Protecting Home Rule? - What Home Rule?

I saw this comment on Pandora’s Box of Rocks blog.

“Mr. Fixit,

If you want to heal the community, politely ask Richard Chandler and Marion Trieste to go home. Or the other way is to support the Republican members of the town board who are diligently working to protect our right to home municipal laws that if obeyed will make it impossible for Dickie and Maz to ruin our town anymore than they already have.”

On the Cape Vincent wind zoning issue...if someone actually finds a scrap of home rule laying around...please... I would like to be the first to know!!!

It is disturbing to me that people who make these comments still don’t grasp the reality of home rule and Art. X.and what our town board is actually doing. If someone wants to support our town board then fine, but at least do it based in reality rather than fantasy. The fallacy in this comment is right at the point where this person says ”if obeyed”.    If home rule is truly in place and protected there is no IF OBEYED. If we had home rule and were willing to protect it and applied it BP would HAVE TO OBEY.

So let me ask this commenter a simple question.

Who will make the final determination on whether the wind regulations in our Cape Vincent zoning law will be enforceable or not? The town…or the State? Hopefully you are smart enough to understand that the STATE in ALBANY will make that final determination. And the last time I looked on a NY map Albany is NOT our HOME but will STILL make the RULES!!!

I fail to see how that is home rule or that we are protecting it.

I give the board credit that they are working diligently on the path they have chosen to appease, validate, and be reasonable to the Art X. system. And I am sure they and their supporters just love to bask in this praise  that they are protecting home rule!

But a significant disconnect in logic and comprehension occurs when that is interpreted as defending or protecting our right to home rule. In reality the town board is doing no such thing. They ARE attempting to protect a local law before a political bureaucratic system that already removed our home rule on this issue. But they are not challenging the removal of home rule or defending or protecting home rule itself. That assumption is badly flawed!

You can’t willingly participate and appease and be reasonable to a system that has already removed your home rule rights and then at the same time claim you are protecting home rule. You can’t claim the rules of a system that removed your home rules rights are fair and impartial, and then claim you are protecting home rule rights. That is an absurd contradiction.

To actually protect and defend home rule you would have to go after and directly oppose the root system that took it away, not further enable and validate and give power to the system by appeasing it and participating in it.

You can’t claim to be defending or protecting home rule when you formulate a local law and then hand it over to the State to determine it’s validity and argue and beg as to whether you are allowed to enforce it or not. That is NOT protecting home rule!

This town board an every town board that willingly participates in and appeases the Art X system that already removed our home rule, is validating and enabling a further suppression of your home rules rights.

And that IS NOT PROTECTING OR DEFENDING HOME RULE!!!

And further more I twice asked this town board if they would pass a resolution that would have opposed Art X and the removal of our home rule.

THEY OUTRIGHT REFUSED! 

So would you like to explain to me how this is “protecting” our home rule rights?

WE have NO CHANCE of protecting our community if people don't even grasp the fundamentals of Art. X and what it is doing to us and how the town board has chosen to react to it.

On the wind issue in CV there is NO HOME RULE...and you can't protect something you DON'T
HAVE!