Is Tesla's Buffalo gigafactory a major job creator or a monument to greed, corruption and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars?

State Comptroller candidate Jonathan Trichter thinks it's the latter.

"There's no better example in the state," Trichter said. "There's no bigger example in the state."

Standing in front of the RiverBend factory, Trichter criticized Governor Andrew Cuomo's signature economic development initiative, the Buffalo Billion, and the incumbent Democrat comptroller Tom DiNapoli, who Trichter said shirked his responsibility to audit the entities responsible for the funding and continues to approve money allocated to them.

"He shies away from the big-ticket items that might cause some kind of confrontation with the governor because he's the nicest guy in Albany whose afraid of a fight," Trichter said.

If the scene looks familiar, it is.

Gubernatorial candidates like Republican Marc Molinaro, Democrat Cynthia Nixon and Stephanie Miner — a Democrat mounting an independent challenge to Cuomo — have stood in front of the same building and called for reform.

"It's the biggest ticket item in New York State when it comes to economic development," Trichter said. "It's $750,000,000 and the comptroller should be looking at the biggest ticket items."

Republican analysts Jeff Williams said the factory serves as a convenient, if not particularly creative, backdrop for candidates this year. He said it's an easy place to tell the story they want to tell, although he doesn't know how much longevity the story will have.

"I think as employment numbers start going up at that facility it becomes less and less... and as time goes by, it becomes less and less a symbol of bad, where it might turn into a symbol of good," Williams said.

But Trichter believes the facility is and will remain a boondoggle for New York despite the fact the state said Tesla is ahead of its job creation goals.

"It's financially distressed. There's no way we'll hit the 3,000 job bogey. We're at 700 now, best that I can tell, and it's not on track," he said.

If elected, he said economic development spending will have to go through the comptroller's office or he'll turn the spigot off.