Monday, July 21, 2008

Around the State . . .

No Surprise Here: Albany's 'big 3' fail to reach compromise on property tax cap. . . And it's not even a 'cap' . . . just a limit on how fast taxes can increase. . . Excelsior . . .

Nor Here: AMD factory still on track although "New York state's $1.2 billion incentive package offered to AMD expires in 12 months" raises an interesting question, "what if?"

Nor Here: Nuclear Operator Seeks to End Revenue Deal With State. Planning to close nuke plants? We should be opening MORE!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Chalk one up for those persistent Westchester county developers and Canadian NYRI investors.

Entergy Nuclear is seeking to dispose of their financial deal with the taxpayers of the State of New York by abandoning the “revenue sharing agreement that was expected to bring as much as $432 million to the state over the next six years, according to company officials and securities filings.” They are threatening to “decommission the two Indian Point plants in Westchester County and the FitzPatrick plant in Oswego County.” Wow no surprise here. For years the Westchester county real estate developers have been lobbying to have the Indian Point facility destroyed to make room for multi-million dollar real estate projects.

There is a HBO documentary depicting the dangerously deficient security measures being deployed at the Indian Point Nuclear Power plant. The “dumb and dumber” scenario here is that they chronicle themselves as a highly vulnerable facility in terms of it being a probable terrorist target. How desperate does one have to be to produce an expensive infomercial publically announcing itself as a probable target and expose the Westchester county residents to terrorists just to pander to the greed of a few?

NYRI already has an established need to ship upstate power to downstate consumers. There is already an existing shortage of electrical power in the downstate counties, including the five boroughs of New York City. NYRI has used this information as justification to permit them to find the cheapest way to deliver power from upstate communities. Even if it means trampling on the pristine upstate environment laced with their blatant disregard for upstate property owners. However this time, the upstate property owners are not standing for this horrible disrespect for upstate property. They have opted to fight back raising the desperation bar of greed.

What NYRI needs is not just a need for more power, but to manufacture a genuine downstate power crisis. And with this development they may have created a brilliant one. In this uncertain recessionary economic climate all they will have to do is show the elected State leadership a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars, in conjunction with a loss of megawatts of precious electrical power, and one can easily smell a political rat. Now add the reelection campaign funding that will flow from the wealthy Westchester county developers, and it is not difficult to figure out that there may be some real collusion happening here.

Now let’s take a look at who wins and who loses here. Ask yourself where the citizens of the Mohawk Valley will be in all of this mess? Do you think that perhaps the people of the Mohawk Valley will find themselves under the bus again? How many of our elected officials do you think will make a pilgrimage to Westchester County looking for campaign reelection contributions?