It’s a financial wasteland that stretches across the state.

Since taking office in 2011, Gov. Cuomo has doled out more than $10 billion in public funding and tax breaks in the name of economic development — costly giveaways that have resulted in a series of broken promises and boondoggles.

Welcome to Andy Land.

“Many of these so-called economic-development projects deliver little more than ribbon-cutting photo ops for the politicians involved,” said Tim Hoefer of the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank in Albany.

Even worse, some have bankrolled graft and corruption that led to the convictions of two former Cuomo aides and three developers, all of whom now face decades in prison.

Big-bucks efforts that failed to live up to their hype, and wound up mired in scandal, include:

• The Central New York Film Hub outside Syracuse, which cost $15 million to build but was sold last month for just $1 — despite Cuomo boasting in 2014, “Who would have ever figured: Hollywood comes to Onondaga, right?”
• A $90 million factory that taxpayers built for the Soraa LED lighting company, which walked away from the deal with no penalty late last year. The state then committed up to $15 million more so NexGen Power Systems, a semiconductor company, would retrofit and lease the plant, also outside Syracuse.
• Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion revitalization plan, centered around a state-funded $750 million solar-panel plant that currently employs fewer than 700 workers — a far cry from the 3,000-plus predicted by the governor.

With Cuomo appealing to voters for a third term — and potentially preparing for a 2020 White House bid — his stewardship of the economy is a crucial part of his electability.

But unemployment numbers show that on the Democratic governor’s watch, the state has trailed the country in recovering from the devastating effects of the Great Recession.

“New York has definitely not gotten a bang for its buck with Buffalo Billion,” said Assemblyman Raymond Walter (R-Erie County), whose district covers the suburbs northeast of Buffalo.

“Buffalo Billion was put out there to give hope to the people of Buffalo and the [rest of] Western New York, but instead of hope, what we got was false promises — and, on top of that, corruption,” Walter said.

“So instead of Buffalo Billion being this great shining example of economic development and Buffalo’s comeback, whenever people hear ‘Buffalo Billion’ now, they’re going to think of bid-rigging and corruption.”

Last week, a Manhattan federal jury convicted the former head of the SUNY Polytechnic Institute, whom Cuomo tapped to administer his Buffalo Billion plan, and three developers who scored lucrative contracts.

Alain Kaloyeros, once dubbed a “genius” by the governor, faces up to 60 years in prison.

Stephen Aiello and Joseph Gerardi of COR Development Co., which built the failed movie studio and abandoned LED factory, and Louis Ciminelli, whose LPCiminielli built the Buffalo factory, each face 40 to 45 years in prison.

Meanwhile, former top gubernatorial aide Joseph Percoco — whom Cuomo has likened to a brother — is awaiting sentencing for two pay-to-play bribery schemes, one of which included freeing up $14 million in delayed state payments to COR. He faces up to 50 years behind bars.

When Cuomo took office in January 2011, the nation’s jobless rate for the past year was 9.6 percent, a full point worse than the state’s rate of 8.6 percent.

But by the end of 2017, the national rate had been trimmed to 4.1 percent, while the state lagged behind at 4.7 percent.

State Labor Department figures also show joblessness actually rose in 55 of the 57 counties outside the city between January 2016 and January 2018, a period during which the national unemployment rate fell 0.8 percent.

A report last year from the independent W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich., analyzed tax incentives for economic development during 2015 and concluded that New York’s were the most-expensive — and second-least effective — nationwide.

“It’s obvious the costly brand of economic development efforts Governor Cuomo has spearheaded aren’t working,” said Douglas Kellogg of the conservative, anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform.

“And still, struggling New York taxpayers are asked to fund more of this garbage, year after year.”

The roster of state agencies that hand out incentives includes Empire State Development and 10 regional economic development councils under its umbrella, as well as the SUNY system and related nonprofits, including the Fort Schuyler Management Corp., which oversaw the corruption-tainted Buffalo Billion projects.

Regardless of what board or commission signs off on a contract, “the governor controls everything,” said John Kaehny of Reinvent Albany, a good-government group that advocates fiscal transparency.

“The rest is just boxes on an ‘org chart,’ ” he added.

Experts also say officials have stymied efforts at scrutiny, including through a 2011 law that exempts SUNY construction projects from review by the state Comptroller’s Office — a measure that was tucked into the state budget at Cuomo’s request.

“The public deserves to know whether or not they are getting a good return on their investment, and the governor seems determined to make sure that doesn’t happen,” said Ron Deutsch of the labor-backed Fiscal Policy Institute think tank.

Last year, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli issued a blistering audit after hitting a wall when he tried to find out if Empire State Development had met its statutory reporting requirements.

The audit revealed that between April 2012 and September 2016, 17 programs didn’t undergo mandatory, independent evaluations, and public reports weren’t issued on 12 programs that received more than $500 million in total funding.

In response to the Buffalo Billion scandal, the Republican-controlled state Senate passed a bill in May to create a publicly searchable database listing all the economic-development benefits handed out across the state, along with the number of jobs each project is supposed to create or retain.

But the legislation — backed by an array of good-government groups, including liberal-leaning Common Cause and the New York Public Interest Research Group — died in the Democrat-controlled Assembly.

“They won’t do anything to stick a finger in the eye of Cuomo — nothing,” one Albany insider explained.

During a joint Senate-Assembly budget hearing in January that was focused on economic development, Empire State Development CEO Howard Zemsky argued that failures of projects like Soraa were an unavoidable consequence of trying to bring cutting-edge industries to the state.

Zemsky also defended the decision to not include any “clawback provisions” in the botched Soraa factory deal, after Senate Finance Committee Chairwoman Catharine Young (R-Olean) said the company “basically stiffed the state” for $90 million.

“Obviously, there are no guarantees. These are high-tech companies. They change very rapidly,” Zemsky said.

Cuomo’s office referred questions about his economic-development agenda to Zemsky, who pointed to successes like Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, which created more than 3,000 jobs in Westchester and Rensselaer counties — almost double what it promised in 2012 for $31 million in grants and tax incentives.

Zemsky also insisted most of Cuomo’s projects “are just getting started” and will “be the growth industries of tomorrow.”

“We are really planting the seeds for the next generation of industry for a region of the state that had more than 40 years of decline,” he said.

“We’ve made very purposeful strategic investments.”

Zemsky noted the state had added 1.1 million private-sector jobs since Cuomo took office, for an all-time high of almost 8.2 million such jobs. Empire State Development wouldn’t say how many of those jobs were created upstate.