Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is pushing for high-tech investment in New York, has touted the University of Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. (Photos from College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering)

New York City isn’t the only part of the state that has been attracting a growing number of high-tech companies.

In upstate areas struggling to rebound from the recession and recover from the longer-term decline in manufacturing, the state has been recruiting companies like Yahoo! and IBM to add or expand operations, create new jobs and assist in rebuilding the economy.

To read the full article, please visit cityandstateny.com.

Rep. Charlie Rangel, who voted today in the Democratic congressional primary, is facing a challenge from State Sen. Adriano Espaillat and three other candidates. (Jon Lentz)

After navigating through a crowd of reporters and photographers to cast his primary vote in Harlem today, Congressman Charlie Rangel sought to link his campaign to President Barack Obama.

From the ongoing fiscal crisis and income inequality to healthcare reform and the high number of young people going to prison, Rangel asserted he was the only candidate in the Democratic primary race who could combat the ongoing problems and defend the president’s policies.

“It wasn’t the identification with his color,” Rangel said of the reason he had been inspired by President Obama. “It was the identification with his ideas. The fact that he realized that all Americans have to be invested in an education, and research and science, not because it’s the right thing to do, but if we’re going to compete with other nations, we cannot do it with a population that should be creative, rotting away in jail.”

He also applauded Obama for pushing through healthcare reform to address the problem of sick, uninsured people relying on emergency rooms. The Supreme Court is set to issue a ruling on the president’s landmark legislation later this week.

“We have to stop it,” Rangel said of the many uninsured people relying on emergency rooms. “Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals know we have to do it. Then he came with this exciting idea, that was adopted by Romney in Massachusetts, and hopefully will be adopted this week by the courts.”

Rangel, who touted his support from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Bloomberg and other elected officials, started his press conference outside the polling station by seeking to dispel what he called “nonsense questions,” including concerns about his age and his ability to serve.

“Am I too old to run for re-election?” he asked. “Clearly, I’ve gone through the process. I’ve done what candidates are supposed to do. … I don’t think anybody that’s running – or not running – should challenge my health.”

To read the full article at City & State click here.

Williams with his family. Photo by Jon Lentz.

Clyde Williams, a candidate for the new 13^th Congressional District who has been overshadowed by incumbent Rep. Charlie Rangel and another challenger, State Sen. Adriano Espaillat, cast his vote in the Democratic primary this morning in Harlem.

After voting, Williams said he was confident he could come from behind and win today’s primary, pointing to late endorsements from the New York Times and the Daily News, a well-funded get-out-the-vote operation, and voters who want change.

“We’ve gotten many more volunteers of the last few weeks,” he said. “We’ve also had more people who have showed an overall interest in my candidacy, and more than anything else I think we are resonating because people realize we talk about issues.”

He said his campaign has “hundreds of people” out today at polls, driving vehicles, making calls and boosting his visibility. He said he didn’t have any target numbers for turnout, but that his campaign already knocked on more than 38,000 doors and reached at least 188,000 people.

“We’re going to continue what we’ve been doing, which is running a race based on actual numbers and making sure we get these people out to vote,” he said. “There’s definitely a desire for change. We hear that everywhere we go. … I think the only person who offers real change in this race is me.”

But he said it would be a challenge facing two strong candidates who are already in elected office – Rangel and Espaillat – even with a fundraising advantage in the race.

To read the full article at City & State click here.

City & State: Does your comedy ever intersect with politics?
Susie Essman: Not too much. If something strikes me, yes. But there are people who do it so much better than I do that I let them handle it. You know, the Jon Stewarts and the Bill Mahers and the Lewis Blacks. They’re so much better at it than I am, so I stick to what I’m good at.

CS: Is there anything going on in New York politics that you find to be particularly funny right now?
SE: No. You know, when things are going well, it’s really bad for comedy. Bush was great for comedy. Eliot Spitzer was, of course, fantastic for comedy.

CS: Mayor Michael Bloomberg appeared on an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Did you have a chance to speak with him?
SE: I was not in the scene with him. But I know that everybody was very pleased with him. He came in, he did what he had to do, and he did it well and quickly and in just a couple of takes. He’s a professional. Some politicians are better actors than others.

CS: You’re bringing comedy back to the Catskills with an Aug. 25 benefit concert at the Belleayre Music Festival, part of the Catskill Park Resource Foundation’s effort to revitalize the region. How did you get involved?
SE: I live in the Hudson Valley—not in the Catskills, exactly, but we’re adjacent.That entire area really suffered after Hurricane Irene. So many people lost their homes, and the whole Catskill region really suffered also from that devastation. And this winter all the ski resorts suffered because there was no snow. I mean, I was happy about no snow because I have a treacherous driveway, but that’s kind of selfish of me. I know that the area’s depressed.

CS: Did you go there on vacations as a kid?
SE: We used to spend the summer at a bungalow colony. When I was growing up, it was the place to go. All the hotels were in operation, and it’s where so many great comedians started working in the Borscht Belt. That’s no longer there. I think a lot of those places are just trying to hold on and see if gambling is ever going to come. They’re all closed now, and it’s kind of sad because it’s a really beautiful, beautiful part of the country.

CS: Did you ever perform there early on in your career?
SE: I worked at the Concord, at the Raleigh, at the Nevele, at the Fallsview. But I was really at the tail end. It was not the way that it was in the ’40s or ’50s, let’s say, when it was happening. All of those comedians started there: Mel Brooks and Buddy Hackett and Alan King. They used to go up there and they used to work at the hotels and then go around to all the bungalow colonies and work there on a Saturday night. They’d do maybe five or six shows on a Saturday night.

CS: What was it like when you performed there?
SE: It was very different. It was a very different clientele, and it was on the downslide. It eventually just dried up. All the hotels closed. I think money wasn’t put back into them. They weren’t kept up well. But it’s a beautiful part. I’m partial to New
York State.

CS: Is there anything that can be done to revitalize the Catskills?
SE: There’s no manufacturing any more, like the rest of the country. I think they’re trying to just boost tourism. It’s a great outdoor life there. There’s hiking and fishing and skiing and all that stuff.

CS: Tell me about the benefit comedy concert that you’re putting on in August.
SE: It’s a fundraiser to raise money for people to bring awareness [to the Catskill region].  Especially with gas prices the way they are—it doesn’t have the cachet of the Hamptons per se, or Dutchess County, but it’s a great place to go with your family. It’s inexpensive. It’s rural. A lot of good restaurants have been opening up. I think they’re just trying to bring awareness to the area. It’s in economic decline right now, like so much of our country.

To read the full article at City & State click here.

In The Avengers movie that opened this past weekend, Mark Ruffalo plays the Incredible Hulk, a creature born from a scientific experiment gone awry who joins a team of superheroes seeking to save the world. The risks of scientific progress and efforts to save the planet are also at play in his real-world battle against hydraulic fracturing, Ruffalo tells City & State.
What follows is an edited transcript.

City & State: How did you become involved in fracking activism?

Mark Ruffalo: I heard about hydrofracking before I moved my family to New York, and I thought it was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. It was going to bring this vibrant new economy to upstate New York. But I also started to hear some questionable things about it. So I went to the old Internet and started doing some research. At this time, there was very little to learn. The gas industry is very rosy and extremely positive. There were inklings from EPA whistleblowers and people in Wyoming whose homes were filling with gas and were coming up with these neurological disorders from the drinking water. So I decided, “I have to go look at this for myself.”

CS: Where did you go?

MR: I went to Dimock, Pa. It wasn’t really to find anything wrong. It was just to see what was going on. But in a room of 40 people, it became clear to me that these people were under siege in their life, and the American dream was betrayed. What about the EPA? The EPA wouldn’t allow something like this to happen. Well, this isn’t regulated by the EPA, really. Well, what about the DEP? Well, they’ve pretty much turned their back on us. What about your attorney general? They’re not interested. There were victims there, and basically they were being told they were lying. You had these Americans who obviously had a problem, and everybody turned their backs on them. I didn’t want to get involved, honestly. But if I am who I say—I care about people and I care about injustice—then I realized this is coming to my community, where there are people that I love and I care for, and it can’t happen like this.

CS: But fracking could create jobs in New York’s poorer regions.

MR: There’s only a fraction of the jobs the industry says they’ll create. They tend to be incredibly transient. Cornell did a study last year on what the effects would be, especially in small communities that rely on pristine water and pristine air. A lot of these communities have only agriculture and tourism to support them. What happens is the community is left worse off after the bust. A few people end up making a lot of money. It doesn’t make its way out to the rest of the community. The workers leave. The area is left with less economic diversity. It kills off other industries. I understand that we’re in bad times. The other thing that’s interesting to point out is the fastest growing job sector right now in the United States, at 10–18 percent a year, is the green sector, or the renewable-energy sector.

CS: In your experience, are people aware of the hydrofracking issue?

MR: When I started three years ago, I just thought, There’s no way. We’re done for. We have the biggest industries in the world; we have Exxon Mobil and Chesapeake just dumping so much money. It was a done deal. Thousands of families have reported contamination now. These people are poor, they’re desperate. When their wells become contaminated, their properties become worthless. They turn to the gas industry, and the gas industry says, “We didn’t contaminate your well, but we will buy you out and give you water if you sign a nondisclosure agreement.” We will never know these people’s stories. You have people in Dimock, and some people in Wyoming now, these mothers whose children have come down with asthma and weird autoimmune-deficiency diseases, whose school is right next to compressor stations, and they’re getting together and they’re starting to get their stories out. They’re not taking the short money, which is what we’re seeing in Dimock. They’re saying, “No, we’re going to live through this, we’ve been wronged, and we’re going to get our stories out.” It’s very different now than it was even a year ago. Fracking is a national issue. There’s a lot of new information coming out, and the longer this goes on, the more we’re going to find out how damning it is.

To read the full interview at City & State click here.

To a certain kind of operator, New York is filled with rich deposits of gold.

From upstate mountains to western farmlands to city streets, the state is dappled with places ideal for extracting that gold from other people’s pockets and putting it in their own.

These operators want to mine that gold. They want to build casinos aimed at tourists dazzled by the bright lights, at locals who have to leave the state to place a bet, at politicians giddy with the prospect of thousands of jobs and a flood of revenue. And the state wants to pave their way.

But not everyone wins in a gold rush.

If New Yorkers approve full-scale casino gambling in a public referendum, some of the companies that now run smaller, limited casinos will surely rake in millions of dollars—and others will see their profits tumble.

The nine racetrack casinos currently doing business in New York will face off for the chance to upgrade their facilities with more slot machines and upscale table games like poker and blackjack— but at least two, and possibly more, will be left in the dust.

Gambling behemoths like Wynn Resorts and Las Vegas Sands, which specialize in the “destination” casinos Gov. Andrew Cuomo is dreaming of, are also eyeing New York opportunities— as well as their Malaysian competitor, Genting, which beat them all by getting the first toehold in New York City.

And for the state’s five Native American casinos, as well as some nearby casinos in places like Atlantic City and Connecticut, legalized gambling in New York could decimate their finances. They want to stop the spread of gambling if possible, or at least keep it far from their own casinos.

Amid these shifting and competing agendas, the landscape is still being shaped. The governor and legislative leaders have not agreed how new casino licenses would be awarded, where they could go, who would be eligible and whether existing operators would get special treatment.

The answers to those questions will determine who gets rich and who gets hurt in this gold rush. But one group is certain to win no matter what: lobbyists.

“Lobbyists are going to do what’s good for them,” said Jeff Gural, who owns the racetrack casinos at Tioga Downs and Vernon Downs. “They’re going to convince casino companies, ‘Why don’t you hire me, and let me try to get you a license?’ If you’re asking me if this bill is good for lobbyists, I’d have to say yes.”

It’s been the same equation in other states, from Ohio to Florida to Maryland and Massachusetts: Whether or not casinos are ultimately legalized, lobbyists always get their cut. It’s no different in Albany, where lobbyists form a permanent shadow government that understands how to work a famously opaque system to either get things done or block them, especially when plenty of cash is at stake. The New York Gaming Association, a coalition of the state’s racetrack casinos, estimates more than $3 billion leaves the state each year as gamblers shuttle off to Atlantic City, catch a bus to Connecticut’s Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun or hop on a flight to Las Vegas—and one thing that stays in Vegas is the cash spent by visiting New Yorkers.

To read the full article at City & State click here.

Keep the plant open, and an earthquake-triggered meltdown could unleash a wave of toxic radiation upon millions of New Yorkers.

Shut down the plant’s two units, and the region could face rolling blackouts, double-digit rate hikes and new pollution-
belching power plants to replace the 2,000 megawatts lost from the grid.

But open or closed, Indian Point is unlikely to fall into either worst-case scenario, presenting policymakers instead with a calculation of each option’s actual risks and benefits and the most acceptable trade-offs.

“Most discussions of Indian Point are strongly in one direction or the other,” said Michael Gerrard, an environmental law professor at Columbia University who will moderate a panel about the plant next month. “There’s a lot of polarization on the issue.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the final say over renewing the two reactors’ licenses, which expire in 2013 and 2015, respectively, though Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been pushing to shut them down and is demanding that their owner, Entergy, install cooling towers that could be prohibitively expensive.

The arguments in favor of shutting it down center on safety, an issue that flared up after the nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant a year ago.

Environmentalists say low-level radiation leaks, the plant’s location near underground fault lines, countless safety-inspection exemptions and the lack of a viable evacuation plan provide further reasons to shutter the plant.

But the plant has had the highest safety ratings the past six years, Entergy points out, and passed key safety assessments performed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its license renewal application.

If the plant is shut down, however, the critical questions would then be about reliability, cost and environmental impact.

Indian Point electricity meets about 30 percent of New York City’s demand; the plant is a reliable source of low-greenhouse-gas electricity and generates almost no air pollution of any kind. It’s also fairly inexpensive to run, since the capital costs were amortized long ago.

The New York Independent System Operator, or ISO, which operates the state’s transmission lines and conducts studies of the reliability of the entire system, has said new energy sources would have to be in place to provide 1,200 new megawatts by 2016.

“Failure to do so would have serious reliability consequences, including the possibility of rolling customer blackouts,” Rick Gonzalez, CEO of the ISO, said at an Assembly hearing last month.

Gonzalez said that new power plants and efforts to curtail demand would likely be the potential solutions in the next three to five years, as well as limited transmission upgrades.

The governor this year called for the creation of a transmission highway to bring ample upstate energy to the downstate area, but stringing hundreds of miles of new power lines would likely take longer than building new power plants.

Other options exist, but each has drawbacks: Renewable power sources such as wind and solar are expensive, natural gas requires new supply and generators, and nobody wants more coal.

But Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, who chairs the Energy Committee, said testimony at his hearing last month convinced him that Indian Point is not essential to New York’s energy future, from both environmental and reliability perspectives.

“The new generation could be the retrofitting of an existing facility, the repowering of an existing facility to be larger and using a cleaner fuel than is currently used,” Cahill said.

To read the full article, pick up the latest issue of City & State, or click here. 

Some still remember how frustrating it was.

Some say it doesn’t really bother them.

And some still disagree about how exactly it played out.

Ten years on, the victims and the survivors of the last round of gerrymandering in New York offer mixed views on the process and how it altered their lives.

Vincent Gentile, who was a three-term state senator, saw his New York City seat carved up like a side of beef in one of the most controversially redrawn districts that year.

“People now are saying, ‘Oh, look what’s happening,’” Gentile said. “But it’s just a repeat of what happened 10 years ago. They were playing their shenanigans 10 years ago, and they’re doing it again 10 years later.”

Gentile says he was targeted by Senate Republicans who reconfigured the district so then City Councilman Martin Golden could challenge him.

The Staten Island portion of Gentile’s district, which he had won handily in 2000, was cut off, while more conservative portions of Brooklyn were added to help Golden, a former police officer.

“They drew such a twisted district that, to get from Gravesend to Marine Park, they had to connect it with one avenue through Sheepshead Bay,” Gentile said. “And so it looked like a little barbell with the bar in middle. It should have been an easy rejection by the Department of Justice.”

Golden, who won the seat, sees it differently.

“I believe I had nothing to do with the drafting of the seat 10 years ago,” Golden said. “They’re all similar communities, all communities that should be together. And I think it was well put together, and I think we’ve served that community well.”

Not that Gentile holds a grudge. The two are collegial and have partnered on joint initiatives in Brooklyn.

While Gentile went down fighting and landed comfortably in a City Council seat, others find that gerrymandering makes retirement look like the best option.

Ten years ago former Congressman John LaFalce was confronted with a map that combined his district with that of another Democratic incumbent, Rep. Louise Slaughter.

The district seemed favorable to him, but after more than a quarter century in Congress, the new lines dashed his hopes for another reelection bid.

“Raising money had really become an unpleasant necessity,” LaFalce said. “I didn’t like the prospect of having to run against a member of my own party, the prospect of having to run against an incumbent. Also, at that time in 2002 I did not foresee the Democrats regaining a majority in the House of Representatives for some time. In the minority, you just can’t set the agenda.”

For LaFalce, the decision was a good one. He got his Congressional pension, returned to practicing law, joined a number of boards and became a college professor, which he enjoyed immensely.

In other cases, getting gerrymandered out of office doesn’t stick. Republican Long Island Assemblyman Phil Boyle was drawn out of his district 10 years ago after backing the wrong side in an intraparty dispute.

“I call myself a poster boy for redistricting reform,” Boyle said. “My house was literally on the water, so they had to go down my block, around my house, and over the water and back up the other side just to draw the lines they wanted to.”