What are your other priorities for the upcoming term, specifically in Saugerties?
Certainly, the old phrase, “a rising tide floats all boats,” is true, and strengthening the economy is a critical priority and something I’m very vested in. I think we start at home, looking at our small businesses and farms, making sure they can retain jobs and they can remain viable economically. That’s the first goal, and then when we are able to, help find ways to help expand their businesses and create new opportunities.
Here in Saugerties, for example, the Dutch Ale House was a project I worked on directly, and we worked with the liquor store when they had issues with their license. Now we’re working with Saugerties Furniture, trying to find a way to help them secure deliveries while still honoring traffic and safety concerns in the village.
And as much as there were questions raised about Diamond Mills, I still see it as an investment that I feel will have long-term beneficial impact on the community, bringing people into the area to help patronize our local businesses. I see that as a plus.
What I find is that each business has its own unique needs and circumstances. I have been and plan to continue to stay close to the business community, to understand their needs and issues, and work to help them to strengthen the way they do business. If we can find ways to create new jobs and opportunities, we want to be doing that, and I’ll repeat that pattern across the seven counties that I serve.
Do you think, then, that the best way to encourage economic growth in the area is to focus on existing businesses rather than new ones?
When you look at it, much of job growth does come from existing employers. And while traditionally, economic development in this state has been focused on attracting and recruiting new employment, my working sense of it, and I think the growing consensus of the economic development community, is that creating new jobs and expanding or bringing new investors into the region is an important strategy but we can’t neglect retaining the jobs that we have.
In my home county, there’s a manufacturing facility that’s been closed since 9/11 (it closed that same day), and there have been a number of efforts to try to bring businesses into it but it’s been a struggle. Now there’s a local beer production facility in Otsego County that wants to expand, and we have the opportunity to help them expand out of their existing base, creating new opportunities, and make use of an idle facility in the same breath.
What are your other priorities?
Agriculture is another thing I’m particularly passionate about, strengthening family farms and looking at ways we can embed the production of New York food and fiber, and how we can try to capture more value added in our region and create jobs while we’re at it. Also, making sure that the family farms receive some of the benefit of some of that local processing and consumption.
There are different conversations about it, but from my perspective, it’s like we have folks who are speaking dialects but basically it’s the same language. One side talks about economic multipliers and the other about local food and sustainability, but when you look for the common denominator, it’s family farms.
There’s a huge divide between the farming community and the consuming public. There’s a lack of awareness, I think, a lack of understanding [by consumers] of the needs of the industry. With the flood relief, I haven’t had the chance recently, but I’d like to push for more of a consumer-based series of initiatives that are aimed at strengthening family farms as the final objective. I’ll be reaching out to our consumer-based groups and trying to pull them together to see if we can put together a series of policy and budget recommendations that are consumer-centered but family-farm-centered, as well. I serve on a task force on food, farm and nutrition that is being underutilized, and I think there’s great opportunity to use that task force as a launch point for this sort of initiative. We need to have that conversation, between farmers and consumers who are not making the connections between regulatory policy, tax policy, marketing assistance and making land affordable and available to young families who want to go into agriculture.
Look at Chobani [an Upstate New York yogurt company]; we celebrate the growth of that business from about seven people to 300 employees, and they’ve created another plant with 700 or so employees, and now they’re building plants in Australia and the west coast, but as much as we celebrate that, the one piece overlooked in this story is that the return to the dairy farmer has not increased. If anything, the prices have been lower than they need to be to encourage farmers to reinvest in equipment, or to encourage young family farms. In the mix of job growth and job creation, Chobani is a phenomenon, but my fear is that it may be short-lived unless we’re intuitive enough and motivated to make sure that the family farms derive enough economic benefit from that partnership to warrant future investment. My fear is that the whole dairy industry could collapse unless and until we ensure that there’s a fair price for the product that encourages future generations to continue with the industry and family farms can remain viable. Otherwise we’re headed toward the factory farm, which many people are fearful of and resist.
Other projects in the works?
I see marvelous opportunities for this state to continue to advance in a leadership role in alternate energy and conservation. We see the efforts with the solar consortium, and I look at energy across the broad spectrum; renewables, solar, wind, hydro, biomass, and also energy conservation. Where I think the state has fallen short is education about energy. I had to step back because of the floods, but I’m going to be pushing aggressively on what are the alternatives, what are the options, what are the directions that homes, businesses and farms can pursue.
Another thing is creating incentives to end users, so that the technology can affordably be within reach. We did a ribbon cutting at Kaatsbaan with their solar panels, and that’s good news for Kaatsbaan, but the challenge is we’d like to see that replicated in hundreds of thousands of homes, farms and businesses across the region. The technology is there but is not within reach financially.
My own house is a passive solar home, with excellent insulation, and I’d love to put in a wind generator, I’d love to put a solar thermal, but we can’t afford it. I’d like to put in a little biomass to burn grass pellets, it’s half the cost of oil, and we can’t afford it. Bringing the technology affordably within reach is vital.
The last part with alternative energy is financial subsidies and supports to those who want to go into manufacturing or getting the technology into the hands of the end users. I believe if we’re going to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, we do it home by home, business by business. As much as we rail against high gas prices and foreign oil, we’re not making meaningful inroads into lessening that dependency. I think we can be more aggressive with local projects, with state funding and making projects work on a case by case basis.
Diamond Mills in Saugerties is planning to create a hydro facility as part of that project. I haven’t had a chance to really engage the owners as to where they’re going with it, how much energy are we talking about, how are they thinking about utilizing it, are they planning to sell it to the grid, can we create a local power company. . .but that’s an opportunity right in our backyard where we can be positive and proactive.
Former governor Paterson coined a phrase which I keep close to me; he spoke about “energy being the new currency,” and I fully subscribe to that. So to the extent that we can have abundant affordable energy, we’re much better situated and everything flows from that.
