Paterson Says “Anxiety Is Overflowing In Upstate NY”
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- May
- 12
That was part of Gov. David Paterson’s response to questions about why he wants to remove an upstate chairman of the Empire State Development Corp. and replace it with one statewide chair.
He said he doesn’t want to take away representation of upstate businesses, but feels it’s important to have one person at the helm of the agency. Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer split the agency into an upstate and downstate branch, which has been hailed by upstate business leaders.
Business leaders in upstate are criticizing the governor’s plans to go back to the old policy, in which a New York City chairperson oversees the state’s entire economic development program.
Right now, Dan Gundersen serves as the upstate chair, based out of Buffalo.
“No one has said that we are taking Mr. Gundersen away from upstate,” Paterson told reporters after a town-hall meeting in Batavia on farm issues with Sen. Charles Schumer. (There is Paterson and Schumer, on right, before the event today.)
“And I certainly understand that the economy is reeling, the anxiety is overflowing in upstate New York.”
Paterson went on to say that “I wanted to have an ability of the agency to have a centralized organization” yet he doesn’t plan to diminish any services to upstate.
“If we don’t change something, we’re not going to have improvement around here,” Paterson said.
“And I would invite some of those who said they were irked, to please call me because I let them know since the time I was in office two months ago that if they ever had a problem, they should call me and not one of them have called me in the past few days.”
This entry was posted
on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 6:02 pm by Joseph Spector.
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What he wants, of course, is to be able to appoint one person, a party loyalist, who will not criticize anything that comes out of his office. If upstate falls for this, then they are as dumb as the condescending picture of American Gothic (the barn, the pitchfork, the old farmers) makes them out to be. What neither of these pols or the hacks who put them in front of the cutouts understands is that this picture is a satire to begin with.