News Item
"Yahoo News" featured Law Professor John Nolon in "The Tainted Water Crisis In Upstate New York That Andrew Cuomo Can’t Shake"
...Changing watershed regulations across the state would require transferring many zoning and permitting powers from towns and villages to larger municipal bodies, such as counties or even the state itself. The constitutional grounds to do so are solid, according to John Nolon, a law professor at Pace University and counsel at the school’s Land Use Law Center.
There aren’t legal obstacles to solving the problem, Nolon said, but introducing a bill to strip towns of key powers could be career suicide for a state lawmaker.
“That is a politically very fraught task, because state legislators within the Assembly or Senate, they’re all local politicians and they all run for office,” he said. “When they go home, it’s difficult for them to say, ‘We just took away the town’s power to determine its future.’”
Read the full article.
