The aquarium, proposed by Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon and approved by the county legislature, is being built in the city's Inner Harbor. Credit: Laura Robertson | Central Current

About $5.7 million generated from the 2024 sale of the former CNY Film Hub was donated as a sponsorship by one Onondaga County-associated nonprofit to the Friends of the Aquarium, another county-associated nonprofit. 

The donation was revealed in a 2025 report by The Bonadio Group on the Greater Syracuse Soundstage Development Corporation, which previously owned and sold the film hub. 

The report, reviewed by Central Current, shows that the funds were donated to the Friends of the Aquarium charity to further Soundstage’s mission of developing the region’s film industry. All the assets at Soundstage, including land, the 52,000 square foot building that used to house the Film Hub, were sold to Saab Inc. — a Swedish defense and aerospace company — for more than $5.9 million in 2024. 

A spokesperson for County Executive Ryan McMahon said the funds were donated by Greater Syracuse Soundstage Development Corporation because the nonprofit’s board “voted to become a marquee sponsor at the aquarium.”

The details of the sponsorship “will be revealed at the appropriate time,” McMahon spokesperson Justin Sayles wrote in an email to Central Current.

County Comptroller Marty Masterpole, who found the donation in the report, believes the funds are public funds and violate the county legislature’s pledge not to commit more public funds to fund the aquarium project.  

“It just seems like a stretch to me that they used Soundstage money for the promotion of the music and movies film industry,” Masterpole said. “It seems like a stretch that they need $5.7 million to promote the film industry through the use of the aquarium.”

Justin Sayles, McMahon’s spokesperson, said the funds are not public and that they are funds generated by a private sale via a charitable organization linked to the county. 

“These are independent boards who voted to support this project with funds that are not public dollars,” Sayles wrote in an email.

Democrats’ worries that the county is using public dollars to fund the aquarium comes after the legislature last year promised not to use any more public funds to pay for the $103.8 million price tag. The county initially seeded the project to the tune of $85 million from county surplus funds.

Friends of the Onondaga Chair William Gilberti said in March the charity has raised $7.6 million. Those funds will go toward the construction of the project, he added. Gilberti said most of that came from donations. Some money came from grants, he said. 

He also said that $1.25 million of that total came from the Onondaga County Civic Development Corporation.

Legislators asked Gilberti to disclose who the donors and donating organizations are but Gilberti said he couldn’t deliver the names of individual donors. 

Privacy of donor information was the subject of a spat between Democrats and Republicans last year. In March 2025, Republicans and one Democrat voted to amend a local law from 1996, eliminating the need for legislative approval on private donations to the county greater than $1,500. 

Legislators at the time sparred over the measure, with the at-the-time Democrat minority caucus citing concerns about potential pay-for-play dynamics between donors whose names would remain anonymous, and county officials. 

County officials have maintained that donations directly to Friends of the Aquarium, a nonprofit, have always been private under a United States Supreme Court ruling. 

The revelation of Soundstage’s donation to Friends of Onondaga County Aquarium was shocking to Democrats, who learned about it from Masterpole an hour prior to Tuesday’s legislative session. 

Legislator Maurice Brown, a Democrat representing a city district, said what he called opacity surrounding how the aquarium charity raised almost $6 million via a single donation is a glaring example of why information about the donations needed to be fully transparent. 

“This is not what we were led to believe,” Brown said. “We were led to believe businesses and private entities wanted to pay for this, not just the government.”

The donation made by the Syracuse Soundstage Development Corporation makes up all but approximately $650,000 of the total transferred to the county by Friends of Onondaga County Aquarium by March. 

Friends of Onondaga County Aquarium is also set to receive a $3.5 million grant from one of the county’s budget lines in its 2026 budget. Sayles said those were funds voted on by the legislature as startup funds in this year’s budget. He added that the aquarium will pay the funds back as the project starts to generate revenue. 

The $1.25 million the charity received last year from the Onondaga Civic Development Corporation, an entity linked to the county, are not public funds, Sayles said. The OCDC is funded through fees paid by non-profits such as higher education institutions to bond for large capital projects.

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Eddie Velazquez is a Syracuse journalist covering economic justice in the region. He is focused on stories about organized labor, and New York's housing and childhood lead poisoning crises. You can follow...