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In Our Opinion

Celebrating Small Businesses On Saturday

On Saturday, Chautauqua County will join the rest of the nation in celebrating Small Business Saturday. It’s a celebration too big and too good to pass up. Geared to the start of the holiday shopping season and coming on the heels of Black Friday blowouts at national big-box retailers, the sole focus of the day is to encourage consumers to shop at locally owned and operated enterprises and thereby contribute to the myriad benefits that practice produces. American Express began Small Business Saturday in 2010, and in 2011, the U.S. Small Business Administration wisely joined in as a ...

Giving Thanks Today For All That We Have

Too often, we prosperous, free Americans take our many blessings for granted. Nearly all of us enjoy material wealth that is the envy of billions of people in other lands. We are free to do nearly anything our hearts desire, as long as our actions do not harm others. Our nation itself is a blessing. Our government is our servant. Public policy is meant to benefit us, not the other way around, as is the situation in many other countries. We govern ourselves by consensus, in effect - providing any agreement by the majority is not detrimental to those who happen to be in the minority. ...

Accepting The State’s Help Often Comes With Strings

Grants often have strings attached to them - as Jamestown officials were reminded last week when talking about a culvert replacement project that will be aided with a $1.5 million state grant. Jamestown won’t have a problem covering its $350,100 share of the project as long as nothing changes. Of course, that’s the big question raised by Councilman Jeff Russell, R-At Large. What if something changes? After the city was led down the primrose path when it came to the new fleet maintenance facility on Washington Street to the tune of millions of dollars of additional spending ...

Changes To City Budget Merely Postpone The Pain

City Council members are poised tonight to pass a budget with much less of a tax increase than was proposed a month ago by Mayor Kim Ecklund. That’s good in the short-term. The increase in costs that we have seen across the board has pinched many homeowners’ budgets, so even small tax increases add on to the total increase in costs for everything from utilities to basic household items that have hit all of us. City officials have suggested adding $63,099 in expenses back into the budget, cutting $23,647 in health insurance expenses and $2,000 for the city Human Rights ...

The Kids Have The Right Idea, Follow Their Lead

Our county’s population loss is being acutely felt in rural school districts, where the fairly small but steady population loss makes it difficult to provide elective courses and extracurricular activities that were common as recently as the mid 1990s or early 2000s. Shared sports teams have helped keep extracurricular options open for students, with few mergers working as well as those involving Clymer, Sherman and Panama students. That’s particularly true of the schools’ merged football team, which once again is in the midst of a deep state playoff run. Merging other sports ...

Workforce Development Efforts To Receive A New Test

The Jamestown area got an early Christmas present last week with the announcement that the final piece of funding is in place for Electrovaya to open its lithium ion battery Gigafactory in Ellicott. The Canadian company will create about hundreds of new jobs in a local economy that has long needed the addition of dependable, non-seasonal, non-tourism-related positions. It’s been a long road for Electrovaya as company officials worked through the purchase of the former MD Electronics building in the Mason Industrial Park and then pieced together the puzzle of loans, tax incentives ...