The New York State Senate’s 50th district stretches across Onondaga and Oswego Counties, including the cities of Fulton and Oswego, and a number of towns like Clay, Cicero, Camillus, and Manlius.
In this year’s election, Republican challenger James Corl said since launching his campaign, he has walked more than 150 miles of that district to talk to people who live there.
"You can't get a good representation of what people want just from sitting behind a desk,” he said. “I think a good representative, a good senator, needs to be actively out in the community, seeing people where they are, not just going to the places where everybody goes, but where nobody goes, which I think is really important."
The 24-year-old Cicero native said on his travels, he met a lot of people who felt disengaged and left behind by political policies.
He said if elected to Senate, he would like to focus on growth in our area. He has political experience as a legislative director for New York State Senator Mark Walczyk, and he said he sees his age as an asset that will help him connect with a younger demographic.
"We have a lot of opportunities here in central New York,” Corl said. “We have an abundance of natural resources. We have a lot of great things to offer, but we need to do more to recruit and retain young people here."
Democratic incumbent Senator Chris Ryan is finishing up his first term in Albany, and he served on the Onondaga County Legislature prior to that. He said he’s proud of his work to promote growth in central New York during his time in Albany and hopes voters send him back.
"We've been able to get back a lot of funding, whether it's the $450 million for SUNY Upstate, the $12 million for the sewer pipe for southern Oswego County getting ready for housing, the funding that we got for the water for Micron, the extra money we got for the wastewater treatment plant,” Ryan said. “I mean, it's just about passing laws. It's about helping New Yorkers, central New Yorkers. It's about bringing back resources."
Ryan said he knows many New Yorkers are struggling with the high cost of living, and he said he’s working on programs designed to help.
"We've seen tens and tens of thousands of people getting kicked off healthcare plans, the Essential Plan, we're trying to safeguard that,” he said. “We don't want to leave people behind. SNAP, we see the SNAP being cut. We're trying to help that, so I think, we're trying to offset those rate increases through policies, but we're also trying to fund because people are hurting, and we're talking about food. We're talking about food insecurity."
Both candidates count increasing housing in the district as a top priority, as Micron prepares to arrive and local governments prepare for a population increase.
Corl said he wants to push back on mandates for builders and give municipalities more incentives to expand their housing stock.
"My proposal would be a shovel ready housing program, where municipalities could propose a plan to increase that stock of housing by 3-5 percent, and that's whatever the town or municipality decides it would like,” said Corl. “And then, New York state could then approve that plan, and then double the amount to sewer and water infrastructure money to actually make that project a reality."
Ryan said he’s working to reform SEQRA, or environmental review laws, to help housing plans move forward.
"We have developers ready to go,” he said. “We want to make sure that our policies are, whether it's working with developers and the DEC to make sure that the housing moment can be met, but also funding to initiative or incentivize home builders or developers to build housing, and also some market rate housing as well."
Both candidates said they plan to spend the next few weeks talking to voters across the district. Early voting starts Oct. 24 and Election Day is Nov. 3.
