Onondaga County legislators voted Tuesday to require their own approval of any nonprofit donation of $10,000 or more to county government, ending a 13-month fight that began with a $5.7 million transfer no lawmaker knew about until the county comptroller printed it in an audit. Local outlet CNY Central reported the bill passed unanimously.
The local law cleared the County Legislature in a public session at the John H. Mulroy Civic Center, with County Executive Ryan McMahon, a Republican, publicly endorsing a measure first written and pushed by the chamber’s Democratic majority. McMahon called the bill “a commonsense update that saves taxpayer dollars while making it easier for community partners and supporters to contribute to programs that improve quality of life throughout Onondaga County.”
For McMahon, the position was a quiet reversal. As recently as April 14, his administration had argued, through County Attorney Robert Durr and others, that imposing new disclosure requirements on private donors would chill giving and could run into First Amendment problems flagged by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2021 case Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta. By Tuesday morning, the executive branch had moved to support the Democratic bill, removing what could have been a politically costly veto fight.
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The number that moved everyone
The trigger was a single line in a 2025 audit of the Greater Syracuse Soundstage Development Corporation, performed by The Bonadio Group, an accounting firm hired to review the county-affiliated nonprofit’s books. County Comptroller Marty Masterpole released the audit and personally walked Democratic legislators through it before a Tuesday session this spring, telling them that $5.7 million from the Soundstage corporation had been moved to the Friends of the Onondaga County Aquarium without a vote of the Legislature.
Democratic Majority Leader Nodesia Hernandez, who represents the 17th District and led the bill on the floor, told reporters in April that the lack of notice was deliberate. “We feel like that was intentional,” she said at the time. “That is not acceptable.”
The Soundstage corporation is a local development corporation created in June 2018 to operate what was then known as the Central New York Film Hub at 24 Aspen Park Drive in the town of DeWitt. New York State surplused the property and the corporation took it over for $1. “The state didn’t want it, and then the county did at the time,” Masterpole told CNY Central in describing the original handoff.
In 2024, the Soundstage corporation sold the same building to Saab Inc., the Swedish defense and aerospace company that already operates a facility next door on Aspen Park Drive, for slightly more than $5.9 million. Saab is converting the site to expand its munitions and high-tech manufacturing operations.
The corporation’s audited books showed that roughly $5.7 million of those proceeds was then donated to the nonprofit Friends of the Onondaga County Aquarium as a “marquee sponsor” gift, supporting the county’s Inner Harbor aquarium project. No resolution authorizing or accepting the donation went before the Legislature.
Masterpole, the only Democrat to currently hold a countywide elected office in Onondaga County, said the use of the money did not match the corporation’s stated mission of supporting the local film and music industry. “It just seems like a stretch to me that they used Soundstage money for the promotion of the music and movies film industry,” he said, in comments to Central Current.
What the new law actually requires
The local law passed Tuesday rewrites Local Law No. 3 of 1996, which had governed the county’s acceptance of donations from “friends” groups for three decades. The 1996 law required individual Legislature resolutions for gifts over $1,500. In 2025, the Republican-led Legislature voted to remove that ceiling at the urging of the McMahon administration, which argued the small-dollar threshold was slowing the aquarium’s private fundraising.
The new framework, sponsored by Hernandez and co-supported by Democratic Legislators Elaine Denton and Jeremiah Thompson, sets the threshold at $10,000:
- Any donation of $10,000 or more from a nonprofit “friends” group to county government must be approved by an affirmative Legislature vote.
- For larger gifts, the law requires donors to appear before the Legislature.
- For donations under $10,000, the county’s Chief Fiscal Officer must notify the Legislature chair, but no resolution is required.
- The Chief Fiscal Officer must itemize the amount and date of every donation in a quarterly report to all 17 legislators.
Deputy County Attorney Ryan Ockenden told the Ways and Means Committee on April 29 that the bill applies only to money flowing from a friends group to the county itself, not to private donations made to the friends groups. “It’s different if then the friends group turns around and makes a donation to the county,” Ockenden said. “That’s when this local law comes into effect.”
Why McMahon backed it
McMahon, who has presided over the aquarium’s expansion from an $85 million surplus-funded project approved 9-to-8 in 2022 to a $103.8 million construction in 2026, framed the new law in budget-administration terms rather than transparency terms. His statement Tuesday emphasized that the $10,000 threshold lifts an administrative burden by removing the old $1,500 trigger while still preserving Legislature oversight on big-ticket gifts.
The political math also matters. Democrats took control of the Legislature in 2026 and would have had the votes to send the bill to McMahon’s desk regardless. A veto would have triggered a two-thirds override vote, in an election year, with an audit on the floor that already documented $5.7 million the Legislature had not been told about.
McMahon’s office, through spokesperson Justin Sayles, has continued to argue that Soundstage and Friends of the Aquarium are “independent boards who voted to support this project with funds that are not public dollars.” Masterpole rejects that characterization. “It’s absolutely taxpayer dollars,” he told CNY Central. “There’s no chance you can call it anything other than taxpayer dollars.”
The Soundstage backstory
The Soundstage Development Corporation grew out of an early-2010s push by then-Governor Andrew Cuomo to grow film production in upstate New York. State funds, reported at roughly $15 million, built the DeWitt facility. After the state-run film hub failed to attract sustained production work, the property was transferred to Onondaga County’s nonprofit corporation in 2018, which renamed it Greater Syracuse Soundstage and tried to relaunch the operation with a private general manager, Bill Fisher, and an assistant general manager, Bill Murray.
By 2024, the soundstage had not delivered on the film-economy promise, and Saab’s expansion across Aspen Park Drive presented a buyer. McMahon used his 2024 State of the County address to celebrate the Saab purchase as a high-tech manufacturing win. What the public did not see at the time was a board decision to redirect the bulk of the $5.9 million sale into the aquarium project rather than into a successor film initiative or back to the county’s general fund.
The aquarium’s funding picture
Friends of the Onondaga County Aquarium, which McMahon established in August 2024, has reported $7.7 million in private fundraising from 42 donors, an average of about $183,000 per donor, according to figures shared by Friends chair William Gilberti and reported by Central Current. The Soundstage transfer of $5.7 million represents nearly three-quarters of that private total.
Other publicly identified contributions to the aquarium include a $1.25 million donation from the Onondaga County Civic Development Corporation, another county-affiliated entity, and a $3.5 million grant scheduled in the county’s 2026 budget. Reporting in April put the building’s remaining funding gap at roughly $19 million.
The aquarium broke ground in 2024 and is targeted to open in late summer or early fall of 2026 under the name Harborview Aquarium, announced April 14 at the Syracuse Academy of Science. The winning name was submitted by Jennifer Coffey and her family of 10 children, according to Spectrum News.
What critics still want to know
Even with the new law, the names of individual donors to the Friends of the Aquarium remain undisclosed. Gilberti has cited federal nonprofit privacy law and donor preference for anonymity in declining to publish a full donor list. He told the Legislature in April that some donors did not want their names released while construction was still underway and warned that broad disclosure rules could shrink charitable giving across the county. “It saddens me that there’s this kind of discussion going on, because to me it does nothing but have an impact on the willingness of people to consider our organization for their charitable donations,” Gilberti said in April.
Hernandez and her caucus have argued the issue is not about exposing private individuals but about money that originated in a public sale. Democratic Legislator Maurice Brown, the chair of Ways and Means, said in February of last year, when the Republicans were lifting the $1,500 cap, that he worried about “a ‘pay to play’ vacuum” and that “the aquarium won’t succeed if we continue to operate in secret.” Republican Legislator Julie Abbott, who McMahon appointed to the Friends of the Aquarium board, has defended donor anonymity, arguing some contributors give precisely because their names will not be made public.
What happens next
The law takes effect once filed with the New York Secretary of State. The Chief Fiscal Officer’s office will be responsible for the quarterly disclosure reports going forward, and any future gift of $10,000 or more from a friends group to county government will return to the floor as a discrete resolution. That includes any successor donations from the Soundstage Development Corporation, which retains roughly $650,000 in remaining cash on hand according to its audited filings, and any future transfers from the Onondaga County Civic Development Corporation.
The aquarium itself, meanwhile, continues to rise on the Inner Harbor. By the time fish enter the tanks this summer, the rules for how the public money around it can move quietly between county-tied nonprofits will be different than they were on May 4.
Editor’s note on sourcing
This article is based on reporting from Spectrum News Central New York, Central Current, WAER, WRVO, CNY Central and the Central New York Business Journal between April 13, 2026, and May 5, 2026, on County Comptroller Marty Masterpole’s audit of the Greater Syracuse Soundstage Development Corporation conducted by The Bonadio Group, on the corporation’s own filings with the New York State Authorities Budget Office, and on the public legislative record. CNY Signal sought additional comment from County Executive Ryan McMahon’s office, the Friends of the Onondaga County Aquarium, and Comptroller Masterpole; on-the-record statements already in the public record have been used in this piece.
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