Priorities, Part 2

The past couple of weeks have been quite harrowing for the firefighters in our area due to drought conditions and high winds. These men and women are true hometown heroes and give so much of their time and energy to keep us safe. Please support our local volunteer fire companies! The county executive has issued a burning ban and said how important the volunteer fire companies are during his photo ops. However, actions speak louder than words. Let’s compare what the local public service entities received in ARPA funds vs what Project NepTWNE received.

American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds were designed to help the country recover from the effects of the pandemic. For more information on how ARPA grants were to be distributed and the qualifications: State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. Project NepTWNE was granted $1.5 million in ARPA funds to build a water research lab in the Union Fish Building as the ordinance was written: https://keepourlibrarypublic.com/faqs/#erie-county-documents-regarding-the-1-5-million-grant-to-gannon. Keep in mind these funds were granted to a private, religious university with a large endowment. Gannon still had remote classes during the pandemic: Gannon to pay $1.1 million to settle class-action suit over COVID-era remote instruction.

As is shown in the comparison, most of the fire departments were given less than 1% of what was given to Gannon, which at the end of the 2022 school year had an endowment of $71 million. And Gannon got a lease of the taxpayer funded library on top of it? And the county executive wants to take over the 911 system when he feels that a private university deserves more funding than our local volunteer firefighters? This is why we need to hold him accountable when it comes to taxpayer money!

“They say in every library there is a single book that can answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind.”

~Lemony Snicket