No worry about embarrassing questions from the audience. Hein blew through the usual 15-minute Q&A after prepared remarks and kept going almost 13 minutes past the traditional 9 a.m. adjournment time.
Former chamber president Len Cane, who was in the audience, had over a more-than-30-year career strictly enforced that deadline. People have to get to work, you know.
Cane later reminisced about an incident involving one of our more loquacious former pols, retired congressman Maurice Hinchey. “Maurice was in the middle of a sentence when the clock struck nine,” Cane recalled. “I was only halfway out of my chair when he looked over and said, ‘Uh, oh. I’m done. Here comes Len.’”
As Hein does not suffer critics gladly, and a few were scattered in the crowd, I suspect his overage was deliberate.
Here and there
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s suggestion that the state pay for the college education of inmates seems to have kicked up dust on the left and right.
To Republican Assemblyman Pete Lopez, it’s just not fair to finance felons while hard-working, taxpaying citizens bust their butts to get themselves and their kids an increasingly expensive and generally necessary college education. Lopez’s account of his own struggle to pay for school, including a stint as a fishmonger, made his point, but it missed Cuomo’s. It costs a lot more to incarcerate criminals — usually repeat offenders — than to educate them.
State Sen. Cecilia Tkaczyk, while not agreeing with the governor, takes a more fundamental view. Educate all our children, said the former school board president, and fewer will wind up in jail.
Bottom line, my guess is that this gubernatorial initiative, a diversion as the big budget battles loom in March, is going nowhere.
Ulster surrogate judge Mary Work, a Democrat, will seek a second ten-year term in November. Democrat sheriff Paul Van Blarcum will be running for a third four-year term. Given the growing advantage in Democratic enrollment — about 10,000 more registrants than Republicans — and a Republican Party in shambles, neither should have a worry about November.
Kingston Mayor Shayne Gallo has thrown his considerable weight between one of two expensive engineering recommendations to fix what now seems a permanent sinkhole on Washington Avenue. To the horror of neighbors and the considerable inconvenience of motorists, the gaping sinkhole emerged more than two years ago, before Gallo took office.
Public impatience and ire with the city’s seeming inability to deal with this issue has led to some weird ideas, like chucking the mayor into the hole with pick, shovel and cork. Others add the suggestion that corporation counsel and mayoral spokesman Andy Zweben join him as a subterranean mouthpiece. Gallo, who delivers his third state-of-the-city address on March 4, may shed some light on less fanciful alternatives.
I was there and was also taken aback by Hein’s comment about his Mother. I was also insulted by Hein’s total lack of respect for the audience and the time honored tradition of making sure folks had enough time to get to work by 9:00. It is becoming clearer everyday that Hein’s one and only concern is Hein himself.
WHY would anyone think Hein has any regard for older people after what he did with Golden Hill? WHY would anyone think, after years of whining and complaining and arguing by local officials over Safety Net, that Hein was whining about Kevin Cahill on any kind of “principle”?? Hein is yet another truly useless elite. It is high time to at least kick out the elites and get some serious folks in there who are at least in touch with reality moreso than Hein and Putin seem to be. And finally, it is high time the public start to curse this phonybaloney Mr. Hein out enough to make HIS ears cringe!!