Albany -- The New York State Olympic Regional Development Authority says a recent audit shows strong financial health, and an increase in revenue.
This, as the State has also made major investments in modernizing and enhancing its venues in recent years.
They say those investments have made an impact in attracting big events, and visitors, to its properties.
"Every year we do an annual audit, we work with an auditing firm from New York State, and it's an independent audit," Ashley Walden, President and CEO of ORDA, tells CBS6. "This year is the third year in a row that there's no management notes, which means clean audit, which means we've got good practices, good checks and balances, and the overall financial health of the organization is strong. So we were happy, obviously, with those results. And from the close of a fiscal year we had, we saw record breaking revenue and visitation, which means a lot of the investments from the state and the legislature that those are continued to show and to show the growth year over year."
The audit does show a net loss of $50.15 million in 2025, an increase from a net loss of $47.3 million 2024, though, Walden says those lines are misleading.
"The biggest increase that we've seen is that our building assets have doubled over the past couple of years. So, as soon as we add more assets, or increased assets, those get depreciated, and that depreciation is being spread out over over a number of years, and so that gets accounted into the operating loss that you would see at the bottom line. But the story is actually much different from a single fiscal year and a cash standpoint. what we have seen, you know, with the growth in visitation and the growth in revenue, we've really seen the stability, the financial stability increase, and that's something we're very proud of," Walden says. "The true operating performance that we would see is that each year we try and have a balanced budget, and this year we were just above that balanced budget. So that's our target. We work within those and again, we are just seeing that there's tremendous financial stability within the organization"
Tom Eschen asked: "Is that 'net loss' something you eventually have to make up for? Why does it describe it as that at the end of the day?"
Walden: "I think the easiest way for people to understand is that that loss, particularly, you know, the depreciation, that is not money exiting accounts or going out the door, right, that is an asset that we have on the books that is depreciating and lowering its value over time. And so that depreciation, that value needs to be accounted for, and that's what you're seeing. But it's not, it's not dollars leaving... leaving a bank account."