Mayor's Corner
2/27/2025
Mayor’s Corner by Greg “Porp” Rogers
LeRoy lost a legend this week, Don Santini. Anyone raised in the 60’s and 70’s in this community knows what a huge personality this man was. He was deeply loved by his players. He was the most charismatic person I’d ever met. RIP, Coach.
For about 13 years now I have been writing this column. My goal was to always keep the message as positive as possible, because I really believe LeRoy is a great place to live your life. Everyone has problems and issues, but if you focus on the positives the quality of your life will be better. Conversely, if you always look at the negatives it will wear you out.
This will be one of the few times I will mention the negatives. New York State has a huge problem and Albany has their heads in the sand. We are losing the 20- to 40-year-old population, for two major reasons, taxes and weather, and we cannot fix the weather. Losing this demographic has caused an employee gap. Everywhere you turn, restaurants cannot get cooks and help. Hospitals are short on nursing staff, they can’t keep up and the level of care suffers, not from the quality of nurses but the overall number available. The prison guards are on strike because the lack of employees has them working 24-hour shifts at times. We at the village are having our police officers poached by other agencies. They offer up to 25 to 30k a year more, with lifetime health benefits. These numbers are crazy. Health care goes up 10% a year roughly and an officer can retire after 20 years of service, you do the escalating math. The numbers at the police academy are also way down, so this is not going away any time soon. That is it for my rant.
In an effort to do our part to keep LeRoy as affordable as possible, the board will continue to scrutinize all spending and purchases, but please keep in mind, everything has gone up for you and us too. We will begin our budget process next week and it is my plan, when finished, to have this column have comparison to five years ago, pre-Covid pandemic. Look to see how we made it through.
The next comprehensive plan meeting is April 9th at 6:00 at the Village Hall.
I have two quotes this week.
“Negativism sucks energy.” Al Plumb
“BABY!!! You’re a** is grass and I’m the lawn mower.” Don Santini