Refugees? Council Says Aye,
But Audience Members Nay
Oneonta Mayor Daniel Buttermann opened the meeting by announcing the launch of “Community Conversations,” a series of open forums intended to bring residents into earlier, more frequent dialogue with city leadership.…
I’ll start by commending those individuals that are committed to helping the less fortunate and display this sort of altruism. It is indeed laudable, but at this time, not practical. Two large concerns – this area is already stretched to the limit when it comes to social services, and some would argue, we don’t do a good enough job of connecting our community to the available resources – but now we’re going to let foreign, non-English speaking residents come in an utilize all of these services. To argue against this notion is nonsense. These folks will need Medicaid, social services, state level assistance, housing subsidies, etc. These are all resources that many of our own citizenry so desperately needs. I understand the numbers are low, but that gets me to my next point. These organizers commend the Utica program, which is a long-established organization, but it too started out as a small outreach. The program has now resettled some 15k refugees to Utica. Why don’t we see some data on these populations? How many are working? How many are still utilizing services? What are the ramp up costs? Some of this data has got to be available, correct? Lastly, please check out the Obama-led grant opportunity that was given to Utica for their refugee population. Millions of dollars provided to help teen refugees find summer jobs. This is a complete affront to our community and quite frankly, an ignorant move of epic proportions considering the current state of the Upstate economy. We in a period of historically low economic growth in our communities, tightening budgets, low property tax collections, stretched community resources, and little to no employment opportunities for our own populations, so we’re going to plan a refugee resettlement? One of the commenters said it couldn’t be a better time, and as seen above, I would argue it couldn’t be a more inopportune time.