BY: Keith S. Shikowitz, Investigative Reporter
Let’s look at the No Bail laws now, which is creating a lot of the lack of safety in New York State, not just in your district. There’s been band aids put on it and this is what other outlets and people in the media said, that they put band aids on the No Bail Law was as a way to make it look like they were reforming it and you know, trying to make it better for the people. Have you seen any, I mean, you’ve seen the band aids seen the band aids.
Weber stated, “The band aids have had zero effect. I know that because I’ve spoken to judges, prosecutors and police officers recently and they tell me the same thing that they’ve seen no change in terms of the effectiveness of these cosmetic changes and they still remain concerned that what’s on the books right now is not serving the residents. Well, what we need to do is go back to the drawing board, get rid of bail reform, the cashless bail and then deal with other changes, minor changes that may be need, may that may be needed you know, I think this, this really push for cashless bail obviously transpired a number of years ago, right, when there was someone who was arrested, I think for a low level crime, marijuana possession or something that was put into Rikers Island and didn’t have money to get out of jail and they were talking about the inequities of that. I think everyone’s sensitive to the special case. I don’t recall the entire thing, but I know that that was the inequity that de, that led to, you know, the massive change in our laws.”
Infrastructure is a problem all around the country. Roads in disrepair. Bridges falling apart and into rivers as what happened in Pittsburgh.
Earlier you were talking about infrastructure and when you’re talking about the taxes what have you seen going back just even between here and Albany in the way of what needs to be fixed.
“We’ve seen a lot. You know what? The one thing that we did in the first few months that I took office was really trying to change the conversation in terms of doing repair work. What I mean by that is we put together a portal on our website so that our residents can report potholes whether on a state road, county road, village road. We don’t care, we want them to report it, and we will disseminate that to the and we have been to the various jurisdictions of the state. You know, we’ll send it to our DOT contact. If it’s county village or town, we’ve been sending to those local DPW jurisdictions to get those potholes fixed.”
We’ve, we’ve reported hundreds and hundreds of potholes because we wanted to change the conversation of, ‘That’s not my responsibility. We’re only responsible for the state.’ In the end, we’re responsible for our constituents. And why not help them navigate through a complicated system like government, you know, over the last couple of years since I’ve been there, we’ve increased money to CHIPS program and to municipalities to do infrastructure upgrades. So, we’ve, we’ve done a good job but it’s nowhere near where we need to be.”
What needs to be done to fix the situation.
That includes water systems and electrical systems. It’s got to be, you know, leading into the electrical. Obviously, we’ve seen this big push to go to electric, you know, these electric mandates, but, you know, when you talk to O and R and some of the utility companies, they’re nowhere near ready for what the state is trying to mandate immediately. That’s going to take you, that’s not even, that’s a separate conversation that’s going to take even more money, state money, probably federal money to make sure that whatever mandates are in place that it doesn’t have an impact on, you know, people turning on their lights without a brown out.
Sum up what your second term is going to be and then tell me why people, what, what’s your message to the reader to my readers that says, why they should vote for you over Melnick?