Maggie Brooks Chart
TAXES Maggie Brooks has vowed to continue County Executive Jack Doyle’s policy of freezing the property tax levy — the amount of property tax money the county takes in. The result has been continuing cuts in the county property tax rate. The policy is crucial, she says, to attracting and maintaining businesses. It’s also, she…
Tell me a story
Rafe Martin creates entire worlds out of simple words, or, as he puts it, “sounds on air.” He’s not one to run around on stage during his storytelling performances, preferring to simply sit or stand in one place, using gestures or a change in tone to plant his audience — of children and adults —…
Smokin’ by the Kodak plant
Tailgater’s owner Mike DiCesare is a barbeque guy. “Barbeque didn’t exist in my family,” he says. “But once I learned the basics, I really got into it.” Now, on his days off, he tends an open pit in his back yard, reads barbeque publications, and travels to famed barbeque spots. DiCesare worked for a…
An appetite for criminal justice
In contemporary popular fiction and cinema, John Grisham is to the dusty courtroom what Stephen King is to the dank basement. If one deals with ghosts and monsters, the unspeakable fears lurking in the depths of the soul, the other probes the more familiar and, in our litigious time, the more palpable anxieties of the…
Fighting drug dealers, gainful employment
There were three high-profile biopics unveiled at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival, and two of them were about print journalists with very different work ethics. One was Shattered Glass, about New Republic writer Stephen “The Original Jayson Blair” Glass, while the other chose to focus on the exact same subject covered in 2000 festival…
With friends like these…
I’m now friends with Jim Shapiro. That’s right. Jim “The Hammer” Shapiro: telelawyer supreme with the trademark bark of an empowered nerd. I hadn’t been part of the ultra-hip online community of Friendster.com for three days and already I was buddies with a celebrity in a population of about 1.5 million users. Friendster…
News briefs 10.15.03
The bright side of the tracks On the rear side of a long commercial building at 176 Anderson Avenue, in a parking lot facing the train tracks, kids are creating vivid masterpieces. Paul Knoblauch, a metal artist who works out of the building, has met some of the graffiti artists. He thinks that part…
Toughing it out for DA
Since the Nixon era begat the “modern ‘get tough’ movement” — to use the Sentencing Project’s term — the criminal justice system has been rough on people. A new Sentencing Project study says the US rate of incarceration in 2002 hit “a record high” of 702 inmates per hundred thousand population. Russia took second place,…
The great race: Maggie Brooks vs. Bill Johnson
Read more about “The great race” in the News Articles section here This year’s campaign for county executive is a crucial one. Monroe County is faced with major budget problems, a weak economy, loss of manufacturing jobs, small population growth, and a decline in the population of young adults. Because current County Executive Jack…
Bill Johnson
William A. Johnson Jr. was elected 64th mayor of the City of Rochester in November 1993. He was re-elected without opposition in November 1997 and won a third term in November 2001. Under Johnson’s leadership, the City of Rochester has initiated a variety of innovative programs, including the Neighbors Building Neighborhoods Program (considered a…
Maggie Brooks
Maggie Brooks was appointed county clerk by Governor George Pataki in April 1997. She won a full four-year term later that year and was reelected in 2001. As county clerk, Brooks oversees a $54 million a year operation that includes the county’s downtown lands records office, which handles legal recordings and filings, along with…
Bill Johnson Chart
TAXES Maggie Brooks and Bill Johnson have diametrically opposed views on this issue. Johnson says although property-tax increases would be a “last resort,” he can’t rule them out because economic growth won’t happen fast enough to solve the county’s financial problems. Freezing the property tax levy — the amount the county takes in — as…
