What Is Governor Hochul Trying to Hide About Her Blooming Grove Veto? (Part 1)
After almost two-hundred days of waiting, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul's office says there are no records concerning her late night December veto of a land preservation bill for Blooming Grove
If we start listing all the issues Democrats and Republicans have with New York State Governor Kathy Hochul, we’ll be here all day.
As it stands, posts on The Monroe Gazette are longer than most people want for their news coverage, and I always get an ear-full about the length.
So, for the sake of argument and length, I’ll only give you two issues concerning Governor Hochul before we get to the Blooming Grove veto.
Then, in part two, we’ll focus entirely on the situation behind the Veto and the Governor’s stonewalling about it.
Why?
I think it’s important to take some time here to provide these examples so that the Blooming Grove Land Preservation veto is put into the proper context.
First, people may not realize they’re happening/have happened, and second, I don’t want anyone to think I’m just picking on the Governor because it’s election season.
Both examples below demonstrate the governor’s interest in working for wealthy and well-connected people — who don’t need her help and our money — at the expense of everyone else.
It’s not just Mr. Joel Stern and his local hate group, The United Jewish Community of Blooming Grove.
And I want to stress that point, which is why we’re going to go through these examples first.
I really hate it when people say shit like “They run the State” in referring to my Haredi brothers and sisters.
This is the worst antisemitic trope.
No. “They” do not run the State. “The Jews” do not control the world or space lasers.
Believe me, as a Jew, if I had access to a space laser, I wouldn’t be wasting my time working as a journalist.
What would be the point when I have a space laser?
The Wealthy and the Powerful control the state, much like they do the rest of America.
Some members of that group just so happen to be Haredi, but it’s not an exclusively Haredi club.
Two of our examples today demonstrate that, which is why I’m sharing this before we discuss the veto and the governor’s stonewalling of information concerning it.
Money For The Buffalo Bills or Money for The Metro-Rail Extension?
Let’s start in Western New York, where our governor calls home, and I’ve spent much of my life.
Hochul gave $850 million of your tax dollars to the Buffalo Bills despite the Bills having one of the wealthiest owners in the NFL.
If you’ve never been, Highmark Stadium is in Orchard Park. Not Buffalo. You have to get on I-90 and drive east for a bit to get to the stadium. It's not exactly the safest thing to do in the Fall and Winter, given the region’s notorious Lake Effect Snow,and lack of mass transit.
(If you have not had the pleasure of driving through Lake Effect Snow on I-90, I assure you, it’s fucking terrifying.)
Buffalo's lack of mass transit is a major problem and arguably one of the things keeping it from explosive economic growth.
Why? Well, where do you think all the Climate Refugees are going to move to when the South gets too hot? They’re going to Buffalo, baby!
You might be, too. So pay attention to what I’m saying here. There’s a point to it.
People in Buffalo have been dying to see the Metro Rail get extended and expanded throughout the region to meet the growing city’s mass transit needs.
Probably no more so than in Amherst, so tens of thousands of college students and thousands more employees can get from the University at Buffalo North Campus to downtown Buffalo without needing a car or the bus every day.
The University at Buffalo is enormous. There are 32,000 students across the three campuses, most at Amherst’s North Campus. It’s the largest college by student population in the State University of New York (SUNY) system. UB is an economic force for the entire region. (Their D1 football team sucks, though. SUUUUUUUCCCKKKS. So much so that they should scrap the program and re-invest the money into academics. But that’s just my opinion.)
More college students attend the University at Buffalo than the total population of the Town of Blooming Grove and the Village of South Blooming Grove combined.
If you’ve driven between Buffalo and Niagra Falls, you know how congested those roads are — to say nothing of the ever-present dangers of driving around one of our Canadian friends. (It’s Miles Per Hour down here guys, not Kilometers.)
Getting all those people and buses off those roads? That’s a win for the environment. And as you’ll recall, reducing greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030 is required by the New York State’s Climate Law.
NFTA (Niagra Frontier Transportation Authority) announced plans for the possible UB North Campus Metro Rail extension back in 2013, 12 years after I first heard about it as a college freshman at Alfred State, and it still hasn't happened.
Why? Money.
Ok. A lot of NIMBY shit too. But it’s mostly money, as in nobody wanted to pay the infrastructure bill of $1.2B to make it happen.
And here we are today, with a Governor from Buffalo!
She’s ready to get to work and make her city the destination Climate Change has said it would become, and we’ve got all that money from the Infrastructure Act Biden passed …
Right?
Wrong.
Instead, Buffalo got $850M for a football stadium that its billionaire owner could have paid for.
A new football stadium, by the way, that will be in the same dumb location in Orchard Park, with no roof, for another thirty years or until the NFL decides to extort New York State again to keep the Bills from moving to Toronto.
They will. I promise you, the NFL will absolutely do this to New York State again, and you will have to pay the bill. Even if you live in Southern Orange County, nearly six hours away from Buffalo.
In professional sports, that’s the whole ballgame: Extorting taxpayers to keep the teams they love while minimizing the expense of the billionaire owners to build new stadiums.
The reason for the $850M is less to do with the new stadium and more to do with bribing the NFL to keep the Bills in Western New York for another 30 years. Or less.
Further proof of this claim can be found in the NFL’s intention to put four teams in Europe this century but not a team in Toronto, North America’s fourth-largest city.
Why not Toronto? Because the NFL can use Toronto as leverage to extort New York State for anything they want when it comes to keeping the Bills in Buffalo. This includes $850M of your money, which could have gone toward the Metro Rail’s total bill of $1.2B
Governor Hochul sold out the people of her own home city to a billionaire fracker.
So, let’s stress the point here so it’s not lost on anyone: Governor Hochul does not work for my Haredi brothers and sisters.
She works for the Wealthy and the Powerful. And her work for those people comes at the expense of the city she calls home.
That brings us to our second example, this one is a little closer to home in Southern Orange County.
Keeping Museum Village Open Or Defending Andrew Cuomo From Consequences?
Here in Southern Orange County, you’ve probably heard that Museum Village is going broke and will likely have to close. This is “great news” for our developer friends in South Blooming Grove, who have been eyeballing the property for quite a while now.
But this is equally bad news for everyone else since Museum Village is a cultural institution that Roscoe Smith gifted to Southern Orange County. Smith is the same person who gave us all what became Orange & Rockland and Smith Clove Park. Not to mention his long-neglected but still beautiful property on Lakes Road, which the Village of Monroe will (eventually) turn into a park after the eminent domain proceedings have concluded.
If only there were money New York State was using for bullshit things (like a new football stadium for the Bills) that could go to institutions like Museum Village instead.
Well …
Hold on to your ass.
Thus far, you — a New York State taxpayer — have paid $8.2M to defend former Governor Andrew Cuomo against lawsuits over his creepy conduct. Something New York State has zero obligation to do.
But wait. This gets way, way, way dumber.
Because $2.5M of that money is being used to retain the firm, Morgan Lewis, to defend Cuomo against … a 168-page report prepared by Attorney General Letitia James that documented Cuomo’s extensive list of wrongdoings.
So, think about that for a second.
You’re on the hook right now to defend Andrew Cuomo from charges brought about by a report that you also paid for coming out of Letitia James’s office.
Governor Hochul does not have to do this.
As The Nation pointed out in its article, settling the claims against Cuomo would probably have cost less than the nearly $10M we spent as taxpayers defending him.
If our State Senator, James Skoufis, had any balls — he doesn’t — he would demand New York State stop defending Cuomo and re-allocate that money to more pressing needs.
You know, like keeping Museum Village open?*
Then again, Mr. Skoufis has over a million dollars in his campaign account — and I checked with New York State’s Board of Elections on this one. According to Kathleen McGrath, Director of Public Information at the Board of Elections, after this election is over in November, Skoufis could discharge the money from that account and gift it to Museum Village to help keep it open while a more long term situation is determined.
As Mrs. McGrath told The Monroe Gazette:
“There are a number of permissible ways for a committee to disburse leftover funds once all loans/liabilities are paid off (and any other repayments are made). Funds can be:
Contributed to a charity recognized by the Internal Revenue Service, but not where the filer or a member of the filer’s family controls the charity or has decision making powers therein; or (Emphasis Added)
Contributed to a candidate or a political committee, subject to the recipient candidate’s or committee’s receipt limit; or
Transferred between two authorized committees solely supporting the same candidate; or to a Party or Constituted Committee where the filer making the transfer is a candidate or candidate’s authorized committee; or
Refunded on a pro-rated basis to all contributors; or
Turned over to the NYS General Fund.
The Campaign Finance Handbook outlines these options.
While I cannot speak to the specifics of this museum, if it is an IRS-recognized charity/501(c)(3), then donating funds to it could fall under the first bullet above.”
Of course, Skoufis won’t do this. Because he seems to enjoy hoarding all that money, but it’s something he can legally do according to New York State, after paying off any debts or other bills from his re-election campaign.
Either way, this is yet another situation in which Governor Kathy Hochul has misappropriated money that could have gone to more pressing needs, like improving mass transit in Western New York for tens of thousands of people or keeping cultural institutions like Museum Village open.
And we haven’t even touched on the damage she just did for Orange County’s commuters and New York City commuters by killing the congestion pricing plan.
Remember: The Congestion Pricing, according to the MTA’s statements to The Monroe Gazette, would have funded the upgrades needed for the Port Jervis line to provide a one-seat ride into New York City, as well as more regular train service.
Now, we have nothing.
So, do you understand why people on both the left and the right don’t like Governor Hochul?
Good.
Do you also understand why I shared all this with you first, before we got into a deep discussion about Hochul’s office stonewalling The Monroe Gazette for nearly a year about the Blooming Grove veto?
I absolutely detest these people who crawl out of the woodwork on social media and say Hochul works for the Haredi,or say that the Haredi run the State.
No. They do not. We, as Jews, do NOT.
What we DO have is a governor who works for the powerful and the wealthy, often at the expense of everyone else.
And members of the Democratic party — like Skoufis or Letiticia James — often enable that bad behavior.
It just so happens that some of those Wealthy and Powerful people, are Haredi.
I just didn’t want to get any further in this discussion without first stressing this point. Because it would be real easy for someone to twist things around and fuel their wild antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Now, in Part 2, assuming we’re all on the same page here, we’ll talk about the late-night December veto that Hochul executed on behalf of Mr. Joel Stern and his hate group.