A Million State Senate $$$ are now available to fight the NYRI powerline! While some may welcome this as good news, is it really? Is it money well spent?
People should know exactly what they will get for their money. But no one knows what the result of a lawsuit will be. Spending at lot of money on one does not guarantee success. The money could be spent and the suit still be lost. Then what will be left to show for the spending?
This is a million that could have gone into something tangeable -- like fixing up the crumbling historic aquaduct at Ft. Hunter... or fixing crumbling abandonned buildings at the Utica State Psych Center.
Instead, it will go to pay lawfirms (most likely politically well-connected law firms) to fight a problem that should never have even existed had the State Senators done their job of policy-making. (Is this a case of creating a problem/allowing one to develop and then rewarding your friends with money to solve it? Will the money really be used to buy competent representation against the powerline, or will it buy a "performance" ? Who knows? It's "Senate Republican" money -- suggesting that it is controlled by "leaders" whose true positions may or may not reflect their public statements.)
The Assembly, meanwhile, is looking into making more money available to intervenor groups. More of the same type of thinking.
Our state legislators have no hesitation over spending money -- after all, it's not really theirs, but OUR money they are spending. Offering up huge sums of cash is an easy way to impress some people, and an easy way to deflect from the fact that they have not done their job in establishing a viable state energy policy that is fair to all regions of the state. Again, we should not even have come to the point where we have to fight a NYRI.
The Senate and Assembly have allowed large corporations (even foreign companies) to, de facto, make "energy policy" for us by defaulting in doing it themselves. Instead of policy being set by elected representatives, it will be set by litigation before administrative agencies and the courts. The $ million expenditure represents legislative laziness.
Unless government starts doing what we pay it to do, decisions that affect everyone will increasingly be made by private entities that have the money to get things done themselves -- either by acting within a legislative void or by buying influence. Individuals will have less and less control over their lives because everything that gets done will be from the prospective of what is good for these businesses, not people.
1 comment:
More money for contracts for their buddies. Once more our elected officials want to impress the people with their own money and then repress them in the end. This is all just a bunch of museum and a way to get us to pay for elections in a backhanded kind of way. If it weren't an election year, we would see them marking X's where the towers will go right now.
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