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In Our Opinion

In Our Opinion

The Chautauqua Lake and Watershed Management Alliance wasn’t awarded funding in 2025 through the state Invasive Species grant program. Board members learned recently that there wasn’t a problem with the alliance’s application. The problem is there are a lot of other lakes that face many of the same issues the Chautauqua Lake faces. In fact, the DEC told alliance officials that there were three times as many applications for the 2025 grant as there were for the previous round. In our opinion, the 2027 state budget needs to include additional funding to deal with invasive ...

In Our Opinion

In Our Opinion

We agree with the idea behind Democrat Fred Larson’s proposal to require the county to use $2 million from the county’s surplus to decrease the county’s tax levy. The county’s surplus is more than $30 million, more than the agreed upon minimum of 5% of the county’s budget - or roughly $16 million. There is no set upper range for the surplus, but we’ve said here in the past that we’d like to see the surplus spent down, either to decrease the tax levy or to pay one-time project costs that the county wants to keep out of the yearly budget. That’s why we would urge some ...

Hochul should veto cannabis industry wage board

In Our Opinion

Both houses of the state Legislature approved legislation (A.11562/S.10643) that would create a wage board for the state’s cannabis industry. It’s a bill that both state Sen. George Borrello, R-Sunset Bay, and Sen. Liz Krueger, D-New York City, opposed in the state Senate. It’s one of the few areas of cannabis policy on which Borrello and Krueger have found agreement on over the past few years - a fact that we hope will help sway Gov. Kathy Hochul as she decides whether or not to sign the legislation and create a wage board for a fledgling industry made up of small businesses ...

In Our Opinion

In Our Opinion

The state Department of Environmental Conservation is nearly finished with a document that should have substantial influence on the way we maintain Chautauqua Lake in the future. During a public meeting last week hosted by the Chautauqua Lake and Watershed Management Alliance, Chad Staniszewski of the DEC’s Region 9 office told those attending that the DEC expects to finish the internal loading study within the next month or two with the plan possibly being released after review early in 2027. The internal loading study could be the DEC’s biggest contribution to Chautauqua ...

Six Supremes put U.S. elections up for sale

Local Commentaries

Statistics suggest that our current Supreme Court justices have some of the highest IQs in America. It seems fair to conclude, then, that six of them knew exactly what they were doing when they effectively put for-sale signs on the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government—on the presidency, on the Senate, on the House of Representatives. The deciding six were Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas. Definitely and positively, all six realized the message they were sending to candidates and their big-money organizational ...

Who is taking Islam seriously?

Local Commentaries

Imploring a young audience to “discard the stuck-on-stupid card,” retired Lieutenant Colonel Alan West then quoted poet Maya Angelou, “When people show you who they are the first time, believe them.” Spoken not just once, “Death to America” has been bellowed a gazillion times by Islamic Shias in Iran and elsewhere including Dearborn, MI. Do you believe them? If not, you own a “stuck-on-stupid” card. In New York City, Muslims on Times Square incessantly shouted, “Allahu Akbar.” The leader addressing the hyped-up horde said sarcastically, “Don’t scare them, ...