CAMBRIA — At first glance, the big, orange road sign announcing vacant property on Lockport Road as a “shovel ready certified” building site seems a bit gratuitous.

To companies looking for new places to launch a business, it’s not. The sign in their eyes is a welcome mat, for in three words a community pronounced itself ready, willing and able to make a deal quickly.

So said local leaders who gathered Thursday to mark receipt of the certification, and Cambria Technology Park’s inclusion in the state’s Build Now-NY program. Empire State Development Corporation will be among those promoting the 152-acre “greenfield” at Lockport Road east of Comstock Road as ready for immediate development by high-tech manufacturing and/or computer data management businesses.

Shovel ready means developers can start erecting buildings almost as soon as they propose a project and get an OK from the town. That’s because the issues that normally force a lengthy wait between proposal and construction — local and state government approvals related to impacts on environment, archaeology, wetland protection, et cetera — have already been dealt with. The Town of Cambria wrote a generic Environmental Impact Statement to satisfy the regulators’ questions, and obtained construction pre-approval from the array of involved agencies, from health and transportation to historic preservation, agriculture & markets and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Shovel-ready certification is a credit to Cambria residents, planning board members particularly, who gave “thousands” of hours and waded through “tons” of paperwork connected to the impact statement, county legislator Dave Godfrey said.

All that leg work should give the county, and Cambria, a leg up in the big business/big employer recruitment game, legislature Chairman Bill Ross suggested.

“We lose so many developers because of time. For businesses, time is money,” Ross said. “The beauty of (certification) is the permitting work, which take so much time, is already done.”

“This provides valuable savings” to any business aiming to build facilities in New York, state Sen. George Maziarz, R-Newfane, said. “This is the type of site that the Fortune 500 companies look for.”

National Grid helped underwrite the costs of making the technology park shovel ready, by its grant of $300,000 to the Niagara County Center For Economic Development in 2010. The grant was for making two Lockport Road parcels shovel-ready; work is continuing on a parcel in Pendleton, according to NCEDA Director Sam Ferraro. The host towns contributed the requisite matches on the Grid grant. While the Cambria property remains privately held, NCEDA is playing the role of real estate broker. Newly hired Industrial Development Agency marketing director Andrea Klyczek is in charge of marketing the property, which can be subdivided.

National Grid helps fund economic development initiatives in the hope of growing its own customer base. If creation of a shovel-ready building site attracts a new employer that’s also a high energy user — say a data center or high-tech manufacturer — then the public-private cooperative effort will have “work(ed) for everybody: business, rate payers and the region,” said Dennis Elsenbeck, a National Grid Western Division regional executive.

Go-get-iveness, and forging of public-private partnerships, are exactly what Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he wanted to see when he announced the state would set aside $1 billion in financial incentives for businesses locating in the Buffalo-Niagara region. Niagara County has already shown it can rise to Cuomo’s challenge, state Assembly member John Ceretto, R-Lewiston, said.

“A development like this shows that Niagara County is a real player for the $1 billion ... and we are working hard to obtain it,” he said. “We have already been working on business development, on those partnerships ... . Now we are ready to move; we are shovel ready.”

Site marketing got under way while the shovel-ready certification work was in progress, and the county has already had an inquiry from an out-of-state business, legislator Rick Updegrove said. Buffalo Niagara Enterprise, which helped recruit Yahoo! to Lockport and Greenpac to Niagara Falls, is advertising Cambria Technology Park as suitable for data center development.

By planning for a high-tech/no-smokestacks industrial park, Cambria finally made good on a 15-year-old goal to positively reshape the town’s southeast corner, Supervisor Wright Ellis said. As the old dairy farms that used to dominate the corner started closing up, the town’s 1997 comprehensive plan envisioned a commercial center someday rising in their place.

“It’s wonderful to finally see it come to fruition,” Ellis said.