Flaggers directed single lane traffic past the State Route 825 and Perimeter Road intersection in Rome the week of July 7, the start of an on site detour that Oneida County called the next phase of roundabout construction feeding the Griffiss International Airport Triangle Site. County Executive Anthony J. Picente Jr. said in a July 2 announcement that the project “continues to move from planning to reality and reflects the coordinated effort underway to prepare the Triangle Site.” Rome Mayor Jeffrey M. Lanigan called it “another important step forward for the City of Rome and Oneida County.”

The roundabout is one piece of a construction season that has turned the 332 acre Triangle Site, a former runway apron at Griffiss, into the staging ground for Chobani’s $1.2 billion dairy processing plant. County crews and contractors are simultaneously installing a 12 inch steel natural gas main, a sanitary sewer pump station with a force main, and new electrical service adding 50 megawatts of capacity, according to the same county release. A noise wall meant to buffer nearby homes from the new roundabout traffic was, as of July 2, substantially complete. The county said the roundabout and noise wall are expected to be finished by fall 2026.

The infrastructure work traces back further than this month’s detour. County Executive Picente and Mayor Lanigan issued nearly identical statements on March 24, when the county announced that tree removal for the roundabout and utility corridor would begin immediately, with traffic detours to follow in May. Picente called the March announcement “another major step forward in preparing the Triangle Site for Chobani’s transformative investment in our community.” Lanigan thanked the county and state for “continued investment in infrastructure that supports the Chobani project.” Both releases describe the same underlying facility: a dairy processing operation the county’s own infrastructure announcements describe as 2 million square feet, built to run up to 28 production lines and process more than 1 billion pounds of dairy product a year. Chobani’s original 2025 groundbreaking materials described a 1.4 million square foot facility, a difference CNY Signal is flagging rather than reconciling, since neither the county nor Chobani has published an explanation for the change in the two sets of public materials.

Money for the roundabout and utility work is layered across at least three funding actions. Oneida County has put more than $6.5 million of its own money into developing the Triangle Site to date. The state’s Focused Attraction of Shovel Ready Tracts New York program, known as FAST NY, awarded the county $23.6 million toward site work, the largest single award among seven sites selected statewide, requiring a local match of $2,691,000. County officials have said Oneida County is on the hook for at least $15 million in site expenditures before Chobani’s first production line runs. The county has separately said it expects the site, once built out, to support up to 3.9 million square feet of development and as many as 3,000 jobs across future phases, a larger figure than the roughly 1,000 jobs Chobani itself has cited for its own plant.

The public money is paired with a private tax agreement that runs four decades. The Oneida County Legislature approved a payment in lieu of taxes agreement with Chobani and the Oneida County Industrial Development Agency on June 11, 2025, with the industrial development agency taking its own action on the deal June 20, 2025. Under the schedule County Attorney Amanda Cortese Kolasz walked legislators through, Chobani will pay $90,000 a year during construction, then a fixed $2 million a year for the facility’s first ten years of operation, then payments rising 1.5 percent annually from year 11 through year 40. Legislator Caroline Gable Reale, who represents the county’s 15th District, pressed Cortese Kolasz on how the county arrived at the $2 million figure; Cortese Kolasz said it was reached through property valuation projections. Picente told legislators “an approved PILOT is essential for Chobani to commence construction.”

How that PILOT money gets split among local governments changes as the deal ages, which is why the payment schedule matters as much as the total. In the construction period and the first five years of production, the county keeps 45 percent of the payment, the city of Rome gets 35 percent and the Rome City School District gets 20 percent. In years six through ten, the county’s share drops to 40 percent, the city’s rises to 37.5 percent and the school district’s rises to 22.5 percent. From year 11 through year 40, the three way split evens out entirely, with the county, the city and the school district each receiving 33.3 percent. That structure means the school district, which educates the children of workers building and eventually staffing the plant, starts with the smallest slice of PILOT revenue and only reaches parity with the county and city after a decade.

The Triangle Site’s other constraint is written into a state permit, not a tax table. The city of Rome and Oneida County’s development application for the Triangle Site went before the state Department of Environmental Conservation as a completed application published in the agency’s Environmental Notice Bulletin on April 15, 2026, under application number 6-3013-00361/00001. The application sought an Article 11 incidental take permit because the site supports upland sandpipers, a New York State threatened species that nests in the site’s grassland. The DEC file describes 256 total acres of disturbance across the Triangle Site build out, of which 81.18 acres qualify as occupied upland sandpiper habitat. To offset that loss, the applicants committed to a net conservation benefit plan protecting 155.48 acres of suitable off site grassland bird habitat for 45 years. The DEC’s Utica sub office, whose contact on the filing is listed as Kristina Markey, issued a negative declaration on the application and found no adverse impact on historic preservation resources.

Measured against each other, those two DEC figures show the mitigation the county committed to is larger than the habitat it is removing. CNY Signal’s calculation, dividing the 155.48 protected acres by the 81.18 disturbed acres, puts the ratio at about 1.9 acres of grassland habitat set aside off site for every 1 acre of occupied sandpiper habitat lost to construction, a ratio the DEC filing itself does not state directly but that follows from the two acreage figures in the agency’s own public record.

Rome’s Common Council, which has no formal role in the county’s PILOT or the state’s habitat permit, is working through a narrower but related infrastructure question of its own this summer. At its May 14 meeting, the council voted to study a six month moratorium on new battery energy storage systems inside city limits while it writes zoning rules for them. Sixth Ward Councilor Riccardo Dursi told colleagues the systems “buy energy at a low cost in the evening and sell the energy at a high cost in the afternoon,” but said the council lacks basic answers about where such installations would sit relative to houses and businesses. “We just don’t know anything yet,” Dursi said. “If they’re near a substation, are they near residential? Are they commercial?” First Ward Councilor John Sparace framed the pause as precautionary: “The bottom line here is protecting our residents, protecting our businesses, to make sure we know what we’re getting ourselves into.” The moratorium is a separate city zoning matter from the county led Triangle Site work, and neither the council record nor the county’s releases link the two, but both illustrate a city government spending the summer of 2026 writing the rules for a wave of energy and utility infrastructure arriving faster than its code can keep up.

The construction is happening in a city with a shrinking population and a below average household income, context that helps explain why local officials describe the jobs count as consequential. Rome’s population was 31,795 as of the Census Bureau’s 2020 through 2024 American Community Survey five year estimates, with a median household income of $59,925 and a poverty rate of 18.1 percent, according to that same five year data set. Both figures sit below New York State’s broader averages. A facility promising more than 1,000 jobs, in a city of under 32,000 residents, would be among the largest single employers to open in Rome in decades if hiring reaches the figure Chobani and the county have both cited publicly, though neither has yet published a hiring timeline tied to the fall 2026 infrastructure completion date.

What happens next is dated. The county says the roundabout and noise wall should be finished by fall 2026, ahead of Chobani’s own target of taking its first milk intake in 2027 and ramping toward full production over the following several years. The Rome City School District, which does not gain PILOT revenue parity with the county and city until 2035, is not a party to the county’s construction announcements and has made no public statement tied to the Triangle Site infrastructure work as of this writing.

Sources and verification

• Oneida County government, “Chobani Project: New Roundabout and Noise Wall Construction Underway on State Route 825,” March 24, 2026, oneidacountyny.gov
• Oneida County government, “New Roundabout Construction on State Route 825 Advancing to Next Phase,” July 2, 2026, oneidacountyny.gov
• New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Environmental Notice Bulletin, completed application, City of Rome / Griffiss International Airport Triangle Development, application 6-3013-00361/00001, published April 15, 2026, dec.ny.gov
• Rome Sentinel, “Oneida County legislators approve Chobani PILOT agreement,” reporting on the June 11, 2025 Oneida County Legislature vote, romesentinel.com
• Rome Sentinel, “Rome Common Council to investigate battery energy storage systems,” reporting on the May 14, 2026 Common Council meeting, romesentinel.com
• WKTV, “$23.6 Million: Oneida County Awarded Funding for Griffiss Project; ‘Largest Shovel-Ready Site in NYS,'” wktv.com
• U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020-2024 five year estimates for Rome, NY, via Census Reporter, censusreporter.org