Editorials from around New York

Recent editorials of statewide and national interest from New York’s newspapers:

Chick-fil-A Concedes

Wall Street Journal

Nov. 19

The left’s culture warriors always need new monsters to slay. Among their most improbable targets in recent years is the famously friendly restaurant chain Chick-fil-A, which this week appears to have surrendered.

In 2012 CEO Dan Cathy, a committed evangelical Christian, sinned against the progressive ethos by expressing support for the traditional view of marriage. That prompted a political campaign against Chick-fil-A. Earlier this year at least three U.S. airports denied the company concessions contracts. Last month, shortly after the company announced it would open the first Chick-fil-A in Britain, local activists pressured the site’s landlord into backing out.

In each case, the fast-food chain’s critics accused it of promoting “anti-LGBT” causes and failing to be sufficiently “inclusive.” The restaurant has always seemed inclusive to us, but what its adversaries mean is that Chick-fil-A has donated to organizations allegedly “hostile to LGBT rights.”

What kind of vicious, reactionary organizations? Charities like the Salvation Army and Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which hold views on marriage that predate the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision declaring same-sex marriage to be a constitutional right.

COO Tim Tassopoulos on Monday told the commercial real estate website Bisnow that the company will no longer give money to the offending organizations. “There are lots of articles and newscasts about Chick-fil-A,” Mr. Tassopoulos says, “and we thought we needed to be clear about our message.”

It’s hard to blame Chick-fil-A. The company exists to serve chicken sandwiches and waffle fries, not to wage political battles over sexual morality, and its corporate decision-makers are free to give whatever they want to whomever they please. Still, it’s disappointing to see the left’s cultural imperialists succeed in strong-arming a company that has committed no offense-and to see Chick-fil-A implicitly conceding that the charitable organizations to which it has donated are guilty of the sins their unreasoning critics attribute to them.

We suspect Chick-fil-A’s despisers will be emboldened rather than satisfied, and don’t be surprised to hear demands that the company must now support causes the left holds dear. All in the name of tolerance and diversity.

Online: https://on.wsj.com/2XxPenX

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LIRR tunnel repairs require urgency

Newsday

Nov. 19

Two years ago, we sounded the alarm about the need for massive repairs to a rail tunnel under the East River, particularly two tubes inside flooded by superstorm Sandy in 2012.

In those two years, little has changed.

Meanwhile, every day, hundreds of Long Island Rail Road trains rumble through the cracking, damaged tubes. Power and signal problems sometimes occur, resulting in delayed trains and angry riders.

It’s just a matter of time before a serious incident occurs, or before a significant outage disrupts service more widely.

Yet, somehow, transportation officials are still having the same arguments about what to do. The East River tunnel is more than a century old. Two of its four tubes are in extremely bad shape due to corroding steel, cracking concrete and other damage from Sandy. The other two aren’t much better.

So it is frustrating that Amtrak is still designing the project to fix and upgrade the damaged tubes, and even the design phase won’t be done until 2021. That’s too long to wait. Meanwhile, Amtrak and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority continue to disagree on how to split the costs. The MTA says it owes 24 percent; Amtrak thinks that figure should be higher.

Complicating it all is $432 million in federal funds that Sen. Chuck Schumer says he secured specifically for the LIRR and tunnel repair in 2016. The MTA now says it spent the money on New York City Transit Sandy-related projects, arguing that the money was meant for overall transit resiliency, and was due to expire this past September.

Certainly, railyards and subway signals needed repairs, and in some ways, the MTA’s choice was understandable given the lack of tunnel progress and apparent expiration date. But the MTA erred in not providing a more public, detailed accounting of that decision-making. Now the agency must show it is setting aside its own funds for the LIRR tunnel to make up for dollars it spent elsewhere.

Figuring out the cost sharing among Amtrak, the MTA and New Jersey Transit while fighting for more federal funding is only the first step.

Beyond that, the project delays are unacceptable, and the lack of urgency is appalling. Amtrak and the MTA together must find better, faster ways to do the work. MTA officials suggest learning from the subway’s L train tunnel work, which includes racking cables rather than enclosing them. But Amtrak says that might not work for the East River tunnel because of its complexities and the voltage involved. That doesn’t mean, however, that there are not innovative solutions.

Still, the tubes deteriorate every day. The eventual completion of the East Side Access project connecting the LIRR to Grand Central Terminal will provide an alternate route to Manhattan for some commuters, but the start of tunnel repairs must not wait until then.

Amtrak owns and operates the tunnel, and must take the lead, but everyone shares responsibility for doing the improvements. If they don’t, everyone will share the blame when - not if - the tunnel fails.

Online: https://nwsdy.li/337gkU2

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Internet Virtually Guarantees Future Of Swatting

The Post-Journal

Nov. 19

Count us among those who had to look up “swatting” online after receiving Monday’s Post-Journal.

Swatting pranks occur when first responders are called to a specific location in response to an immediate and urgent emergency in hopes that police will turn out in full force with a SWAT team and scare the bejesus out of the victims of the prank. The tactic is typically used as a means of harassment against a person or group and has been reported to have begun with online gamers.

On Saturday, the Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office, the New York State Police and Westfield Police Department were alerted to a report of a person with a weapon at a residence on Pigeon Road in Westfield. When police arrived, they learned the person alleged to be involved in the incident was elsewhere in Westfield. Of course, there hadn’t actually been a shooting. The 20-year-old was shocked when police showed up and questioned him.

Swatting has been around for several years, but Saturday’s incident is one of the first local incidents. Give credit to our local police officers that this incident had a happy ending, because swatting incidents haven’t always ended so quietly.

A Wichita, Kansas, man was shot by police in December 2017 when a man in California called police to report he had shot his father and was holding his mother and sister hostage. The prankster had apparently sent police to a different address than his intended victim’s. The man who was shot was totally uninvolved. The swatter was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Every generation has their pranks and tomfoolery. The internet and ability to spoof cell phone numbers has upped the ante, turning the prank calls of the 1970s into fake hostage situations in 2019. It would be nice if the possibility of a long prison sentence or federal charges is enough to deter some of the doofuses who would engage in this behavior, but we know better. The anonymity the internet provides virtually guarantees that swatting will be around until someone invents an even bigger, more dangerous online prank.

Online: https://bit.ly/2CYjwaa

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Climate change is hurting us right now

The Post Star

Nov. 17

The hard rain that ushered in November, washing out roads, flooding homes and knocking out power throughout the region should be a warning about the fragility of our infrastructure and its inability to stand up to the destruction being wrought by climate change.

It’s more of a confirmation than a warning, because we’ve been warned, repeatedly, by national and international reports and by our own senses as we’ve witnessed the changes in the seasons and the growing severity of storms. You no longer can talk about hundred-year floods, because flooding that previously occurred once in a lifetime is becoming commonplace.

The trouble with climate change goes beyond the direct effects of a warming planet, such as melting ice that leads to a rise in sea level and heat that dries out brush in the western U.S., feeding forest fires. It includes changes in ocean and air currents that lead to unpredictable weather patterns, including unseasonable cold snaps. It includes a greater frequency of heavy rains that push lake levels to historic highs and send swollen streams coursing across roads and crashing into bridges.

This region is filled with lakes and crisscrossed by rivers and streams. All that fresh water is a valuable resource but also a potential danger, and it’s one we are not ready to meet, as the recent storm demonstrated.

Several roads in northern Warren County are still closed and unlikely to be reopened until spring. Towns with small populations like Horicon, Chester and Johnsburg will struggle to find the funds to repair these roads. They simply do not have the money to replace culverts and make other changes needed to harden the infrastructure against future storms.

Washouts will continue and, before long, without outside help, communities are going to be forced to abandon public roads they can no longer afford to maintain. Some lakeside and riverside residential areas will be surrendered to the rising water.

This is only the local effect of a national and global phenomenon. Since human beings tend to settle near water, millions of people worldwide could be displaced. On the other extreme, many more could be driven out of their homes by heat, drought and fire. An enormous worldwide effort is needed, not just to change our habits to lower carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but to address right now the effects we are already feeling - which means, locally, flooding and washouts.

Every town and village needs to start putting money toward infrastructure improvements, but also, a unified effort is needed. Counties, and the state itself, have to make infrastructure investment a top priority, and the work has to anticipate the greater and greater stress coming from severe weather events.

Every year counties invest in road-paving, but if roads are getting washed out, some of that investment is wasted. We need to invest much more money than we have been so our roads and bridges can withstand the new reality: water that rises higher and more often than it ever has.

Climate change is often talked about in terms of an apocalyptic future - seacoast cities swallowed, millions displaced. But climate change is today’s challenge - roads and bridges are being washed out now - and it should be a top priority for all of our political leaders.

Online: https://bit.ly/37nzhp4

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New York must fund early voting in 2020

The Auburn Citizen

Nov. 17

The underlying goal for adding New York to the long list of states that have an early voting program is to increase voter participation.

Following this first year in which early voting took place, there’s been plenty of debate between proponents and opponents about its cost-effectiveness. But with the state Legislature and governor’s office firmly in the control of the Democrats who made early voting the law at the start of 2019, there’s no question that it will be back for the much-anticipated presidential election year that’s coming.

And with that in mind, we urge the Legislature and the governor to take a look at the numbers that are in from 2019 and pay attention to a key commonality among the counties that had the highest early voting participation rates. For the six highest turnout percentage counties, all of them opted to take advantage of state funding available to them and offer more than the minimally required number of polling places.

Those six included Cayuga County, where the county Board of Elections wisely established early voting sites in Auburn, Conquest and Venice: representing the middle, northern and southern thirds of the county.

But if more counties are going to go beyond the minimum requirements in 2020, and if counties like Cayuga will maintain or grow their polling site numbers, they will need a renewed funding commitment from the Legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo. There just isn’t adequate discretionary local money for counties to do this on their own.

This month, the Cayuga County Legislature is considering a resolution that expresses gratitude for the funding the state provided in 2019 and requests it be continued for the next year. We urge county legislators to support this resolution and make sure our representatives in Albany get the message.

Online: https://bit.ly/2rapzpl