The two candidates for New York's largest state senate district met in Plattsburgh earlier this week for their first televised debate. The district is a massive swath of land that stretches from Glens Falls to the Canadian border and juts out west into St. Lawrence County.
Republican Dan Stec has represented the district for six years. He's a Queensbury native and Navy veteran. This year, he's being challenged by Democrat Melissa Seale, a nurse practitioner in Glens Falls with three decades of experience in healthcare with a focus on youth mental health.
Both candidates agreed the North Country needs a strong voice in Albany to represent its largely rural communities, but they spent much of the debate at the Mountain Lake PBS studios disagreeing on policy measures.
The debate began with questions around the prison industry, which has long served as an economic anchor for the district.
Last year, Governor Hochul fired 2,000 correction officers who refused to return to work following a wildcat strike, then signed an executive order barring them from working for both state and local municipal agencies. That exacerbated an existing staffing crisis in New York's prison system. The state placed National Guard troops in some facilities to help with the shortages.
Stec said the state isn’t doing enough to address officers’ safety concerns and that’s why people are no longer entering the industry. “The fathers and uncles and aunts and mothers aren't telling their kids at the kitchen table anymore, 'this was a good career for me. You should go do this,” Stec said.
Seale said better mental health services for officers would help them feel safer and more supported on the job - something she has personal experience with. “I worked as a psychiatric provider in the prison system. I've worked with corrections officers," she said. "I know what the job entails, and it's not an easy job."
Both candidates said they’d like to repeal the HALT Act, which limits the use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons. While corrections officers say the law limits their ability to punish inmates for bad behavior, advocates say it protects them from cruel and unusual punishment.
Last year, Stec sponsored a bill to repeal the HALT Act, but it never made it to the Senate floor. "We need to be absolutely clear," Stec said. "The prison closures and the prison crisis that we have have been brought to you by Democrats and Democrats alone."
Stec also placed blame for rising costs on the Democratic majority in Albany. He said since they took control of both houses of the legislature eight years ago, the state’s budget has inflated by more than $100 billion dollars - increasing taxes for every New Yorker.
“I look at everything through an affordability lens," Stec said in his opening statement. "And unfortunately, in recent years, the policies that we've taken in Albany, have headed, largely, in a bad direction.”
But Seale blamed rising gas, food, and energy prices on federal policy driven by President Trump and Republicans in Congress. "I've spoken to many business owners who are negatively impacted by the tariffs, such as a brewery that gets its hops from Canada. They don't know if they're going to be able to make it," Seale said. "We need a strong voice advocating in Albany to make sure that families are able to maintain a way of life that they deserve.”
The candidates also differed on immigration, providing universal healthcare coverage, and how to develop the local economy.
Seale said healthcare for all should be rolled out in phases - especially at a time when New Yorkers are losing coverage at alarming rates, and hospitals are being shorted on Medicaid reimbursements. “I know, as a provider myself in Glens Falls, that we've seen our reimbursement rates get cut further and further, where it's being difficult," she said. "It's difficult at this time to maintain private practices up in the North Country.”
But Stec said the reason the New York Health Act hasn’t moved forward in decades is that the system is simply too expensive.
“There are other ways to provide health care to make sure that we're doing it better," he said. "You want to talk about affordability and people leaving the state? They will leave even faster if this bill becomes law, which sat there for 30 years and it hasn't passed yet.”
The candidates also traded jabs on the state’s one-year moratorium on new AI data centers. Proposed projects in Chateaugay and Massena are making headlines.
While Seale praised the moratorium and said research should be scaled up on how the facilities could impact land, water, and energy costs, Stec said data center development should be left up to the towns and cities. “That should be a decision that's made locally, not from Albany," he said.
Stec and Seale were similarly split on the state's immigration policy. Earlier this year, the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act barred local police agencies from working with federal immigration agents on civil investigations.
Stec said the law is "unsafe for everybody," and said law enforcement agencies should be able to communicate with one another at all levels to protect public safety. He supports an exception to the law for border communities in the North Country.
Seale said she would "look into it" but maintained community police officers should not be doing the jobs of federal officials. "It's taking away from our communities, and I feel could make them less safe," she said. "It's our taxpayer dollars. So I think the federals should stay federal, and our community police officers should stay serving the communities."
Stec and Seale did see eye-to-eye on some things. They agreed the recently postponed electric school bus mandate won’t work in a region with cold winters and long routes. Both said the North Country needs a senator who is deeply in tune with the region's issues and can come up with unique solutions to address them.
The debate between the 45th State Senate District candidates was hosted by Mountain Lake PBS and will air in its entirety at 8 p.m. Friday and again at 7 p.m. Saturday.
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