Introduction
It now can be logically argued that we now have less freedom (= less rights) than even a decade ago - for example, via indefinite detention, "legal" assassination of Americans, (lack of) on-line privacy, the "death" of "habeus corpus" and warrantless wiretapping. And yet one local (to NY State) hard won right is the freedom to vote with the money you spend on your electricity bill as to how you want that electricity made. Do you want it made via polluting or non-polluting means? You get your choice - by a way that maximizes the probability of a Fukushima/Chernobyl event (and we've had some really close calls in NY State), or way with a zero probability of such a horror? Do you want that electricity made in a way that has minimal CO2 pollution, or maximal CO2 pollution. After all CO2 pollution (CO2 made by burning fossil fuels) is the prime driver for Global Climate Change, which will NOT be good for us, by a long shot. About 40% of the CO2 pollution made in our country comes from burning coal and natural gas to make electricity. How about electricity in a way that maximizes NY State job creation, instead of in a way that exports the maximum quantity of money (out of state corporate profits, fossil fuel expenditures/corporate rentier profits)?
New York State energy policy is a game that's largely about territory and players and not so much about principles. I obviously don't work in Albany, and would be happy to be wrong about much of this, but this is the story I tell based on what I've seen.
The key pieces of this story are New York City and Westchester County.
New York City depends on power generation from outside of the city much the same way it depends on water from outside of the city. One of the key tasks of state government for the past century or so has been keeping New York City supplied.
Electricity has been a particular challenge, as NYC's supplies sometimes get stretched, especially in summer, and the temporary generators Con Ed pulls out haven't been very popular. On top of that, there's a pretty loud call to shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant just north of NYC, which needs its licenses renewed in 2013 and 2015 to keep operating. Sure enough, it's on a fault line, and Westchester is too densely populated for the evacuation plans to make much sense.
Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s there were hopes to buy electricity from HydroQuebec's ever-larger hydroelectric plants, but Governor (Mario) Cuomo stopped that, or at least barred one set of plans for doing so. The Shoreham nuclear plant could have provided power too, but a nuclear power plant in Long Island had even crazier evacuation plans than one in Westchester.
More recently, the city has been looking to Upstate for power. Around 2004, NYRI, a Canadian company, proposed a major power line from around Utica to Middletown (map), serving NYC, and residents fought hard (rough summary). After a lot of wobbling, Governor Pataki denied them the use of eminent domain in 2006, and it's more or less died since.
However, the Federal Government created a "National Corridor Designation" including roughly the same area. We didn't hear too much about it here because neither Tompkins nor Cortland County is included, but Cayuga, Chenango, Otsego, and Broome are.
That's designed to make it easier for power companies to build corridors. From their FAQ (49KB PDF):
On a more specific level, the designation of a National Corridor is a necessary first step in providing the federal government - through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission - siting authority that supplements existing state authority. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides a potential siting venue at FERC for transmission facility proposals within a National Corridor.
In practice, this will mean that if an applicant does not receive approval from a State to site a proposed new transmission facility within a National Corridor, the applicant may then apply to FERC for a permit and authorization to construct the facility. If FERC accepts the application, before it would issue a permit, it would conduct a full National Environmental Policy Act review and consider alternatives.
Such a federal permit would empower the project developer to exercise the right of eminent domain to acquire necessary property rights to build the facilities. However, that authority could only be exercised if the developer could not acquire the property by negotiation, and even then would not apply to property owned by the United States or a State, such as a national or State park. (Emphasis and paragraph breaks added.)
I think the story politicians (Governor Andrew Cuomo in particular) were hoping would yield political happiness was:
Add powerlines and/or gas pipelines from Upstate to the NYC area.
Generate power Upstate with wind farms and new plants running on natural gas. (Article X helps with both of these.)
Shut down Indian Point.
Point (3) appeals to most Downstate environmentalists. Until recently, natural gas seemed like the miracle fuel, burning cleaner with less climate change impact (yes I know that's questionable), and wind farms were the future, so point (2) also appealed to Downstate environmentalists. Point (2) tied in nicely to growing desperation Upstate for economic development of any kind as well.
Point (1) has always been ugly, but maybe the Feds would take care of that for the state, and let Albany off the hook?
Until it became clear that hydrofracking had massive side effects, this was a plausible story. It's not the only possible story - see, for example, this expensive offshore possibility - but it at least sounded like a balancing of Downstate consumption with clean Upstate production. (And yes, Liquified Natural plants, pipelines elsewhere, etc., mean that this is not just a New York State story.)
This plan, of course, isn't going over very well in a lot of Upstate communities, largely because of hydrofracking. Powerlines don't make people happy, but pollution can force them to desert a place.
How does this tie to home rule, in particular Senator Jim Seward's push for it?
Seward's home rule position lets him find political balance on most of this, except with the relatively small group of voters who have the time to see how the pieces don't fit.
He can tell places like Dryden and Middlefield that overwhelmingly want to avoid hydrofracking that they can stay out of it, while letting places that cheer it on move forward. It takes the heat off of him for the ugliest piece of this puzzle, while letting him stay more or less in the general story Albany is pushing. (And it leaves the conflict open place-by-place for the long run, too.)
Schenectady SPCA sets itself up for 50% off the top
. . . thanks to its lawsuit against the Sheriff
Private persons associated on a volunteer basis with a private corporation and a clear animal extremist agenda will be independently enforcing dog control laws in Schenectady County -- without having to answer to county officials -- if legislators approve the "Vicious Dog Control Law of 2011" on November 9.
As payment, the private corporation will receive 50% of all fines paid to the county stemming from their enforcement of state dog laws. The remaining 50% of the monies paid by Schenectady dog owners pursuant to the enforcement of public laws will also go to the SCSPCA, in compensation for sheltering impounded animals.
The Schenectady SPCA does not operate a shelter and it never has.
As an added bonus when the contract gets signed, the private SCSPCA gains access to vehicles purchased and maintained at taxpayer expense.
it's compatible with what the oil and gas companies want to do with it.
That seems to be the message of the career of Thomas West, the "Super Lawyer" who announced that his firm would be bringing a lawsuit against the Town of Dryden last week. (I didn't originally mean to single out West, but he's proud of his work and appears at many of the most important places where gas drillers demanded that everyone else bow down before their power.)
Do you ever wonder how compulsory integration, which basically lets drillers force their way under up to 256 acres of a 640-acre drilling unit, could have happened?
He was one of the principal authors of the spacing and compulsory integration legislation that overhauled New York's oil and gas program in 2005.
Compulsory integration now plays a crucial role for gas drillers assembling sites in New York. No well can be drilled without a state permit. And no permit can be awarded until the drilling company creates an approved "spacing unit" -- typically 640 acres -- at the proposed well site. The spacing unit is made up of property leased to the drilling company, plus property owned by holdouts who won't lease.
Compulsory integration may only be applied if the driller obtains leases on property totaling at least 60 percent of the proposed spacing unit. After that threshold is reached, the company can force the holdouts to join against their will.
To some, that arrangement seems an outrageous violation of basic private property rights.
"It is a way to get around negotiating price with landowners, a way to acquire gas rights at below-market rates, and a way to force people into leases or lease terms they don't want," said Fractracker, a website managed by a group founded at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health.
When the gas industry in Pennsylvania sought a milder version of New York's compulsory integration statute for drilling in that state's Marcellus Shale — the leasing threshold was 75 percent instead of 60 percent — it met vehement opposition and died.
In New York, opponents never had a chance to mobilize because there were no public hearings before the bill sailed through, Denton said. Albany attorney Thomas West claims on his website bio that he "played a key role" in winning passage of the 2005 bill. Denton agreed, saying, "Tom West shepherded it through the Legislature."
Yep - New York's delightful combination of a sleepy legislature and sleazy lobbyists frequently adds up to a not very funny joke. For all the complaining industry does about the cost of doing business in New York, we sometimes sell ourselves cheap.
And now, of course, this line of thinking has come to Dryden. Dangle riches in front of large landowners, downplay the risks, and hope they'll come along voluntarily. If they don't, worm your way toward enough acreage to take the rights anyway. And if they step up to say "Stop! This is a lousy idea!" - well, sue them.
Anschutz Exploration Corp. plans to file a lawsuit in state Supreme Court in Tompkins County to have the ban struck down in the Town of Dryden, according to the company's Albany-based attorney Thomas West. He said the lawsuit is expected to be filed this week...
"It will be a good opportunity to let the courts decide whether municipalities can, under the guise of zoning or otherwise, ban or regulate drilling," West said. "Hopefully, it won't be a difficult issue for the court."
I'm surprised they didn't wait until after the elections, but pouring fuel on the fire is after all what they're about. I'll be curious to see the actual filings, and will try to post them here.
I wouldn't expect early rulings in this case to settle anything, either - this will likely be settled by New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals, unless something like the proposal from Senator Seward or the one from Senator Ball intercedes on the side of the Town.
Dryden, however, seemed like a plausible target for the gas companies from the beginning:
Dryden is at an interesting geological location, with Trenton Black River, Marcellus Shale, and Utica Shale drilling all possible though not necessarily ideal.
They have a local surrogate happy to handle their public relations and cheer on the lawsuit.
Unlike Middlefield, we don't have the Baseball Hall of Fame to make it a potentially national issue.
The Town, though trending more and more Democratic, is still definitely a place where elections can shift policy drastically. Lawsuits can certainly be election issues.
I wouldn't have thought - though I am not a lawyer - that they would actually have legal standing to sue before the DEC actually issued them a permit. Perhaps they can do it in advance, but we'll see. It's not clear to me how they've actually been damaged at this point, but I suspect they'll use the prior Trenton Black River portion of the application to claim that they're an innocent victim of the charge against hydrofracking.
If they do have standing, I'm guessing this is largely a "might as well sue before other towns get the idea this is a good thing." Whether or not they have standing, announcing the lawsuit just as election time is gearing up seems like they hope the legal process will influence the election process.
It may well do that - just not necessarily in the direction they hoped.
Congresswoman Nan Hayworth has come under fire for doubling down her support for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's assertion, that federal disaster relief for Hurricane Irene should be conditioned on offsetting budget cuts. In a recent facebook wall posting she responded by likening congress to a frugal family:
"When we think about Irene," she writes, "we will mobilize the funding for disaster relief from less-essential spending, just the way American families do when they have to prioritize."
There are three things wrong with Hayworth's remarks: they are insensitively timed, they employ a very weak analogy, and finally, they depend on numbers that simply don't add up. New Yorkers are hurting and they need help, its inappropriate for a politician to exploit the crisis to trumpet her Tea Party styled austerity. Moreover, her comparing the country to a family doesn't make sense, and, even if it did, there simply aren't enough quarters in the jar to help us weather this storm.
On Facebook, Hayworth claimed that she was the first to ask the president for federal disaster relief funding. The fact is, her letter was submitted nearly a week after her colleagues in the senate, Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand had done so. Moreover, throughout the aftermath of Irene, the freshman congresswoman has gone about her routine public-appearance schedule-dropping by for photo-ops at Hudson Valley Hospital Center and speaking at the Rotary Club.
If Nan is seriously concerned about storm damage than that sentiment hasn't interfered with her calendar engagements. And while she hasn't demonstrated very much initiative in helping plan recovery, she has hardly lost an opportunity to use Irene as a way to tout her deficit reduction policies-she's made three statements in four days. When hundreds are without homes, thousands are without power, and businesses have lost incalculable amounts of revenues, it seems a tad insensitive to piggyback politics on tragedy.
The philosophy that Hayworth has been showcasing is that, "The federal government has to balance its budget the way our families do." But does this analogy really work? When individual households experience crises of this magnitude they depend on their community, their civic and cultural leaders to help them overcome hardship. Also, the Eastern Seaboard suffered a catastrophic natural disaster that was in part precipitated by its geography and climate. While an individual homeowner has the ability to relocate to reduce risk, a nation does not have that option and must invest in infrastructure and research in order to prepare for the next event. The family-country comparison is clumsy at best.
On her Facebook page, Hayworth exclaims: "We have a responsibility to the people and communities who are suffering after natural disaster... We also have a responsibility to provide that help without making things worse. We can, absolutely, do both."
This is not apparently the case. Damage assessment estimates that Irene will cost our state $1 billion and our country $7 billion. As it stands, the President's Disaster Relief Fund has only $800 million available, which means that it alone will not be able to finance the recovery. The money will need to come from elsewhere.
Congresswoman Hayworth says that the cash cow will be non-military discretionary funding in the federal budget. So, while sewage overflows in the town of New Windsor and Port Jervis remains indefinitely disconnected from the Metro North, she insists that a lengthy, and potentially inconclusive debate should begin over which government programs to divest in order to pay for recovery. Unsurprisingly, as a result, her ideas are not popular even among Republican town administrators; Exacerbated, New Winsor Mayor George Green, for example, shot back at her: "Don't tell me that you have to take money from another part of the budget to balance out FEMA money... people... lost their goddamn houses."
Although Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm, the human cost is utterly heartbreaking. In Orange County, for example, government infrastructure has been shut down, Wallkill, a town of twenty thousand, not only has lost access to potable water, but because it has prohibited non-essential travel it is effectively under curfew.
The military terminology is strangely appropriate, as the storm has in many ways likened New York to a war zone. Indeed, in the north-central town of Schoharie, Governor Cuomo has deployed the 719th Transportation Company of the Army National Guard to help rescue stranded and trapped home-owners.
All things considered, given her audacity, confused comparisons, and bad math, does anyone want Congresswoman Hayworth in their foxhole, let alone marshalling her district's recovery?
Suddenly, Seward's position seems pretty moderate. Greg Ball is generally on the right-most edge of the entire legislature, but he seems to have concluded that hydrofracking is a threat to the private property he so loudly promotes.
Immediate 180 day comment period on hydrofracking.
Mandatory full disclosure of all chemicals used and compounds produced during the hydrofracking process. Requires oil and gas companies to inform New York State Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources what chemicals are injected, the source of water used, how much water was used, and whether any radiological components were injected, and their fate.
Mandatory water and soil testing by an official governmental third-party for presence of chemicals used by the fracturing process prior to drilling
All fracking companies must agree to sign a Presumption of Causation Agreement with the State of New York.
Mandatory full reimbursement to property owners by negligent fracking companies for 150% of the real estate's market value of property, based on estimates prior to drilling, and 100% of the cost for full remediation of soil and water. The company will also be accountable for full reimbursement of the land owner's legal fees.
Mandatory full remediation of soil and water, and free medical monitoring for life. All settlements are not to be taxed.
Allow local governments to enact or enforce certain laws and ordinances relating to oil, gas and solution mining.
Mandatory adherence to an environmental impact assessment process, similar to New York's SEQR Process, to assess the impact to the environment from fracking.
Mandatory disclaimers and warning statements on lease documents about the risk of contamination of soil and water, as well as the potential health affects, related to fracking spills.
I will be very curious to see how (and if) the gas companies and their allies respond to this plan. Somehow I suspect they won't be too enthusiastic about "responsible drilling" when it includes a heavier dose of responsibility. On the more optimistic side, you never know - they might agree with it as part of a broader possible compromise on drilling.
(I tend to find I either completely agree with Greg Ball or utterly disagree with him. I'm not sure there's another politician with whom I have such clear lines.)
Hi everybody. My name is Devin McConnell and I'm a Democratic committeeman in the Town of Kinderhookin Columbia County. I'm writing up this message to let anyone here from the 20th district know that on Friday, August 12th Dutchess County legislator Joel Tyner will announce his candidacy for the Democratic nomination to unseat current NY-20 congressman Chris Gibson. I met Joel a few days ago at a Democratic event and was taken that he's an actual serious progressive pushing the idea as he puts it that we are "The Real Majority" and explaining that just about all major polls show a majority or more of Americans supporting Medicare-For-All, higher taxation on the rich, Planned Parenthood, Clean Money Elections and withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan now. And so far he is the first person to seriously announce a move to challenge Rep. Gibson next fall and it would be a serious accomplishment for the left and for the Democrats to run a seriously progressive candidate against a Tea Party candidate. The announcement on Friday will be at the FDR house at Hyde Park in Dutchess county at 12:30 and a following event will be at the courthouse in Hudson in Columbia County at 2 o'clock. I'm asking that any and all supportive and interested people reading this come out and support Joel Tyner and get a real progressive nominated before the Democratic Party comes in with another Blue Dog candidate.
Thank you
Devin McConnell
Joel Tyner For Congress, Youth Coordinator
In 2010, several wind farms had at least a full year of commercial operation - and one of them (Wethersfield 1) has been going for 10 years. Thus, it is possible to test if there is a likely Merit Order Effect (MOE) present in our part of NY. Apparently there is one, and one to the benefit of WNY electricity consumers and one NOT to the benefit of WNY pollution sourced electricity generator owners. The estimate is that customers were saved $31 million on their 2010 electricity bill ($604 million was spent to make an average of 1762 MW at an average price of nearly $39.22/MW-hr). Without wind power in the region, that extra $31 million net would have been scarfed up by (mostly) the AES and NRG corporations.
So, here is a link to the paper (12 pages, with some graphs) in .pdf format (214 kb):
http://www.4shared.com/documen... titled "Estimate of the Wind Power Merit Order Effect in Western New York State in 2010".
[I do not have any insider knowledge of conversations in Albany and Washington.]
Over the last few months, I've concluded that our federal and state governments don't seem especially inclined to regulate fracking (hydraulic fracturing) in drilling for oil and gas.
The Obama administration can't seem to say enough good about natural gas, whatever the source, while New York State seems to be shambling toward a July 1 release of the Supplement Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) on fracking, with a 30-day comment period and a likely shorter review to follow. Despite the Pennsylvania blowout, it doesn't sound like the Governor is looking for much delay. The Assembly held hearings last week, but I've not heard much from the Senate about moratoriums or bans lately.
This approach, combined with the regulation likely to be in the SGEIS, opens up some possibilities, though I'm not sure either the gas companies or the environment will feel protected by them:
Allowing municipalities to zone out hydrofracking will make it easy for places that obviously don't need the risks of drilling - cities and villages - to ban the practice.
Allowing municipalities to permit hydrofracking will make it easy for places that are chomping at the bit for drilling to allow the practice.
Places that have a mix of both will continue to have controversies, but at the local level.
In the short run, my guess is that most of the Southern Tier except perhaps the cities and a few towns will support hydrofracking and gripe that the state gets in the way of economic development by regulating it at all. Other areas will be more cautious, especially the more tourism-dependent parts of the Finger Lakes, Cooperstown (if the Baseball Hall of Fame and Chamber of Commerce are an indicator), and, perhaps most difficult of all, the watersheds for New York City and possibly Syracuse and Rochester.
I can't bring myself to say that this is a great idea. I've watched the mining industries' for too long to think they value the environment nearly as much as their advertising claims. I have less and less faith in the federal government's interest in regulating them, especially as the easy oil and gas disappear. And Albany, well... it's probably better thought of as a bazaar than a courtroom.
However, this does seem like a way to break the logjam. I definitely consider it an improvement on having the state start issuing permits while denying municipalities any power to regulate where fracking happens. Some activists - not the most committed, but some - would likely step aside so long as drilling couldn't happen in their own area. It's at least theoretically possible that municipal-level bans would give gas companies working in the open areas an incentive not to spill, because a clean record might encourage more towns to open up to them.
Of course, they might rely instead on recipes of lawyers and pouring money into local elections. The drilling companies, after all, have a relentless focus on extraction, while maintaining local resistance requires a lot of time and energy that won't sustain a business.
Albany could turn a different direction, but while I don't love this compromise, I do suspect it would take pressure off legislators and the Governor - which always seems to be their goal. It feels a classically New York solution combining regulation (understaffed as it may likely be), placing burdens on local government (political instead of financial this time), and nods in the direction of economic development for Upstate New York, however temporary it may be.
As we celebrate Memorial Day, and honor the brave American soldiers who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, we cannot escape the troubling reality that our nation has been in a perpetual state of war for nearly a decade. The United States and our NATO allies continue to occupy Afghanistan without a clearly defined enemy to defeat and without a realistic objective to achieve. At a time of shrinking budgets and pressing national priorities, we cannot continue to send our bravest and brightest citizens across the world to fight an open-ended war, while ignoring our needs here at home.
Bob Duffy has one more opportunity to do something big for Rochester.
There's a new grant program called the Smarter Cities Challenge designed to help cities target local issues of concern and map out solutions. It's being offered as a competition and the deadline for Mayor Duffy to apply is December 31st.
It's been a while since anyone's heard from NYRI, the New York Regional Interconnect company that wanted to drop a big new power line across New York State to carry power Downstate. Local opposition was strong enough that Governor Pataki signed a 2006 bill limiting their possible use of eminent domain and their application seemed to vanish in the downturn. (Their web site still exists.) The federal government, of course, went ahead and created national sacrifice corridors I mean National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors meant to protect such projects from mere local or regional opposition.
Today, I see on the Google blog and in the New York Times that there's a new plan, far more ambitious at $5 billion than NYRI's $1.6 billion proposal, that would put a power line offshore. It doesn't just serve New York - it extends from New York, NY to Norfolk, VA, though the original connections would be to New Jersey and Delaware.
It's meant as a "transmission backbone" for 6,000 MW of offshore wind turbine capacity, five times NYRI's capacity. NYRI billed itself as a way to get green energy from Upstate to Downstate, but there was no real promise the power used would be green. This also seems to run on the promise of green energy, though the Times notes that.
even before any wind farms were built, the cable would channel existing supplies of electricity from southern Virginia, where it is cheap, to northern New Jersey, where it is costly, bypassing one of the most congested parts of the North American electric grid while lowering energy costs for northern customers.
Perhaps Downstate doesn't need Upstate the same way it used to? And those of us Upstate can maybe breathe a sigh of relief about that?
If you ever watch Keith Olbermann on Countdown, or if you have been watching The Colbert Report this week, or if you have been reading the NY Daily News or the LA Times or the Minneapolis Star Tribune or if you've been listening to NPR or its affiliates ...
Possibly by now you will have heard the sad saga of Sidney Town Supervisor Bob McCarthy, who wants to sue a group of Sufi Muslims here and force them to desecrate the graves and exhume the bodies in the tiny cemetery they have on their private property.
Once the story made it to The Huffington Post, Olbermann picked it up long enough to name McCarthy his Worst Person in the World:
In solidarity with his friend Bingchester, who is not drinking Snapple, my 14 month old son has stopped drinking Mott's apple juice, out of respect for the American worker.
My son Quintus, whom many of you TAP folks have met (pictured here with State Senator Jose Peralta) loves apple juice. So we bought another brand, which he seems to like.
Take Action: Visit Bingchester's post here at TAP for links to actions you can take against the wage cuts, in addition to not buying their products. Click here for a list of brands.
This Saturday, my wife and I took our kids and both sets of our parents up to Filmore Glen State Park for a hike up the gorge trail.
I spent a fair amount of time marveling at just how solidly the structures and paths were built, and wondered if this was at least partly Civilian Conservation Corps work from the 1930s, when we put unemployed people to work building things that have been useful for three-quarters of a century since.
Sure enough, it was, as a plaque in the (amazing stone) pavilion indicated.
Roosevelt's Tree Army plaque commemorating Civilian Conservation Corps at Filmore Glen.
Built to last, at a time when it wasn't clear anything would last. I'll take that over crony capitalism, market worship, and calls to privatize everything in sight any day.
EDSC Chairmen Dennis Mullen talks to the always awesome Liz Benjamin about high speed rail in NY. In my opinion, the key takeaway is that the HSR funds in the Stimulus are welcome, but the small amount allocated to NY is indicative that a much broader and long-term funding strategy for HSR is necessary in the next federal transportation bill.
We are again having to take a short bypass on our planned writing journey; this time to a place that's, according to their Facebook page, about 148 beer stores north of Toronto, Ontario (which, for the benefit of the less-geographically aware reader, is in Canada).
It's a crazy place, where duct tape is more truly the coin of the realm than loonies, but we're going to try to explain it all today...and in the effort we may even learn about a few things that really matter, like the unimportance of importance, and the kind of quality of life that comes from having a junk pile and a sense of adventure.
So grab the bug spray, Gentle Reader, because it's time to visit Possum Lodge.
I've thought about this a lot-- I've even talked to you one-on-one. I don't think I'm going to be carrying your petitions next month.
I'm not saying "for sure" I won't. But that's my inclination right now.
I'm frustrated with Albany and while I think you're a good guy, I also think you're part of Albany. It's hard for me to judge how much you're trying to fix things from within and how much you're part of the problem because you live in that culture.
There are some things that you can do to convince me to carry your petitions. I'll talk about them after the flip: but it really boils down to: what are you going to do to fix New York State?
