BY: Keith S. Shikowitz, Investigative Reporter
Patrick Carroll is running for the now vacated 96th Assembly District seat in the hopes of keeping this a Democratic controlled seat. I had the opportunity to speak with him about his campaign.
Let’s start with just a basic question. A lot of people in Rockland County and across the country in the millions have been transferring their political registration with Democrat to Republican. Why do you think people are doing that? How do you think it’s going to affect the race?
“Well, I don’t know if that necessarily has happened in Rockland County. I think the, the, the registrations in Rockland and obviously as a councilman in Clarkston for the last seven years, I know that the registrations of Democrats to Republicans in Clarkston has always been higher. Democrats have always outnumbered the registered Republicans. So I’m not sure what those numbers are. I do think that right now there’s an invigorated democratic party with Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket,, all the way down through. So I tend to disagree unless I saw the numbers, but I think the Democrats have a great slate top down, through the local races here in Rockland. I’m excited about what’s going to happen in November.
New York State as does the rest of the country, has a lot of issues affecting the populous. Some of them are the economy, immigration, no bail laws, school funding among others. The economy has kind of been a wreck the past few years. What plans does Carroll have to help with the economy for the average New York citizen?
A constituent came in and we had to pause for a moment. Picking back up Carroll said, “So, Keith, you had mentioned obviously the various of issues economy, immigration, school funding, etcetera and, and focused at the start on, on the economy. Obviously, as someone who has four young daughters, you know, I’m a government employee. I’m an attorney by trade, but I do work for the state. I work for the DMV. My wife is a physical therapist for the city school system. So, we all know the struggles that are facing middle class folk.”
“When I’m in Albany, my goal would be to be to number one, make things easier as possible. Work on keeping utilities from doing high increases, make sure there’s no unfunded mandates that are coming down from Albany. But at the same time, work to, make things easier and encourage businesses. We want small businesses to be settling in Rockland in the 96th District. But we also want folks you know, investing in our community. So I think as a global thing, I think what I would bring to the seat,, which we actually have had with Ken Zebrowski being in there.” Carroll stated.
Praising the job Zebrowski has done, according to Carroll, “Now, he’s a reasonable person who understands what people we’re going through and understand that people want to stay in their homes, whether they’re our parents’ generation or people who have kids who move away from their homes, from home for school, trade, school, military, whatever it may be and want to reinvest and come back to Rockland. So I think we need to work on first time home buyers, housing that is, is diversified in order to encourage young folks to come back and live here and, you know, work on making things a little bit easier for folks generally.”
Ok, you’re talking about business that goes to the next subject and this whole economic thing, all the regulations over 7000 regulations on businesses in New York state, a business can’t breathe with that much regulation on them as why businesses are leaving New York and, and nobody’s coming into New York.
“Well, I mean, I, I, I, I, I believe, you know, I think, you know, as a, as a person with legal training and attorney, I, I feel like I can kind of grasp for the concepts that may be a little bit more,, or, you know, detailed, but I think that the fact that I’ve been on the town board for seven years, so I’ve seen, what,, Clarkstown folks have been going through and, and, and, and the issues that they’ve been dealing with and, you know, choose where state agencies come down. They might not understand what happens actually in Rockland and needs to have that translated to them so I can bring that common sense up there.”
“So, I mean, without dealing with specifics on any, I mean, I, you just can’t blanketly say, ok, we’re going to get away rid of X Y and Z but yes, I’ll look at each one of them and, obviously the main thing is listening to people and responding accordingly. So, you know, if there’s overbearing regulations, I certainly would be in favor of, you know, getting rid of things that just don’t make sense.