The BenCen Blog

Informing Public Discourse in the Hudson Valley and Across the State

Month: February 2017

Three Proposals That Assure Independent Oversight by Elected County Comptrollers

Proposed budgets in 2016 two upstate counties, Ulster and Onondaga, delivered bad news to comptrollers, county elected officials charged with fiscal oversight.  In Ulster, County Executive Michael Hein sought a 22% cut (from $890,000 to $695,000) in Comptroller Elliot Auerbach’s budget. Meanwhile, in Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney took $479,000 (27%) out of Comptroller’s Bob Antonacci’s budget. Were these decisions political payback that reveal a need for structural changes in county government, or simply tough-minded management?

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On President Trump and Trumpism: A Roundtable Discussion at SUNY New Paltz

Last week, the Department of Political Science and International Relations at SUNY New Paltz convened a roundtable discussion on the state of the Trump presidency a little more than two weeks in. Clocking in at just over an hour, the panel discussion and ensuing conversation with the audience set the context for where we are and where we might be going. The take-away was that one possible solution to Trump and his ambiguities lies in an institutional response to Trumpism, and that audience members might best channel their energies to directed political organization and action, including running for office, as a means to confront and resist the politics of prevarication and anti-democratic calumny over the next 4 years.

Photo credit: KT Tobin

The panel, composed of Nancy Kassop, Stephen Pampinella, Daniel Lipson, and Gerald Benjamin, offered views grounded in the ethic of resistance and response, not reaction. The discussion was organized around questions posed by moderator Scott Minkoff. With particular attention to institutional dynamics, panelists offered their views on domestic government and politics, international relations, and environmental politics. The discussion focused in particular on two dimensions: Trump’s political strengths and weaknesses, and the institutions and industrial and populist partisans that are now organizing in opposition to the president’s inarticulate, inchoate arch-conservative, corporate-friendly policy agenda.

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Introducing Mid-Hudson Currents

Mid-Hudson Currents is the SUNY New Paltz Benjamin Center’s newly launched regional forum for considering with you the governance, policies, politics, social institutions, and culture of our Hudson Valley region, and its communities.

Mid-Hudson Currents will be evidence based, rigorously analytical and thoughtfully critical. We seek to provoke thinking and discussion with data you may not have seen, considered with care for their regional, statewide and national implications. We will link the research we have recently done, or are in the midst of doing, to breaking news or ongoing stories of regional importance while remaining committed to methodologically-sound, locally-focused inquiry. Always, we will seek to identify best practices and advance the public interest.

Additionally, Mid-Hudson Currents will draw upon the diverse research programs of SUNY New Paltz faculty across the range of disciplines, with particular attention to work that considers social and political phenomena that may challenge conventional thinking and accepted norms.

We will start by communicating weekly. Over time we  will extend our reach to include interviews, round table talks with local and regional leaders, and the work of the path-breaking innovators among us.

We invite you to the conversation. As we engage each other, we will shape the ways our local communities and region may best respond to the challenges we face as New Yorkers, Americans, and citizens of the world.

Join us.

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