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In Our Opinion

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 ...

DEC Must Pay Attention To Mounting Questions

North Harmony is the latest Chautauqua Lake adjacent municipality to pass a resolution opposing wetlands regulations proposed by the state DEC. Town residents asked a lot of good questions - including some that haven’t come up yet - that include whether or not the Army Corps of Engineers be involved, a concern about what restoration projects may come and if that may affect Watts Flats, as there is no restoration in that area besides brush hogging the field, vagueness, the town having no ability to enforce the regulations, government overreach, potential loss of tax base, increasing ...

County Executive Gets Realistic On Fly Car, Safety Net Costs

We’re glad to see funding for two vital programs properly funded in this year’s county budget proposal by County Executive PJ Wendel. The first is the county fly car program, which hasn’t met its budget since the county began the program in 2017. The program was billed as being cost-neutral, something most governments who find themselves in the ambulance or EMT business find is easy to say and hard to accomplish. At the same time, the program has proven indispensable to county residents who get quicker emergency response and to volunteer fire departments who often struggle to ...