Dueling 'Wall Street West' Efforts in NY, Pa.

Officials in Binghamton, N.Y. are seeking to establish the area as "Wall Street West" to attract backup data centers for New York financial institutions. There's just one problem: the state of Pennsylvania has been using Wall Street West for three years as the brand for its own effort to capture financial data centers.

Economic development officials from Broome County and Empire State Development met Friday in New York with Sen. Charles Schumer and about 25 representatives of New York City's top real estate and financial institutions to tout opportunities in the Binghamton area. The group discussed upstate New York sites in Kirkwood, Endicott and Union that could be attractive for data centers.

The initiative's boosters said it could be several years before a New York City firm decides to create a data backup site in the Binghamton area. Schumer noted that Scranton, Pa., is "another community that is under consideration" - suggesting that the Binghamton team is aware of the existing Pennsylvania "Wall Street West" effort.

After several years of struggling to attract projects, Pennsylvania's Wall Street West recently announced its first major data center development, a  a 228,600 square foot data center in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley being built by disaster recovery specialist Data Based Systems International, Inc. (DBSi).

Pennyslvania's Wall Street West initiative is backed by a $15 million investment from the federal government and more than $6 million from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which saw an opportunity to build on mandates from federal regulators for financial firms to have backup centers outside the New York metro area.