Election Day is three weeks away, and the entire New York State Legislature is on the ballot.
Southern Adirondack Bureau Chief Aaron Shellow-Lavine sat down with Assemblywoman Carrie Woerner to discuss what she’s hearing from constituents in Saratoga, Warren and Washington counties and how she believes she's working to meet their needs.
WAMC has also reached out to her challenger, Republican Allen Caruso, to discuss the race ahead of Election Day.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: this conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Woerner: I introduced legislation last year, which I will continue to push this year, that says state incentives should not be used to place solar on farmland.
Rather, state incentives should be used to put solar on canopies over parking lots. Let's put solar over the miles of parking lot or acres of parking lot at the Aviation Mall, at the Wilton Mall, at Crossgates Mall, at any of these big private places that have parking lots, put canopies and solar on the canopies.
That solar could then be used to reduce the demand on the grid by using that locally at whatever the building is associated with that parking lot. To create state incentive dollars, to create a choice between using land for food and using land for energy, is a bad model.
Solar is an expensive system installation, but using flat cleared farmland, which probably has a southern exposure because it used to grow things is the least expensive place to put solar. So let's not incentivize developers to build there, which creates this dichotomy between should we use the land for food or for energy, and it's frankly the least expensive option.
If they can make it pencil out without state incentives, fine. But let's not use state incentive dollars to force that choice. Rather, let's incentivize the behavior we want, which is solar in places like canopies on parking lots. Drivers would love it because your car is not going to be so hot, and it's a much better use of solar. And I could go on for a long time about how in the Northeast, where we have a capacity factor for solar of about 20, it is probably not the right kind of the right kind of technology to think that it's going to add capacity to the grid. Much better at a demand reduction strategy. So direct that solar at a particular building, so that that demand for electricity in that in that big building like Crossgates Mall or Wilton Mall would be diminished. So we're taking that off the grid. That's a much better strategy than trying to add this low capacity technology that isn't baseload power to a grid that really needs baseload power, so I'm not saying that that we shouldn't do solar. I said I'm just thinking we should be more strategic about solar at this point, and as I said, we shouldn't use state incentive dollars to force this this trade-off between land for food and land for energy.
Shellow-Lavine: An issue that we're seeing throughout, at least super locally here in Saratoga Springs, is housing affordability. I mean, it is becoming unaffordable for working folk to live in Saratoga Springs and to exist throughout the Capital Region. How are you looking to address that with within your district?
Woerner: I certainly have supported a variety of affordable housing programs in the state budget.
The ones that I really want, really think we need to focus on expanding and making more effective are the ones that build a home ownership and specifically starter homes. So one of the projects that I'm very excited about here in Saratoga Springs because I think it will be the first ever is building affordable condominiums down across from the library.
It was a Brownfield cleanup site. They did the the Brownfield remediation, and the proposal is to build, and I forget the number of units, but affordable condominiums right downtown, and I think that's a really interesting model. And DHCR has been brought in, they're excited about it, and if we can make that work.
That will, I think, be a terrific model for cities like Saratoga Springs. You could see that happening in Glens Falls as well. You could see it in Mechanicville. These small cities, it's a great option for infill in cities that to build affordable housing.
I think we also need to be figuring out how to do things with tiny home communities, how to do things with building the starter home, the 1500 square foot, 1200 square foot house on a small lot, where it becomes a starter home for people, or a downsize option for retirees who are looking to sell their big family home, but still retain home ownership in their community.
I think that that's really where we need to focus: is looking for ways to to build home ownership, because what does that do?
Well, one home ownership is how you build how you stabilize your housing costs and how you build equity for your future. But also, the demand for apartments is so significant now because people are staying in apartments longer than prior generations.
It used to be that you got to 25, 26, you'd saved enough money for a small down payment, you got into a small house, and then you built from there. But we don't have that inventory anymore, and so young people are staying in apartments much longer, which means that there's a there's a limited there's a limit on the supply. Your supply constraint, and when there's an imbalance between supply and demand, prices are going to go up. So if we can help that both by building some more apartments, but also by building these the home ownership opportunities, the small starter homes, you can you can start to create flow through so that people aren't staying in apartments for an extended period of time, and that will that will lower the demand to maybe get it closer to the supply, and that should stabilize the the cost of apartments as well.
Shellow-Lavine: Taking a look at SNAP benefits going away. A lot of the work that you have put in, a lot of the work that you've shared, on that year in review, is securing lots of funding to try and shore up some of those gaps. We know that there are folks who are going to struggle. There are folks who are struggling right now, without a lot of that federal support. Talk to me about what you've been able to secure and what work there is left to be done.
Woerner: In the area of nutrition assistance, we've increased the tax credits for farmers donating their excess produce and products to food pantries to try and create a pipeline for nutritious, locally produced food into the food pantries.
I have personally secured money for Pitney Meadow and Comfort Food Community in Saratoga and Washington counties, both of which do sort of have sort of a broad countywide mission around food security to try and help them have enough resources to deliver food to communities that may have food pantries that aren't really big enough to to access as much as they need to create that food hub network, we have supported universal free meals, breakfast and lunch in schools, so that every kid is starting their day and continuing through the day with a full stomach, so that they can focus on learning. So we've been doing all of these things. There are still big gaps with the change in the work rules and the eligibility requirements. The number of people who are who are participating in the SNAP program has declined precipitously. I met last week with the head of Saratoga County's social services department to understand better the regulations around volunteering.
If you fall in the change of eligibility, you have to either be working a certain number of hours, going to school, or volunteering, and the volunteering piece is where I'm right now focusing, because there are, I think a lot of people don't know how to pursue a volunteer opportunity, and it needs to be a regularly scheduled. Volunteer opportunity with a supervisor who will who will track and sign off on the hours. So I now understand what that process is. I've started the outreach to local faith leaders to say, in your church, in your synagogue, you can identify a set of volunteer activities that people can do, whether that's sweeping the steps, or shoveling the sidewalks, or dusting the pews, or arranging the flowers, or whatever it is that has a certain number of hours every week that people can come in and do that work, and you can keep track of it and help them submit the paperwork, and we're going to pull all those.
My early conversations, they're really enthusiastic about this. We're going to pull all those faith leaders together, come up with a directory of opportunities that we can publish in community centers and whatnot, just to help people who are unable to be hired for whatever reason, but are not disabled and so don't fall under the disability piece, or are not going to school, but can can get a volunteer opportunity so that they can, on an ongoing basis, have a way to do the work that earns them the the SNAP benefits, so I'm trying to fill that gap because I feel like that's when they change the age restrictions, you know a lot of people who are in their late middle age, they have worked their whole lives, but now they're of an age where it's going to be super hard to get a paid job. But if we can fill it in with a regular volunteer opportunity, that that will help in a lot of different ways.
Shellow-Lavine: What are you hearing from constituents as far as their biggest affordability concerns, and what is there to be done to address it?
Woerner: So their biggest concerns about affordability, as we look into the next couple of months, the temperature dropping, and heating, people are very concerned about what the what that's going to do to their electric and gas bills. People are very concerned about the price they're paying for gas at the pumps, and how it's impacting their ability to get to work, their ability to take their kids where the kids need to go, all of that.
I'm also hearing a lot about the cost of health insurance and how health insurance rates are are going up. Obviously food costs are a real issue.
With respect to with respect to gas prices, I know there's conversation about should we institute a gas tax holiday for a while, and maybe that's an answer. I don't know that that fixed the problem when we had this in 2022. I'm not sure that that really fixed it, but if that could help even a little bit, I think that's a good approach.
Home heating costs have expanded HEAP eligibility, and certainly anybody who is within that eligibility category really needs to sign up for HEAP as early as possible.
Last year, we did a lot of work on utility rates, and some of those will start to see the impact of that in the next year or so. We also have a supply issue. We need to build more generation. We have transmission challenges, but we also have supply challenges. We need more generation, and we need generation that is baseload, so 24/7. Which sadly, renewables are not 24/7. They have a very specific role in our diverse energy portfolio, but we have to recognize that we need baseload generation. The more supply we have, the costs will rise, and so we have to fix that problem, and that's you know that's more pipelines, and right now the answer is more pipelines. So there are a variety of things that we need to be looking at in order to truly address affordability, because it didn't. The problem which seems to have sort of sprung up quickly was has been simmering and is the result of a combination of a variety of things that some of which the state can influence, and some of which the state can't influence.
