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In Our Opinion

Democracy Wins In Defeat Of Special Election Scheduling Bill

Voters won earlier this week when a bill was removed that would have delayed holding a special election to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. House of Representatives until November. The bill was pulled from consideration - a rare move given that it was given a message of necessity that would have allowed the bill to move to a floor vote in the Senate and Assembly immediately rather than going through the normal legislative process. Whether it was a sudden outbreak of common sense in Albany or the result of back-room arm-twisting between Gov. Kathy Hochul and President Donald Trump - ...

Is Declining Call Volume A Blip Or A Trend?

An interesting set of statistics was tucked inside Mayor Kim Ecklund’s State of the City address, a voluminous document The Post-Journal has been unpacking over the past several days. City police officers responded to 10.7% fewer calls in 2024 than they did in 2023, with call volume decreasing from 41,412 to 37,394. On average, daily calls dropped from 113 in 2023 to 102 in 2024. In 2024, the Jamestown Fire Department responded to 7,786 calls for service, averaging 21 calls per day. It’s a 3.1% decrease from 8,038 calls in 2023 and a 6.3% drop from 8,313 in 2022. Calls for the ...

Go Back To Drawing Board On Preservation Ordinance

We don’t disagree with Crystal Surdyk, city development director, that a local preservation ordinance is needed in Jamestown. We wholeheartedly disagree that the ordinance currently under discussion is needed. The reasoning is simple - it’s hard enough to redevelop derelict old buildings that could most benefit from the tax credits and grant programs a local preservation ordinance is meant to help secure. We used the Arcade Building as an example of just such a building last week, but the same holds true for most buildings that the current ordinance would give the city ...

Drivers Can’t Wait Until 2026 For Relief On Second Street

Some sort of repair to East Second Street in Jamestown can’t wait any longer. We understand the state is planning a major project for East Second Street starting this year and lasting into 2026, but the road is unusable now. It’s not as if Second Street’s potholes just popped up this year. We advocated in this space for a focus on the Second Street potholes a couple of years ago. The problem has only gotten worse since then while the state DOT wasted time focusing on things like bike lanes rather than making sure Second Street was driveable. While the city has an agreement to ...

Sharing Sports Should Be A Starting Point, Not An End Point

Residents of the Frewsburg and Southwestern school districts learned this week about talks between the districts to share sports teams. Shared teams aren’t new. They’re been a growing part of the interscholastic sports landscape both in Chautauqua County and the rest of the state for years. But what’s being considered at Frewsburg and Southwestern is different. Rather than sharing a team or two, the districts are talking about a large-scale sharing of sports that would formally include several teams in all three high school sports seasons. Southwestern has lost 7.7% of its ...

Executive Orders Sidestep Necessity Of Compromise

Our concerns about the second Trump Administration’s executive actions on immigration are twofold: First, the White House should employ a greater focus on illegal immigration specifically and, second, executive orders violate the principles of our republic. As we noted in our editorials during the Biden Administration, executive orders circumvent the process in ways that poorly serve the public. Sweeping proposals such as Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans or Trump’s plans on immigration, as we wrote about the former in August of 2022, “should go through proper, ...