Dunkirk Mayor Wilfred Rosas attended Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s State of the State address in Albany Wednesday and told the OBSERVER Thursday that it was beneficial for the city to be represented there. Overall Rosas was impressed with Cuomo’s message and cited areas that may impact the city and the region in the near future.

Environment was a big message laid out in the governor’s agenda and Rosas stated that “as it pertains to the city of Dunkirk, I’m very impressed with the $3 billion that he is proposing for the protection of our environment. It will have an impact across the state that I hope we can get a small piece of.”

Rosas went on to share that one of the projects currently in the works is a nature trail that is being working on in conjunction with Revitalize Dunkirk.

“As soon as I get back into the office I’m going to be meeting with our development team and direct them to put something together so that we can propose this project to them to see if we can get some of these funds,” Rosas added.

When asked about wind turbines being placed out in Lake Erie, the mayor was hesitant to take a stance on that. “The offshore wind project is something that the state is still doing studies on. I’ve heard both sides of that argument already and I’m unsure as to where they would put them if they put them out here in Lake Erie,” Rosas stated. “I wouldn’t agree to it being visible. If they were to put them out, further away, that might be something that might be acceptable. At this point I’m not taking a stance on that.”

Rosas did share that with conservation in mind, the city has wetland areas that he feels might benefit from the programs Cuomo is suggesting. “We have some sites in the city that have wetlands and I want our development department to work with our DPW to look at these sites, maybe we could propose to use some of these funds to mitigate some of those wetlands as well.”

Rosas was very happy to hear about the reduction in small business tax coming and hopes it’ll be a permanent situation citing that it’s yet “another tool to help bring in more small businesses to the city.”

Hate crimes also came up in Cuomo’s remarks and Rosas feels that in this day and age there seems to be an increase and that addressing these is important. “These hate crimes that are happening now, he talked about racism and discrimination and it seems like these types of things are all of a sudden happening more frequently than they used to,” Rosas commented. “I think in our community we’re beginning to see some of that as well, so I support that.”

Recreational use marijuana was another area that the governor mentioned and Rosas had mixed feelings on that. “I don’t really have a position on adult use marijuana. I’m not for it, but I’m not all against it either,” Rosas said. “I think those that are currently using marijuana are probably going to continue to use it and those that don’t, probably are not. So I don’t see that this is going to have a major impact. I think that adult use is acceptable.”

Other areas that greatly impressed Dunkirk’s mayor was the expansion of the Excelsior Scholarship Program and pre-kindergarten. “I think that expanding the Excelsior Scholarship Program is a huge boon to us,” Rosas added. “We have some families that have college age kids. Some of them are making too much money to be eligible for some of these grants, but not enough to pay for tuition, so expanding that is going to be helpful in our community where we have families that could take advantage of that. As for pre-K we have to start them earlier, studies have shown that kids that go to preschool are doing better than those that don’t.”

The last thing that Rosas feels is going to be a huge help to the area is the 100% cell phone use that Cuomo mentioned.

“We do have areas in the city, in Northern Chautauqua County that are not good areas for cell phones, so to have 100% cell phone service in the whole county I think will be awesome.”