Blair Horner

What happens to an issue that has been well documented, has and will have a devastating impact, but has seen little sustained public attention? That’s what’s happening when it comes to the growing resistance of certain infections to treatment by antibiotics.

The planet is getting hotter and will continue to do so from now on. This week the Northeast will be enduring another heat wave, the second one of the summer. The impacts of rising temperature are well-documented and increasingly obvious: health consequences, more intense storms, worsening air quality, flooding, and rising sea levels.

Summers eventually give way to falls and with that change comes the openings of colleges and universities. In New York, most colleges open their doors in the third week of August, a mere seven weeks or so from now. The summers are the time for colleges to take stock of their previous academic year and plan for the one ahead.

New Yorkers got important insights into who spends the most to influence state and local budgets, legislation and policies last week. The annual report of the Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government (COELIG), which oversees lobbying activities in the state, documented the spending of the wealthy and powerful as they sought to influence the laws you live with.

Congressional, state Senate, and state Assembly primaries are being held Tuesday June 25th. Not all districts have primaries, but some do, and, in those cases the primary winner likely will be the candidate who prevails in November’s general election.

Last fall, many schools across the nation closed due to excessive heat. Acknowledging that the planet is getting hotter and that students may be unsafe in schools when temperatures soar, New York lawmakers approved legislation to require schools to evacuate students if classrooms reach 88 degrees. The bill, if approved by Governor Hochul, would mandate that students be moved to another location or sent home when temperatures hit 88 degrees. The bill also requires that once the temperatures reach 82 degrees, school districts take immediate action to offer students an opportunity to get cool, but they would not have to leave.

Last week both houses of the Legislature wrapped up their official sessions. In many ways it was a return to the pre-pandemic sessions. The Capitol and the Legislative Office Building were open to the public; committees were held in public and in-person; issue and budget hearings were held; lobbyists wandered the halls, buttonholing lawmakers and pleading their cases face-to-face.

Like the rest of the world, the state of Vermont is dealing with the consequences of a rapidly-heating planet. Just this past winter the state was hit by a storm that left well over 8 inches of wet snow in several towns and more than 35,000 homes without power. The damage to power lines came from heavy, wet snow, weather that’s becoming increasingly common as climate change brings warmer winters and more extreme precipitation.

In the first year of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s tenure in 2011, he successfully established a Medicaid Task Force whose job was to figure out ways to curtail the program’s increasing costs.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul was globetrotting last week with a trip to Italy to see the Pope and then to her ancestral home in Ireland. The trip to Rome was in her capacity as the newly selected co-chair of the U.S. Climate Alliance.