Two years ago, Chautauqua County chose not to make any changes to its County-Wide Shared Services Initiative. We disagreed with the decision at the time, in part because the need to find ways to streamline the provision of government services should never rest. We couldn’t agree more, ...

Matt Coon has acquitted himself well as the top officer in the Jamestown Fire Department over the past several years. It’s almost too bad Coon won’t retire from public service having attained the title of fire chief. It’s something that shouldn’t happen to his successor. City ...

County officials have begun a new effort to better help families who find themselves homeless by better connecting the county’s mental hygiene and social services departments into a unified system. On any given day there are roughly 50 families in temporary housing. The Family-Centered ...

There will come a time when school merger talks in Chautauqua County schools will involve more than sports teams. It’s not a matter of it, it’s a matter of when. The timing really depends on when our population decline finally bottoms out and we have a better handle on how many schools ...

The process to apply herbicides on Chautauqua Lake this year is convoluted, to say the least. Give the DEC credit, it’s trying to make an elongated process work. And the agency is trying its best to work with municipalities that have applied herbicides in the past. But the process - ...

There’s a lot to unpack from Saturday’s Chautauqua Lake Symposium. The county-backed event brought a packed house to the Chautauqua Harbor Hotel to hear from DEC officials, the Army Corps of Engineers, groups studying conditions on Chautauqua Lake and politicians representing the area in ...