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In Our Opinion

DEC Shows Common Sense With Clean Truck Decision

We agree with state Sen. George Borrello, R-Sunset Bay, in his opposition to the state’s Advanced Clean Truck regulation. For starters, the requirement is bad news for a border county like southern Chautauqua County because trucking companies, if they so choose, can simply move across the Pennsylvania border and not have to change their fleet at all. For some companies, that may be a better option than investing in both more expensive electric trucks and the charging infrastructure to power them. Companies that comply will pass the cost of the charging infrastructure on to customers ...

Incidents Show Room For Improvement Protecting Children

Twice in less than a week we were reminded that we still have a long way to go when it comes to protecting children. City police responded to one home for a report of disorderly conduct and found a residence in deplorable conditions with a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old child sleeping on a mattress covered with garbage and insects. There was no food in the home and drug paraphernalia all over the apartment. The children were turned over to Child Protective Services. In an unrelated incident, police responded to a home for a report of a child bleeding from the mouth after grabbing a ...

Cleaning Up The City’s Budget Mess Will Be Painful

Mayor Kim Ecklund has been warning all year that the city budget is a mess. Now, we see just how bad a mess the budget really is - and how much it’s going to cost taxpayers to clean up the mess. Ecklund is proposing a 7.79% tax levy increase, which equates to a $1.82 per $1,000 of assessed valuation increase to the city’s tax rate. That money isn’t paying for anything new - it’s paying for overdue bills or increases tied to employee benefits that weren’t properly budgeted for in previous years, though the problems became more acute in last year’s budget. City ...

Teachers’ Focus Remains On History, Not ‘Indoctrination’

Just about every adult in America who attended a public school has passed through a history class, and maybe they had an aptitude for the subject, had a teacher who inspired them to dig deeper, or were turned off completely by a clock-punching instructor who offered little more than a dry recitation of dates and names. Over the last couple of years, history classes in middle schools and high schools have become yet another battlefield in America’s ongoing culture wars. Some parents and activists have argued that they are hotbeds of indoctrination that drive students to loathe their ...

County’s Handling Of Sex Offenders From Out Of State Must Change

Four times, people convicted of sex crimes have challenged the way Chautauqua County classified them under the Sex Offender Registration Act when they moved here. Four times those challenges have been upheld by the Fourth Department Appellate Division, the appeals court that hears cases from throughout Western New York. Each of the four cases involved the way the county invoked what is known as the foreign registration clause in the Sex Offender Registration Act . But while the circumstances of the cases are different, the results - in front of varying justices of the appeals court - ...

Immigration Isn’t Always A Dirty Word

Eighty-four years ago, Robert H. Jackson welcomed the Immigration and Naturalization Service into the U.S. Department of Justice. Jackson’s remarks were short, but something the then-U.S. Attorney General said during that June 14, 1940, address to the civil servants being welcomed into the Department of Justice bears repeating some eight decades after they were first spoken. “For at this time with our pressing alien problems your service becomes one of the key branches of the government,” Jackson said. “The focus of the country’s attention is upon you and will be for some ...