Click above to download or play today's "Better Weather." Produced by Joe Demanso of the Catskill Makers Syndicate.

Nick Reisman is reporting for State of Politics a poll released April 12, by Unite NY and conducted by John Zogby Strategies found voters do care about who fills the lieutenant governor's job. The poll was released the same day that Brian Benjamin resigned from the office hours after he was indicted on charges of bribery and fraud stemming from an unsuccessful campaign for New York City comptroller. The poll found 88 percent of participants believe the lieutenant governor should have the "readiness to lead immediately" as their most important trait. Benjamin had been expected to compete in a Democratic primary for lieutenant governor in June against activist Ana Maria Archila and former New York City Councilmember Diana Reyna. It is not yet clear if Gov. Kathy Hochul will select a replacement for Benjamin in the office, or if Democrats will be able to replace him on the statewide ballot ahead of the June primary. State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins is currently serving as lieutenant governor in an acting capacity. On the Republican side, the poll found that U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin is at 27.8 percent, former Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino at 15.2 percent and Harry Wilson at 10.5 percent of support. Former Trump administration official Andrew Giuliani is in a virtual tie with Zeldin at 29.1 percent, the poll found. The poll of the GOP primary was conducted April 10 and has a margin of error of 6.1 percentage points. Read the full story at nystateofpolitics [dot] com.

Rachel Silberstein is reporting for the Times Union a provision in the newly adopted New York state budget was crafted to transform the school transportation sector, requiring all school buses purchased after 2027 to run on electricity and replacing all 50,000 diesel-fueled buses statewide with electric vehicles by 2035. Environmental advocates applauded the move, but educational leaders and school officials warn that making the goals will be financially and logistically challenging. In the coming years, districts will have to install charging stations and possibly renovate their electrical infrastructure and bus routes to support the new fleets. Brian Cechnicki, executive director at the Association of School Business Officials, said this is the first in a series of state and federal mandates targeting school districts to help governments reach their environmental goals. "These are all things that we, as advocates and schools, will need to be mindful of ... remember, the more you have to spend in these areas, the less you have to spend on teachers and academic programming," he said. The 2022-23 state spending plan infused the Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act with $500 million to support electric school buses and charging infrastructure. Studies show numerous benefits to going electric. Diesel fuel has been shown to worsen respiratory illnesses and cause cancer. Electric buses have 70 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions than diesel buses, which benefits the environment and results in cleaner air for everyone, according to advocates. Bethlehem Central School District last year became one of the first in the state to start the process of swapping out its diesel buses with battery-run vehicles. The district secured $1 million in funding from the state to supplement the purchase of five electric buses. Read the full story in the Times Union.

Chris Lisinski is reporting or State House News Service tuition at all University of Massachusetts campuses will increase this fall for the first time in three years The UMass Board of Directors voted 12 to 2 on April 13, to approve a package of tuition and fee hikes first proposed at a committee meeting last week. Two student trustees, Derek Houle of UMass Lowell and Narcisse Kunda of UMass Dartmouth, cast the only dissenting votes. Tens of thousands of in-state undergraduate students at Mass face a 2.5 percent tuition hike for the 2022-23 academic year, or between $346 and $395 more annually, as well as increases in room and board costs ranging from 1.9 to 3.9 percent. Out-of-state undergraduates are looking at similar tuition increases next year, as do all graduate students at the Amherst, Boston and Lowell campuses. UMass suspended annual tuition increases on its four non-medical campuses for each of the past two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. UMass President Marty Meehan estimated the tuition freeze resulted in about $32 million in foregone revenue. Meehan said seeking another tuition freeze would not be sustainable in the current economic climate. Officials argued that the average 2.5 percent tuition increase is significantly lower than the current inflation rate of 8.5 percent. Meehan said students will collectively share nearly $1 billion in financial aid from federal, state and UMass sources. Read more in The Berkshire Eagle.

Randy J. Stone reports in Radio World that the Federal Communications Commission is thinking about reinventing the Emergency Alert System. Listeners mostly hear tests of the Emergency Alert System on televisions and radios, that open with a long static-filled tone and say that "in the event of an actual emergency" important information would be relayed. The system is mostly used as a warning for hazardous weather events, interrupting programming on all stations in the affected area. The system began in 1997, primarily to allow the President of the United States to address the country via all radio and television stations in the event of a national emergency, but has never been used for anything other than regional weather warnings. The emergency messages come in four parts: a digitally encoded Specific Area Message Encoding header, an attention signal, an audio announcement, and a digitally encoded end-of-message marker. So while listeners only understand the words or messages, computers are hearing other information. Some stations in each market get the initial warning message, and the other stations get the message from that station through the digital codes. Now, though, many Americans do not get all their immediate information from over-the-air transmissions. Many hear new from online digital sources. A second system, the Common Alerting Protocol, has been set up for digital sources, and the FCC is now asking broadcasters if they can all switch to that system, and integrate it somehow into analog radio and television. This is a behind-the-scenes debate, and whatever the result will probably sound the same to listeners and viewers in the future, if the mandate for a messaging system remains. It might now, since it is not really needed for national emergency, when every channel would be covering every moment of a president's words without any mandate.

Today's daily news update.

Larry Rulison reports in the Times Union that SABIC Innovative Chemicals that runs a factory in Selkirk, was docked by New York's Department of Environmental Conservation with a $322,400 penalty for the accidental release of 22,057 pounds of poisonous styrene vapor into the air in 2020. In May 2020, a styrene vapor leak in India killed 12 people and hospitalized hundreds, according to the newspaper. In Ravena no one died, but multiple roads were closed, homes within half-a-mile were evacuated, and residents within a mile were told to shelter in place. The state Office of Emergency Management, the State Police, the state Office of Fire Prevention and Control, and local agencies all responded to the leak from a railcar. A subsequent inspection of the SABIC facility found other air pollution violations unrelated to the styrene vapor release at the southern Albany County plastic plant owned by Saudi Arabian interests. These enforcement actions include a substantial penalty and require SABIC to improve its operations to protect the surrounding community and the environment from further violations and prevent future emergencies,” said DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos in a statement. Read more about this story in the Times Union.

MidHudson News reports that the environmental group Scenic Hudson, with a new study, says General Electric owes $11.4 billion to complete the cleanup of the Hudson River under the federal Superfund law. GE dumped millions of pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls in the Hudson River above Albany from 1947 to 1977. Scenic Hudson's study compared GE’s dumping of PCBs to the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The study indicates the contamination in the Hudson River was far worse. “PCBs are incredibly persistent. PCBs are far more toxic than oil,” said Haylee Carlock, Scenic Hudson’s director of Environmental Advocacy and Legal Affairs, on April 12. “The damage is far, far greater than the Gulf.” GE dredged some of the PCBs out of the upper Hudson River from 2009-2015, but Scenic Hudson says there is a lot of the poisonous chemicals left in the river. “Removing the contamination will help the restoration happen more quickly,” she said. “This is about restoring the Hudson River to a healthy condition. It’s fair we make them pay their fair share” Mark Behan, GE’s spokesperson, denounced the report. “GE’s dredging of the Upper Hudson River has been hailed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a ‘historic achievement,’ and EPA, supported by the federal courts, has concluded no additional dredging is needed. Today’s report by a private advocacy group is inconsistent with the wealth of scientific literature showing that Hudson River wildlife populations are healthy and thriving. The government’s natural resource assessment has not yet been completed. We are proud of our contributions and will continue to work closely with local, state and federal agencies,” he said. Read more about this story at MidHudson News.

Liz Montgomery reports for Porcupine Soup that Story Farms in Catskill, See and Bee Kitchen of Cairo, Bonfiglio in Athens, and Blackhorse Farms in Coxsackie are among the local vendors now selling food at the Capital Region Welcome Center along I-87 in New Baltimore. Seven of ten employees there are from Greene County too, Market Manager Sarah Roberts told the Greene County Legislature’s County Resources Committee last week. Roberts said they are waiting for approval from the Thruway Authority to add a weekly farmers market. “It will give us an opportunity to showcase local agricultural products we don’t get to sell at the store on a day-to-day basis,” Roberts said. “Fresh vegetables, fruit, things like that.” The next-door New Baltimore Service Area has been closed since August 2021 for renovations and is currently open only for fuel. The service area's competing restaurants and restrooms should reopen sometime later this year. Read more about this story Porcupine Soup.

Today's daily news update.

Click above to download or play today's "Better Weather." Produced by Joe Demanso of the Catskill Makers Syndicate.

Melanie Lekocevic is reporting for Capital Region Independent Media that a new site plan and building height variance request were submitted for the downtown Coxsackie hotel project that began building above the promised height. And the Coxsackie Village Board has announced a public forum with the village attorney and engineers to outline any violations that may have occurred and what the next steps will be moving forward. A date and location for the public forum has not yet been set. The village board meeting April 11, drew about 50 village residents, both in person and on Zoom, most looking to discuss the Empire Riverfront Ventures project. Developer Aaron Flach is building a boutique hotel, The Newbury, and an event center known as The Wire, at 60 South River Street. A stop-work order on the hotel was issued in late March due to questions of whether the project conforms to the site plan that was approved by the village planning board, including the height of the hotel. According to the variance request submitted April 11 by Mark Millspaugh, president of Sterling Environmental Engineering, the developer is seeking approval to make the building 14 feet taller than what is currently permitted. “Existing structures in the district exceed the 50-feet maximum building height,” according to the variance application. “Therefore, the proposed Newbury will not affect the character within the village center.” The stop-work order remains in effect. Mayor Mark Evans said at the meeting, “The planning board’s normally scheduled next meeting is April 21. We have made arrangements for them to use the auditorium at the high school. Part of our job tonight is to appoint people to the zoning board of appeals so they are a full complement and are ready to act when parts of the project may be sent to them. ..." The village board is also planning to appoint alternate members to the ZBA, but will first have to hold a public hearing May 9 before adopting a new local law to make that possible. Read the full story at TheUpStater [dot] com.

Joshua Solomon is reporting for the Times Union that Lt. Gov. Brian A. Benjamin on April 12, became the third lieutenant governor in New York history to resign, but his name will likely stay on the Democratic primary ballot in June, thereby creating a competitive and complicated primary. Benjamin resigned after being arrested April 12 on federal corruption charges. Gov. Kathy Hochul will now have to make a decision: pick another lieutenant governor to serve out the remainder of Benjamin's term or leave the position vacant until January. Hochul may not be required to fill that vacancy before the results of the election. After the resignation of Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the elevation of Lt. Gov. David Paterson to the office, the state went without a lieutenant governor for 15 months. In the interim, four state Senate majority leaders held the acting role of second-in-command. If Benjamin had not resigned, the path to his removal from office would have been through impeachment, according to Richard Rifkin, legal director of the Government Law Center at Albany Law School. The state Board of Elections said Benjamin's name will almost certainly appear on the primary ballot in June. In a statement from his legal team the evening of April 12, they said Benjamin would be suspending his campaign to focus on "explaining in court why his actions were laudable — not criminal." When the case is completed, they said, "he can rededicate himself to public service." If Benjamin remains on the ballot, he could still win the election and move onto the general election while his criminal case is pending. If he was to win but also be convicted of a felony prior to accepting the nomination, it could lead to trouble for him to hold the office, legal experts said. Hochul could appoint someone to finish out the term of lieutenant governor and then that person could run a write-in campaign in the primary, according to the Board of Elections. The other candidates on the primary ballot include Ana Maria Archila, on the Working Families line and moderate Democrat Diana Reyna. Read the full story in the Times Union.

Nick Reisman is reporting for State of Politics Democratic elected officials in New York, from district attorneys to Gov. Kathy Hochul, applauded President Joe Biden's federal rule change issued April 11, to eliminate hard-to-trace firearms that have been blamed on shootings statewide. The policy change would focus on guns that can be assembled using kits and are often difficult for law enforcement to track after the firearm is believed to have been used in a crime. “In New York, we have taken significant action to crack down on gun violence, taking more than 2,700 guns off our streets and shutting down websites that sell ghost guns...," said state Attorney General Letitia James. "But our efforts can only go so far if these untraceable weapons are not effectively regulated at the federal level." In February, Hochul's administration launched a multi-state task force, composed of local, state, and federal law enforcement officials, in an effort to stop the flow of illegal guns into New York. "No one should be able to circumvent the process to gain access to deadly weapons, especially those that take just 30 minutes to assemble and whose parts often cost less than $100," Hochul said. The governor's office last week announced more than 1,700 firearms have been taken off the streets as part of the task force's early efforts. Read the full story at nystateofpolitics [dot] com.

There has been much reporting about the propaganda posing as news that is being broadcast to the Russian people about the invasion of Ukraine. Russian journalists can't use the word "war," and instead must call it a special military operation. The war crimes of Russian soldiers are both actually being committed by the Ukrainians and also are actors playing roles rather than dead bodies according to Russian broadcasts hosts. But there has not been as much reported about the Russian propaganda being broadcast on airwaves in the United States. Russian propaganda is a bit harder to find on U.S. television and radio since the war began, but it is still there. Tucker Carlson continues to parrot Russian talking points on his Fox News show. RT, the English-language news network based in Moscow and funded by the Kremlin, was dropped from YouTube and American cable franchises in early March as the war began. Most of the content from RT America seems to have been erased from the internet since the start of the invasion Feb. 24. But there are still five outlets of “Radio Sputnik” in the United States right now, airing content produced in Moscow and Washington under the Russian government’s supervision. One is WZHF (1390-AM), broadcasting near Washington D.C. The station is now forced to interrupt its programming of talk every hour to air a disclaimer: “This radio programming is distributed by RM Broadcasting on behalf of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, Moscow, Russia. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.” The disclaimer is because of a Federal Communications Commission rule that went into effect March 15. The rule was in the works long before the war, forcing U.S. broadcasters to disclose any programming provided by foreign governmental entities. Rossiya Segodnya means Russia Today, the same Kremlin-controlled media agency that directed RT and RT America. The European Union banned Radio Sputnik after Russia invaded Ukraine. KCXL in Liberty, Missouri is another station airing Radio Sputnik programming and Peter Schartel, who runs the station, says he and his wife are being accused of treason. He argues that he's promoting free speech by airing falsehoods about Russia's invasion in Ukraine. Schartel is paid $5,000 a month to air the propaganda near Kansas City. The National Association of Broadcasters on March 1 called on station owners to stop carrying Russian state-sponsored programming. “While the First Amendment protects freedom of speech ... it does not prevent private actors from exercising sound, moral judgment,” NAB chief executive Curtis LeGeyt said in a statement. “Our nation must stand fully united against misinformation and for freedom and democracy across the globe.”

Today's daily news update.

Joshua Solomon reports in the Times Union that New York Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin was arrested by federal authorities April 12 on bribery and other offenses related to a scheme to trade a state grant for campaign contributions. Last year a real estate developer known by Benjamin was arrested because of a campaign finance scheme that allegedly used fraud to secure millions of dollars in public matching funds. This year, just after Gov. Kathy Hochul upgraded Benjamin a state senator to Lt. Gov., Benjamin received a subpoena. The Times Union previously reported that a $50,000 grant in the state Senate in 2019 went to an educational nonprofit led by the same real estate figure, Gerald Migdol. A few days ago, Hochul said she was standing by Benjamin, but now that he was arrested, that may change. Read more about this story in the Times Union.

Noah Eckstein reports for Columbia-Greene Media that Hudson's housing crisis is so sever, that when a few affordable apartments receive preliminary approval from the Historic Preservation Commission, most major city officials crow about it. “I don’t have to tell you guys that we have a housing crisis right now,” Mayor Kamal Johnson said. “Our schools can’t find tutors or coaches because not enough people live here from Monday through Sunday to take on those roles.” The Historic Preservation Commission in Hudson approved what's being called “The Depot District” on April 8. The two buildings at 75 and 76 N. 7th St. will be mixed-income, mixed-use buildings, and "some of the proposed building space will be used for affordable housing" though the story does not indicate how much. But any new affordable housing is needed in the city, according to the Hudson Anti-Displacement Housing Report prepared by Hudson Housing Justice group shows there is limited housing for low- to mid-income level families in the city. “This place is an opportunity to bridge the gap of social distance,” said Quintin Cross, senior adviser for the Hudson/Catskill Housing Coalition. “This is an opportunity for folks like me; without projects like this we will be displaced.” The Historic Preservation Commission only passed a resolution approving the size, roof, fenestration, and storefront designs. The commission still wants the Galvan Foundation, the developers, to present them with material selections before they provide a certificate of appropriateness. Then construction can begin, and a few affordable apartments may be available in two years. Read more about this story at HudsonValley360.com.

William J. Kemble reports in the Daily Freeman that one Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency employee bought nearly 30 percent of the agency's compost in a 28-month period that began in January 2019. Besides working for the county William “Willy” Whittaker runs a private company, Affordable Dump. Ulster County Comptroller March Gallagher conducted an audit after receiving complaints about the amounts of compost being taken by Whittaker, who is the brother of agency Operations Director Charlie Whittaker. The complaints alleged that outside customers with no employment or family connections with the agency were unable to purchase compost. Of the 4,875.64 tons of compost sold for $146,875.10 during the 28-month period, 1,418.22 tons for $42,522.60 were put into Whittaker’s vehicle, according to .scale logs. “It’s a percentage (of sales) that … seems overly substantial for somebody who is an employee of the organization,” said Gallagher. But Ulster County did not have a rule about employees purchasing compost. That. changed in August 2021 when the county set daily limits of two loads per day for a maximum of 20 tons purchased per customer. The new rules also state that “no individual, business or customer will be allowed to purchase more than 500 tons of compost within a calendar year” unless approved by the board. Whittaker defended his purchases. “I paid for every single one. I’m a legitimate business. I have a legitimate accounting firm,” he said, then added that Gallagher was hurting his business and that “she can go f*** herself.” Read more about this story in the Daily Freeman.

Today's daily news update.