From 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the Center for Environmental Initiatives will lead a program on the interrelationship between the Oak Orchard Creek and Oak Orchard River watershed and Lake Ontario.

The event will include presentations from State Department of Environmental Conservation Great Lakes Program staff; George Thomas of CEI; David DeGolyer of the Western New York Crop Management Association; and Dennis Kirby, manager of the the Orleans County Soil and Water Conservation District.

The program is free and sponsored in part by the Lake Ontario Lakewide Action and Management Plan. It’ll be held at the Oak Orchard Yacht Club, 1103 Archbald Road, Waterport. BY JEREMY MOULE

Action for a Better Community will host a Poverty and Economic Security Symposium from 8:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. on Tuesday, October 14, at the Riverside Convention Center. It will be followed by a luncheon from noon to 1:30 p.m. 

Three different workshops will cover the topics of economic opportunity, educational equity, and criminal justice policies. The symposium’s keynote address will be given by former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston.

The luncheon will feature a keynote address from Marvin McMickle, president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School. And several community leaders will be honored. 

For tickets to the luncheon, call Cherise Jordan, 325-5116 Ext. 4554 or register online: www.abcinfo.org

More information: 325-5116. BY CHRISTINE CARRIE FIEN

Roberts Wesleyan College will host the Finger Lakes Independent Higher Education Forum on Tuesday, October 14.

The forum, “Brainpower, Partnerships, and Resources for Our Region,” will focus on the $4.9 billion that private colleges contribute to the state’s economy and their social contributions to the region. Registration: www.cicu.org/registration/forum141014.

The event will be held at the college, 2301 Westside Drive, from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.


Rochester school Superintendent Bolgen Vargas will hold his coffee and conversation meeting for parents, teachers, and students at 7 a.m. on Thursday, October 16. The meeting will be held at the district’s central office, 131 West Broad Street. BY TIM LOUIS MACLAUSO

This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2014.

4 replies on “Week Ahead: Symposium on poverty; Oak Orchard watershed; higher education forum; coffee and conversation”

  1. David Cay Johnston must be the biggest blowhard in the world. First, he’s one of the 1%ers, “earning” a 6 figure salary at UR to teach 2 classes per week. Second, all he does is contribute to the problem of income inequality by doing nothing but pissing people off. He only states one side of the story. Put ALL of the facts on the table and his whole speal goes away.

  2. Um, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting, author of five critically lauded books, working his way up the ranks as an investigative reporter, staring as a teen, authoring an enormous number of quality pieces, to name just a couple of things based on, you know, merit; earning, not “earning.” Oh and a six figure salary gets you in the top 20%; to get into the top 1% means making well over half a million per year. And if Johnston does, more power to him. Whatever he makes he has earned through hard work.

  3. Johnny,

    I am sure much of my work going back 48 years has made some people very unhappy, especially those who went to prison, lost their jobs or lost election to an office for misconduct or whose subsidies or tax favors were halted. It has also brought joy to the innocent wrongly accused or convicted of things they did not do, the honest being punished for resisting demands that they look the other way and taxpayers who were saved from costly policies, including the more than a quarter of a trillion dollars (over just the first ten years) of tax dodges stopped because of my reporting.

    I correct all errors promptly and forthrightly. If you find factual mistakes please contact me at davidcay@me.com. As for roundedness, please advise what facts you think I am not putting on the table.

    You err in asserting I teach two days a week for a six-figure paycheck at U of R — I teach one day a week for five figures at Syracuse. Also, its “spiel,” not “speal.”

    As for whether I “earn” my paycheck, student evaluators consistently give very high marks to my Syracuse law and graduate business school courses on the law of the ancient world and some have said it was the most informing course they ever took; at USC in LA, where I taught once a week for eight years, students rated courses based on value received for their tuition. One year my journalism course was ranked #1 value in the entire undergraduate college. Other top schools have recruited me, and some hire me for lectures, so evidently their deans feel my teaching adds value.

    Troll Whisperer, thanks for the kind words. The top 1% in 2012, based on tax returns, started much lower than you wrote. The 1% began at $394,000, with half of those reporting less than $612,000 of adjusted gross income.

    Measuring only pay for work (wages, salaries, bonuses, stock option profits) the top 1% starts at $250,000 and the top half of 1% starts at less than $400,000. Half of workers earned less than $27,500 in 2012 and 92.6% were paid less than $100,000.

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