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Friday Is An Example Of Why Local Officials Should Be Allowed To Make Decisions

Gov Kathy Hochul was certainly warranted to declare a state of emergency in Buffalo over the weekend.

As we all saw, weather forecasters were right when they projected a couple of feet of snow for Buffalo starting Thursday night and ending Sunday. It was a lake effect storm for the ages.

But Hochul, who loves to tout her Western. We York roots, should also have known that a region wide state of emergency wasn’t arranged. The Jamestown area, for example, received absolutely zero snow during school hours Friday. Yet schools were closed, throwing thousands of working parents into a panic trying to figure out what to do with their children at the last minute. It’s not as if the lack of Jamestown area snow was a shock. The same forecasts that showed Buffalo was going to get hit hard said Jamestown was largely going to be spared. Yet Thursday was the more difficult travel day in Jamestown, and schools were open despite several inches of snow falling overnight and through the morning.

This, dear governor, is why we have towns, villages, cities, counties and school districts, each with decision makers in some cases earning very good taxpayer-funded salaries to make these decisions. If you don’t trust them to decide when conditions locally warrant travel bans or closures, why have them in the first place?

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