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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

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

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, ...