Paul Szmal: And good morning, it is 740. Welcome to FLX Morning for this Tuesday, April the 1st, 2025. Not an April Fool's joke. Routes 5 and 20 are shut down between Reed and Brewer Road while the police investigation into an incident that happened early this morning continues. And because of the road closures, Waterloo Central Schools are on a two-hour delay this morning. It's 740 and we'd like to welcome into the program State Senator Rachel May. Senator, good morning. How are you?
Rachel May: Good morning, Paul. I'm great. How are you?
Paul Szmal: I'm doing well. And I understand that you've been working on a little bit of a project to try to help out at least maybe not just the city of Auburn, but other places with potholes.
Rachel May: Well, yeah, I mean, we were trying, we're in the process of making the budget right now. It's due today, but I think we're going to have to extend it a little bit. And making sure that we get plenty of funding for roads, road repair in the budget, especially for our upstate cities that have lots of roads that they have to deal with lots of people driving through. But, yeah, I also have some legislation to try to kind of change the formula for how that money gets distributed as well. So we're hoping, I know it's a huge issue for drivers and a big expense because the wear and tear on cars is very expensive. And so the more we can do as a government to give people smooth roads to drive on, the better everyone is.
Paul Szmal: Now, if I remember serves correctly, where state highways go through places like the city of Auburn, the city is responsible for the road repairs. And what you're trying to do is help them get the money to affect those repairs faster.
Rachel May: Right, especially for state roads, to make sure that the cities or the hosts of state roads can really get access to the money that they need for those to maintain them.
Paul Szmal: All right. We're talking with State Senator Rachel May here on FLX Morning this morning. You mentioned that the budget deadline has come and gone. Well, it won't.
Rachel May: Yeah, I mean, today is the deadline, but we're going to pass an extender. We've already passed the debt service bill. And then we are still there are still some outstanding issues that the governor was trying to put in the budget and the legislature is pushing back on. And it always takes a little time where, you know, if we're within a few days, we'll be fine. There have been years when the budget hasn't hasn't been passed till late summer. So we're doing better than that. We're very close, I think.
Paul Szmal: So you're anticipating maybe a few days delay in the process?
Rachel May: That's my expectation. Yeah.
Paul Szmal: Okay. I wanted to ask you about the Rural Resources Fair that you held last week.
Rachel May: Yeah, the hardest thing to pronounce in radio, right? Rural Resources. So I chair the Commission on Rural Resources for the state legislature. And this is the third year that we've had a fair at the Capitol to really highlight, excuse me, not just not just agriculture. We do a lot about agriculture, but this is about all of the organizations that are trying to help rural areas, whether it's rural health or emergency services or the Rural Schools Association or some of the like the Wine Association and Fiber Networks and those kinds of things to make sure that we are bringing people together, that my colleagues are understanding what are some of the issues in rural areas, who is there to help, how can they get information, but also so that those groups can network. And we're finding that for them, it's the only time they've ever all been a room together and they and they make all kinds of connections and are able to work better because they know what are the other organizations out there doing good work for our rural areas.
Paul Szmal: We're talking with State Senator Rachel May here on FLX Morning. That reach out to the rural areas. Do you feel like that's something that's been lacking in the past couple of years?
Rachel May: Well, we've been trying. I became chair when I started in the Senate in 2019, and we've really worked hard to make sure that we're doing the outreach so that one of the things you find is that a city like Auburn or like Syracuse, they've got staff who can do things like apply for grants and and monitor the grants and that kind of thing. And often a rural municipality will have a part time mayor or supervisor or something and they don't have time or or bandwidth to do that kind of thing. So we're trying to make sure that we're getting the information out there to them so that they can have access to the resources that that the state provides or even in some cases that the federal government provides so that we're kind of the multiplier effect in a way, making sure that they have access to what the government can offer them.
Paul Szmal: I want to go back to the budget for a second and actually talk a little bit about what might be happening for you after the budget process is done.
Rachel May: Well, yeah, I mean, we don't know when that will be, but the when the budget is over, then we can turn to more of our legislative agenda, because as long as we're basically the first three months of the session are all spent negotiating the budget, but also passing bills that might be related to the budget. So after the budget is done, I'm going to be really focusing on a few pieces of legislation that I have, including expanding the bottle bill. We want to make sure I heard the news about Seneca Meadows landfill this morning. I do feel like we need to divert as much waste out of the out of the waste stream as we can. And so expanding the bottle bill is one way to do that. I think I'm going to be working on a lot of housing legislation because we have a real crisis in housing. The cost of rent, the cost of buying a house is getting out of hand. And a lot of people can't find housing at all. And homelessness is just skyrocketing. So figuring out how we get more housing built and rehabbed and made safe and affordable for people, that's a huge priority for me.
Paul Szmal: All right. Well, we appreciate the time, as always, Senator May. Thank you for joining us this morning.
Rachel May: Yeah, my pleasure. Good to talk to you. And happy April Fool's Day.
