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In Our Opinion

Amazon deal could be boon for local company

It was roughly six years ago that Chautauqua County made a pitch for an Amazon regional distribution center that, when completed, would have been one of the largest in the world. County Executive PJ Wendel, Mark Geise, county IDA director and former U.S. Rep. Tom Reed all advocated for Amazon to consider Chautauqua County, which was pushing land the county owns in Ripley as well as the Mason Industrial Park in Ellicott. The project never came to fruition, but there was a lot of genuine excitement around the possibility at the time. Last week Amazon made a quieter entry into ...

County’s new economic development goal doesn’t change much

After weeks of debate and discussion, points and counterpoints, the Chautauqua County Legislature has decided that the number one economic development goal for county government is sustainable disposable income growth. It sounds like a good goal. No one is against the idea of increasing disposable income for county residents. Certainly no one would say they are against such a goal in an election year. The problem is few know what the heck the legislature means with this goal. Wouldn’t it be simpler to use household income growth as the goal rather than disposable income growth? ...

Other Voices: US-Saudi nuclear agreement further erodes safeguards

Even as he threatened to escalate an unlawful war sold in part as preventing Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, Donald Trump opened the door to proliferation in the region on Wednesday. The US announced that it had signed a deal with Saudi Arabia which would potentially allow the kingdom to enrich uranium in future and to avoid the fullest inspection rights for the international watchdog. Experts have long warned that a civilian nuclear programme could create a path towards a nuclear-armed Riyadh. Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince and de facto leader, has said that if Tehran ...

State makes right call delaying robot teacher in Salamanca

The state Education Department was right to ask the Salamanca City Central School District to pause its plan to launch a pilot program featuring a Realbotix educational robot and digital avatar in its high school STEAM program during the upcoming school year. There are a lot of unanswered questions that should be answered before this newest bit of technology is used in local classrooms. Concerns raised by parents and educators prompted Betty Rosa, state education commissioner, to send a letter to Salamanca school district officials requesting the pause. The pause prompted the New York ...

Money isn’t the sticking point for JHS kitchen issues

Change orders are nothing new in construction projects like the one taking place now at Jamestown High School. The Jamestown Public Schools Board of Education held a special meeting on Thursday to approve a $260,000 change order for the renovation project at JHS after two unforeseen issues were found in the JHS cafeteria kitchen. The problem the school district faces isn’t financial. The district had set aside $3.6 million for change orders on the project, with $1.2 million remaining. The additional money won’t be coming out of local tax dollars. There won’t be a future tax ...

In Our Opinion

Many readers of a certain age probably remember the famous public service announcement at the start of the late-night news asking parents if they knew where their children were. It was a staple of Buffalo news stations in the 1980s and into the 1990s. The genesis of the “"It's 10 p.m.; do you know where your children are?" began as far back as the 1960s by WNEW-TV in New York City as a nightly reminder for parents to enforce the Big Apple’s curfews and to know where their children were at night. Fast forward 60 years, and it’s obvious that some parents in Jamestown need that ...