OP-ED: Republican Town Hall in Belmont was full of misinformation, not legislation

“I couldn’t take the misdirection any longer and left the room”

By Karen Ash, Angelica NY

I attended last night’s Town Hall with Allegany County’s Republican delegation in Albany. Thank you to Sen.’s Borello and O’Mara, and Assembly member Sempolinski for taking time to meet with constituents in person. (If only our current representative in Congress would do the same.)

The first question related to a bill recently passed by the NYS Senate – S-4408 – which was deceitfully painted by Sen. Borello as a raping and pillaging of state-owned land forests. He twisted the intention of the bill to imply that it would cause wholesale clear cutting of pristine forest to make way for massive solar and wind installations. He said, “to do it on reforested areas in our public lands is shameful.”

Here is some factual information for those of us who prefer it:

S-4408 proposes to amend environmental conservation law as follows: “Authorizes the department of environmental conservation to enter in to agreements or easements for the sole purpose of interconnection of renewable energy installations across reforestation areas where such installations are located outside such reforestation areas; provides that such agreements or easements shall not interfere with the operation of such reforestation areas for the purposes for which they were acquired.”

The installations are OUTSIDE the areas. Only the transmission lines would be INSIDE the areas. No siting authority is intended or granted by the language in the bill.

So, what is a reforestation area? According to the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Rachel May, “State reforestation lands are working lands, not forever wild preserves. They are former farmland and logging tracts that the state manages for recreation, logging, environmental protection, and they often feature roads, fire lanes, utility lines, ski trails, and even oil and gas wells.”

Unlike “forever wild” forests protected by Article XIV, Section 1 of the state constitution, reforestation areas are described in Section 3 as “forever devoted to the planting, growth and harvesting of such trees” — language that explicitly builds in commercial timber harvest as a core purpose.

S4408 specifically applies to transmission lines through reforestation areas. Oil and gas companies already have this privilege and have had for decades. [ Using DECInfo Locator, one finds four active wells in Hatch Creek State Forest (Cattaraugus Co.), and others in Allegany County’s Bully Hill and Bush Hill State Forests. ] This bill simply brings clean and renewable energy technologies into parity with the O/G companies and ends the highly subsidized and polluting petrochemical industry’s monopoly on public lands.

I strongly object to Sen. Borello’s misleading and downright false response to an earnest question asked by a concerned citizen.

A second questioner asked what the gentlemen were doing to address our area’s shortage of doctors, dentists, and mental health professionals. Spoiler alert: they all spoke, but no one answered the question.

Mr. O’Mara said, “there are lots of proposals floating around.” He said, “We’ve been working on the nursing shortage for a long time.” He said he was in favor of loan forgiveness and that he has hope. He said of attracting health care workers to our area, “We’ve gotta get ‘em here.” That doesn’t sound like legislation to me.

Mr. Sempolinski said he was “in favor of incentives to get folks to practice in rural areas” but that it would be better to help a local person to become a provider. Ah, what a nice thought, but is that in a bill proposal?

Mr. Borello launched into a favorite trope, that old Republican chestnut about devil Medicaid and how if only we could fix it “and every other bad policy coming out of Albany”, all other problems would be resolved. When he started to raise his voice and volume like a tent revival preacher, I couldn’t take the misdirection any longer and left the room, as several people before me had done.