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6 days ago | 
fltimes.com | Michael Fitzgerald
Seneca Meadows Inc. landfill’s plan for a massive expansion got knocked back on its heels earlier this month when the New York State Court of Appeals upheld the Town of Seneca Falls Local Law 3-2016 that mandates the massive landfill must close by the end of this year.
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1 week ago | 
fltimes.com | Michael Fitzgerald
Last Sunday I took my dog Biscuit to an indoor dog park and brewpub. For four-season climates like Portland, Ore. and the Finger Lakes, it’s a perfect invention. An indoor play area for pups, a comfortable tavern for their people. I was pretty sure I needed a maximum dose of oxytocin to prepare myself for my Monday morning review of the news before writing. Oxytocin is often called the feel-good hormone in humans and dogs, which both get from interacting.
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2 weeks ago | 
fltimes.com | Michael Fitzgerald
I just finished reading “The Lost Souls of Leningrad,” a page-turner historical novel by Suzanne Parry set in Stalinist Russia on the eve of and during World War II. Like all good historic fiction, it takes the very real, very horrible historical events of those years to help spin a tale about the impacts of war: civilian starvation, Nazi air raids, personal tragedies, everyone living fearfully in a brutal dictatorship and their resilience through it all.
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3 weeks ago | 
fltimes.com | Michael Fitzgerald
There’s some faux logic afoot in the virtual blizzard of federal budget cuts swirling around us. The error is believing that if these President Donald Trump-and-Elon Musk-induced cuts don’t directly affect you — or someone close to you — then, whew!, you dodged a fiscal bullet. Not entirely, amigos. A timely example is the proposed slashing of Medicaid funding, outlined in detail last week in an online national media briefing in which I participated.
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1 month ago | 
fltimes.com | Michael Fitzgerald
The anger has reached the boiling point. In the Finger Lakes and other communities across the United States, citizen concerns about the cuts to public services by Elon Musk and his DOGE operatives is becoming a full-blown rage. The anger/rage is being directed at elected members of Congress — including our representatives — who appear hapless, helpless, or simply unwilling to do anything to help the public.
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1 month ago | 
fltimes.com | Michael Fitzgerald
A majority of the Seneca Falls town board last week showed it favors protecting the profitable Seneca Meadows Inc. landfill rather than the people of the town and region. The board voted 3-2 to give a town operating permit to Texas-based Waste Connections, SMI’s parent company, for a 47-acre expansion. The split vote also gives its blessing for 15 more years of daily dumping of up to 6,000 tons per day of trucked-in garbage, all to be added to the already ginormous SMI landfill on Route 414.
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1 month ago | 
fltimes.com | Michael Fitzgerald
I have been professionally curious since becoming a journalist five decades ago. It goes with the territory. Give me a budget to write about and I’ll discover fiscal details screaming to be brought to the public’s attention. The same for any controversy, conflict, disaster or complicated political matter. But travels in the last few months graphically demonstrated to me that being professionally curious, vs. being curious in general, are often different cats.
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1 month ago | 
fltimes.com | Michael Fitzgerald
The tsunami of federal employee firings in recent weeks has punched sizable wholes in the decades-old, national health and welfare safety net most Americans take for granted. That net has included research, protection, and medical strategies related to all manner of potential illnesses, epidemics, and pandemics. This includes avian flu, currently bedeviling the poultry industry. The numbers of ill chickens infected with the disease that are being euthanized is staggering.
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2 months ago | 
fltimes.com | Michael Fitzgerald
Two winters ago I traveled to the deserts of Southern California with the Wanderland Writers group. Their name says it all. This loose-knit outfit, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has been all over the world exploring and writing essays about what they discovered and their experiences. This was my first foray with Wanderland, making me wish I had hooked up earlier when members went to Paris, Japan, Cuba and other far-flung locales. The deserts on my trip had a huge, even mystical impact.
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2 months ago | 
fltimes.com | Michael Fitzgerald
Most of the news about the negative political mayhem in Washington, D.C. in the last three weeks has included lurid tales of shuttering beneficial programs, the mass firing of arguably hard-working government officials and affiliated organizations and destruction of long-standing institutions. And Gaza? I can’t even start to rank the unhinged notion of turning Gaza into a Mediterranean playground for the rich.
