David J. Valesky's Blog

The past year has been a tumultuous one for New York State. The national fiscal crisis yielded a very difficult budget and deficit reduction actions, and an ill-fated coup mired the Senate in gridlock that marked one of the lowest points in the chamber’s history. Despite these challenges, the 2009-2010 legislative session was extremely productive with the passage of several pieces of landmark legislation, several of which I was pleased to author, that will improve the lives of Upstate New Yorkers.

For many years, Central New York has been building a national reputation as a hub of green technology and has been promoting itself as a potential home for jobs in green industries.  That promise and potential got a major boost in recent days as an effort I have been working on to attract one of the first electric car manufacturers in the country bore fruit.

What if you could create fourteen thousand new jobs, and save New Yorkers one billion dollars on energy bills at the same time, without additional cost to taxpayers?

A bill that I co-sponsored and which passed in the State Senate last week will do just that.

The Green Jobs/Green New York initiative will get to the heart of two of Central New York’s biggest issues—the availability of permanent, skilled jobs and high energy costs.

Buying locally grown foods has become somewhat of a trend in the past few years. Bestsellers have been written, new words—localvore—have been coined, and people across the nation want to be connected to where their food comes from.

This is no trend in Central New York—it is a way of life. Our broad agricultural base gives us, as consumers, an opportunity that many don’t have—the opportunity to buy local. Products are readily available at local grocery stores, farmers’ markets and roadside stands, and we happily buy them because they taste good and we know where they came from.