochester, and when they spoke to the COMIDA board back in 2021, they said it would not be their last. Asked if they were aware of the local labor policy, they answered, “Yes.” Asked if they expected to require any exemptions: “No.”
Labor leaders have been increasingly vocal about exemptions to the local labor requirement. But here, none were made.
Feld argued that they had no control over what outside contractors were doing. And loss of the tax breaks “is putting a lot of pressure on my client to finish the project,” he said, adding: “It’s in the best interest of the county not to do this.”
Liss put the onus on Greaves and NKG.
“We had phone calls, we sent letters,” she said, “and there was never an effort to, in good faith, remedy the situation. … This was an alarming experience for staff. Something like this has never really happened.”
COMIDA has terminated benefits before, but rarely. The most prominent in recent years involved CityGate and the former Kodak Hawkeye Plant. In both cases, the then-owners had a payment in lieu of tax agreement and stopped paying.
“I don't know that it necessarily would have risen to the level of termination,” Liss said of NKG, “had this individual not come to us, and said he had been instructed to lie.”
