The Fairlife deal: what Webster traded, what was promised, and what's actually in writing

Stand at the east end of Tebor Road and the scale of what Webster agreed to is hard to miss. Seven hundred and forty-five thousand square feet of production, warehouse, and office space on 110 acres of what used to be Burrows family farmland. Stainless-steel silos catching the morning light. Trucks queuing at the gate. Inside, production lines have been running test batches since late November. First shipments of fairlife ultra-filtered milk, Core Power, and Nutrition Plan shakes started mid-January.

The plant is the largest single industrial development in Monroe County history and the largest dairy production facility in the northeastern United States. It is owned by The Coca-Cola Company, which acquired Fairlife in 2020, and it will process five to six million pounds of raw milk a day at full operation, drawing from regional dairy farms across western New York.

Webster's role in making it happen is more complicated than the press releases suggest. To understand the full picture, you need four numbers, a stack of public dollars that has never been consolidated in one document, and a 14-month gap nobody has explained.

What the facility is

The site was assembled in October 2023 from three parcels: $4.27 million for the main Burrows Bros. tract on Tebor and Basket Roads, $3.0 million for 1807 Tebor Road from ERK Properties, and $157,000 for a smaller Burrows parcel on Basket Road. Total land cost: $7.43 million. Total project cost on Fairlife's RP-412-a application to COMIDA: $660 million.

Governor Hochul, County Executive Adam Bello, Town Supervisor Tom Flaherty, and Fairlife CEO Tim Doelman broke ground on April 18, 2024. General contractor Haskell built the shell in roughly six months using 400 concrete wall sections cast on-site and a 660-ton crane. Peak construction workforce hit about 700 tradespeople.

Production-line testing began in late November 2025. As of WHEC's December 17, 2025 report, Fairlife had nearly 300 people hired with about 40 jobs left to fill. Full 24/7 operation is targeted for the second half of 2026.

At full operation the plant will generate about 200 semi-trailer and tanker truck movements a day. Fairlife told WHEC it does not plan to ship by rail, even though active Ontario Midland Railroad tracks run alongside the property.

The jobs story: four numbers

This is where the framing of the deal and the legal mechanics of the deal diverge. The headline number is two and a half times the legally enforceable floor.

250. This is the number you have heard. It is the figure in the May 2023 announcement from Empire State Development, repeated by Governor Hochul, by Bello, by Flaherty, by COMIDA, and by every regional outlet since. It is the threshold attached to Fairlife's $21 million Excelsior Jobs Tax Credit, a performance-based state credit Fairlife only earns in full if it hits 250.

335. This is Fairlife's internal operational target at full build-out, told to WXXI in September 2025 by Ed Burger, the company's vice president of engineering for large capital projects. It is not contractually binding and does not appear in any public agreement.

Nearly 300. This is where actual hiring stood in mid-December, per WHEC.

100. This is the contractual minimum in the signed COMIDA PILOT Agreement. Section 9.1 of the document reads, verbatim:

"The Company shall create, at the Facility, one hundred (100) new full-time/full-time equivalent jobs in three (3) years of completion of the Facility and maintain those new full-time/full-time equivalent jobs, at the Facility, for the balance of the twenty (20) year term hereof."

In plain English: if Fairlife employed exactly 100 people in Year 3 and never grew, it would be in technical compliance with the document that authorizes the largest local incentive in the deal. The state-level Excelsior credit has teeth at 250 because the dollars are conditional on the headcount. The local COMIDA package, where the dollars are larger and the burden falls on Webster taxpayers, is keyed to 100.

The money: the full public stack

The figure that has dominated coverage is $63.4 million, the COMIDA package: $43.84 million in sales tax exemptions on construction materials and equipment, plus $19.6 million in property tax abatement over 20 years. (For how PILOT abatements shift the property-tax burden onto everyone who is not getting one, see Thursday's explainer.)

That figure is real, and it is the largest local incentive on the deal. It is also only a portion of the public investment. The state, utility, and town pieces stack on top:

The Town of Webster's own commitment sits on top of that. Town Board minutes from February 1, 2024 reference upsizing sewer mains from Tebor Road to handle "the fully built and operational Coke fairlife facility." On July 27, 2023 and September 5, 2024, the Board passed bond resolutions totaling $81.5 million , substantially driven by the Fairlife wastewater tie-in. Fairlife has committed to reimburse the town for 96 percent of the debt service and is paying a separate $21.9 million tie-in fee over 10 years. The state's $20 million EFC grant covered another piece. The residual 4 percent on $81.5 million falls to Webster taxpayers.

Fairlife is also funding approximately $30 million in RG&E grid upgrades required to serve the plant, on top of state-funded road work that includes a $10 million extension of Boulter Industrial Parkway scheduled to open in late 2026 or early 2027.

No single public document consolidates these numbers. The figures above were assembled from primary sources: COMIDA filings, ESD press releases, the Public Service Commission order, Town Board minutes and bond resolutions, NYPA allocations, and the signed PILOT Agreement.

The local-hire fight

The COMIDA package came with a local-construction-labor expectation. Through 2024, Fairlife filed 10 waivers with COMIDA asking permission to use out-of-region contractors on specific scopes of work. Nine were approved , allowing more than 200 workers from outside the Rochester area on the site. Most approvals cited equipment-specific expertise tied to proprietary processing equipment sourced from European manufacturers under warranty terms requiring the manufacturer's preferred installers.

The 10th waiver became public. It covered a $45 million stainless-steel specialty piping installation contract with roughly 60 associated jobs. Fairlife argued the piping ran proprietary Swiss-manufactured systems under warranty terms requiring the manufacturer's preferred installer. UNICON, which has done specialty stainless-steel piping in the Rochester region for more than 40 years, pushed back.

"We built Kodak. We built Xerox. We built Bausch & Lomb. We know how to do specialized stainless-steel piping," Joe Morelle Jr. told WXXI in December 2024. "There's proprietary information that they don't want to get out, which is fair ... but there's a lot of work that isn't proprietary."

County Executive Adam Bello brokered a split arrangement: Fairlife could use some of its preferred non-local specialty workers for the proprietary scope while keeping a portion of the contract local. The exact split was not disclosed publicly. Bello called the arrangement a first for Monroe County.

"It's an issue of fairness," Bello told WXXI. "If you're going to offer tax incentives and property tax abatements ... in return, they should be looking to invest dollars that they have into the local workforce ..."

This is the closest the county has come to invoking the accountability provisions in the Fairlife deal. There was no formal sanction and no clawback action. The result was a compromise, not enforcement.

What to keep an eye on

The Fairlife factory will be one of the biggest economic-development stories in Monroe County for a generation. By all available evidence, Fairlife is building what it said it would build and hiring on or near pace. The accountability question is not about the company. It is about whether the framework around the deal was honest with the public about what was traded, what was promised, and what is enforceable in writing.

The press conferences are over. The plant is built. The contract on file says 100 full-time jobs.

AI tools were used in drafting and research.