Good article on Jeff Conrad
Quote:
South's Jeff Conrad
After less than 90 days on the job, newly appointed 26 year old South District Common Council member Jeff Conrad knows one thing: The best training he’s received for his current post came not from the three and a half years working as a legislative aide for then Assemblyman Brian Higgins, as valuable as that was, but from growing up in a strong South Buffalo family.
“I would say the best preparation I’ve had for this job came from being at home,” Conrad points out. “Because the concerns of my constituents that I am dealing with now are the same concerns our family had when I was growing up in the neighborhood: Problems with trees, noise problems, quality of life issues, these are the things that are on people’s minds.”
In fact, most of the calls he gets from South Buffalo residents involve housing.
“Nine out of ten of the calls I get involve housing issues,” Councilman Conrad explains. “I talk to building inspectors two or three times a day. We have really good neighborhoods in South Buffalo and really good housing stock. But, we do have pockets of bad housing. That’s why I supported the rental registry legislation in the Common Council.”
The law requires all absentee landlords in the city to register with City Hall authorities.
“Under this law, you don’t have to register if you live on the premises that you own and are renting out,” he notes. “But, if you don’t live there you have to register so that we know who owns every property in the event that there are problems that need to be rectified. This is a tool we need to have so we can make sure all of our properties stay up to code and do not become liabilities to the neighborhoods they are in.”
Possibly an even more serious problem looming for the city begins as of July 1 with the dissolution of the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority Police.
“According to current targets, the Buffalo Police Dept. is supposed to go down to 675 officers in the next two years,” Councilman Conrad reports. “But, with the loss of the BMHA officers plus the county budget crisis which means the loss of the County Sheriff’s warrant squad, losses to the narcotics squad and the rest, there is going to be a significant reduction in police protection in Buffalo.”
The result could be, not only more danger for residents and officers alike, but an end to any hope of doing something about the rise of quality of life annoyances from one end of Buffalo to another.
If there is a shooting at one end of my district and a stabbing some place else and then someone calls about loud music next door, where are the police going to go,” the Councilman asks. “Naturally, they have to go to deal with the more serious crimes. And, there may not be enough officers to handle those.”
The possible solution Conrad and some of his colleagues are looking at, including Councilman Joe Golombek among others, is to slow down the drive to downsize the Queen City Force to 675.”
What I think we are going to have to do is, instead of cutting the ranks of our police officers to 675, we may have to go down to 710 or 715,” he speculates. “Above all, we have to do everything we can to keep our citizens safe.”
Conrad, a 1997 Timon graduate who has a BA in political science, remains a strong advocate of grassroots government.
“We have 60 block clubs in my district,” he says. “When you buy a house, you also buy that neighborhood. It’s important that the quality of our neighborhoods in South Buffalo remains high. That’s something I am working on every single day I’m in this job.”
They don't have the same articles up all of for a long time, but this is an article that came from http://politicswny.com/
