BY: Keith S. Shikowitz, Investigative Reporter
Being a political figure, especially when you are the incumbent, carries a lot of weight and takes up much of your day. Your time is always in demand from many different agencies and organizations. Sometimes scheduling conflicts prevent you from attending an event that you were informed of after you already have another event scheduled for the same time. Choices have to be made and generally the first commitment you have made is the one that gets your time. Senator Bill Weber is no stranger to this conundrum.
The economy has been a disaster all over the country, but New York with the high taxes is in probably worse shape than a lot of other states. What is something you will continue to do to help bring down the taxes and improve the economy in New York?
You know what, what we’ve seen over the last number of years, last five years, the New York State budget’s gone up from about $170 billion to about $236 billion in the last number of years that I’ve been there it’s gone up $8 to $10 billion as well, unsustainable spending. Obviously, everyone’s tax dollars will go to pay for this unsustainable spending. We don’t see any relief from the majority right now.
You gave a general idea of what needs to be done. What specifically have you done? And are you going to continue to do any specific bills you want to put forth or anything that you’re going to do specifically?
“So, in our first term, we focused mainly on local bills of interest passing local bills that are held the various townships, what’s called,, home rule and what we wanna do in our, in our second term is to really make a difference,, get the majority to really deal with the spending that’s out of control. I tried to get the migrant money removed from this budget this year $2.4 billion over the last two years. It’s been $4.3 billion going right to New York City and that’s money that should have been used to either give property tax relief to people. It should have been used for infrastructure improvements.
Let’s get on to the illegal immigration, the migrant situation. Now I know that one of the things that Melnick said, when I interviewed him was that the immigration thing is a federal situation which he’s right on that part on that point. But the federal situation has become a state matter with the state money going to take care of all this. What can you do to help minimize the effect of this on the average New York taxpayer.
“Well, what we need to do is continually stand with people like Theresa Kenny Ed Day, George Hoehmann, people that really fought back against the mayor and the governor’s sanctuary state policies where Mayor Adams wanted to send over 300 unvetted migrants to Orangetown, Teresa Kenny Ed Day, myself, Mike Lawler we all stood up against that directive and we got, we, we were able, I know that Teresa and the county went court to prevent that.”
Let’s go to the safety and no bail laws that could work right off on the illegal immigration with the new category of crime called migrant crime. The safety issues. What can you do to help maintain the safety of people in, in your district?
“Look, I think it’s twofold. What we need to do is continually put money in the state budget so that local law enforcement, you know, gets, gets state aid that they seriously need. We’ve also in this last year’s budget increased money available to nonprofits, to houses of worship, and religious schools to have additional funding.
I think we put in the traditional $35 million in the state budget above and beyond what we had in the previous year. So that those nonprofits, those, you know, religious schools, religious institutions can apply for grants to increase their security.”
According to Weber, we also need to really roll back a lot of these progressive laws that they’ve passed since 2019 including bail reform, you know, including clean slate that they just put into effect that he voted against last year, which basically seals the records for criminals after a certain amount of years and really get back to supporting law enforcement and, and police officers rather than really coddling criminals, which is what we’ve been doing for the last five years up there.