VESTAL, NY (WSKG) - As the New York state legislature enters the final week of the legislative session, 51st District Senator James Seward is disappointed more wasn’t accomplished to help upstate.
"In the closing days we're looking at issues like giving drivers licenses to illegal immigrants, marijuana legalization, and those types of issues that are kind of more of a far-left agenda," he said.
Seward’s district includes Otsego, Cortland, and parts of Delaware, Tompkins and Cayuga Counties. He wants to focus more on issues important to those communities, such as the population decline in the Southern Tier and access to broadband internet.
“That’s the sort of issues that I think we need to confront as a state, rather than some of these other, what I call New York City-centric issues,” he said.
For the first time in a decade, Seward’s Republican party was in the minority in the New York Senate this year.