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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 ...

10 years later, it’s still impossible to draw conclusions from test score data

Ten years ago, almost to the day, we lamented the difficulty in comparing results on state tests from year-to-year because New York’s Education Department changed testing and assessment guidelines more often than most people change their socks. We noted, at the time, that proficiency rates in English language arts was 37.9% and 38.1% in math, truly depressing when one considered that meant only a little more than one-third of students were performing at an acceptable grade level. The state recommended at the time not to try to compare 2016 data to prior years, which would have been ...

In Our Opinion

This week’s announcement that the U.S. Department of Agriculture will be spending $20 million to purchase grape juice from area farmers is welcome news for the region. Just last week, U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer was trying to make juice out of sour grapes with his proposal to use the Section 32 funds provided by the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 to purchase grapes from local growers hurt by the cancellation of their purchase contracts with Refresco. The same mechanism was used in 2025 to stabilize prices through a similar request through utilization of Section 32 funds, with ...

There are too many endangering the welfare cases in Jamestown

It seems like we’ve read a lot about endangering the welfare of a child charges in the Jamestown area over the past few years. Data compiled by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services explains why that’s the case - more and more Jamestown adults are being charged with not taking care of their kids. Over the past two years, more than 65% of all of the charges of endangering the welfare of a child have come from the city of Jamestown. Through a quarter of 2026, that percentage is up to 73.9%. There are a lot of reasons for that, including high levels of poverty, ...

In Our Opinion

Flock Safety is at least acknowledging the privacy concerns that have been raised by members of the public and by civil liberties groups over the past several months by announcing changes to its platform. We aren’t sure those changes go far enough, though they do appear to be a step in the right direction. Flock operates a vast nationwide network of automated cameras that record the license plate numbers and other characteristics of all passing vehicles every day. Thousands of law enforcement agencies in 49 states can search and share Flock’s data across jurisdictions to aid their ...

We’ve won a battle against phosphorus in lake, not the war

8-25 JPJ Tuesday Chautauqua County celebrated quite a milestone recently with completion of the second phase of the South and Center Chautauqua Lake Sewer District’s Westside Sewer Extension. It won’t be long until there are public sewers all the way around Chautauqua Lake. It felt like one needed binoculars two decades ago to see the finish line when the idea of building sewers around Chautauqua Lake was first being discussed. Since 2017, when work on the first phase of the sewer extension began, sewers have been extended to Stow west along Route 394 toward the boundary with the ...