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APRIL 25 - MAY 1, 2024
New York HEAT Act is excluded from state budget By BRANDON CRUZ bcruz@liherald.com
Nassau Community College Federation of Teachers
Nassau Community College student Ariel Silverman spoke at Monday’s rally about dealing with the closure of all of the campus’s dining options, which has forced her to spend twice as much money for food off-campus or simply not eat at all.
College students are hungry for campus food solutions By BRANDON CRUZ bcruz@liherald.com
With four weeks to go in the semester, students at Nassau County Community College find themselves in a food desert on campus. As the school is facing a $14 million budget deficit for the 2024-25 academic year, Compass Group — the school’s food service provider, which has two years left on its contract with the school — submitted a letter of early termination to NCC stating that it was “no longer financially feasible to continue providing food service under the current financial arrangement,” according to an agenda item at the college’s finance committee meeting on March 12. Compass has managed all of the campuses dining locations since 2019, providing services to approximately 18,000 students a semester.
Jerry Kornbluth, NCC’s vice president of community and governmental relations, said that Compass proposed that the college spend roughly $320,000 per year on its services for the next seven years, but school officials decided that the proposal was too costly and declined, prompting the early termination. “Our current food services vendor has advised us that it will no longer provide dining and catering services at NCC effective Tuesday, April 16,” read a letter from Erik Paulson, consulting vice president of finance for the school. “The college continues to actively explore different food choices and vendors, informed by feedback from over 1,100 members of the campus community who took part in a survey on dining preferences.” But last week, all of the campus-based food CoNtiNued oN pAge 4
As Earth Day came and went this week, some residents — and their representatives — expressed disappointment in what they see as the state’s failure to follow through on its pledge to limit the impacts of climate change. Last week, the state unveiled and passed its $237 billion budget for fiscal year 2025, which many observers criticized its lack of investment in ways to address the ongoing environmental crisis. Two significant pieces of legislation — the New York Home Energy Affordable Transition, or HEAT, Act, and the Climate Change Superfund Act — were notably absent from the spending plan. The HEAT Act aimed to limit the expansion of gas infrastructure by requiring utilities to explore alter native energ y options before providing gas to new customers. Similarly, the Climate Change Superfund Act sought to hold companies accountable for their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions by requiring them to fund infrastructure upgrades to mitig at e t h e i r e nv i ro n m e n t a l impact. But despite Gov. Kathy Hochul’s advocacy of these ini-
tiatives, they did not appear in the final budget agreement. “As we celebrate Earth Day, it is terribly disappointing that the HEAT Act was not included in the budget,” Assemblywoman Taylor Darling, who represents Uniondale and co-sponsored the bill, said. Taylor, who is running for the State Senate in the fall, added that the absence of the measures from the budget “emphasizes the urgent need” for her to work collaboratively with her colleagues in order to quickly “enact legislation that will protect our planet from further destruction,” the next step in addressing the ongoing climate crisis. “Our commitment to environmental stewardship must be unwavering,” she said “so together we can ensure a sustainable future for generations to come.” But the impacts of the exclusion of the two initiatives will go far beyond disappointment for residents. “Our families are struggling,” Darling said at a rally calling for the HEAT Act’s inclusion in the budget last month. “People cannot afford to pay their bills, they cannot afford housing, they cannot afford food, and yet our utility bills, somehow, continue to rise every single month.” CoNtiNued oN pAge 4