To read more about Rachel May’s opponent, Caleb Slater, click here. To read more of Central Current’s 2024 election coverage, learn how to register to vote and more, click here.Rachel May, the incumbent Democrat representing the New York State Senate’s 48th District, is running for a third term this election cycle. First elected in 2019, May represented the 53rd District through 2023. Since then, she has represented the 48th District.May serves on the following committees in the state Senate:Committee on Cities 2 (Chair) Legislative Commission on Rural Resources (Chair) Aging Agriculture  Elections  Environmental Conservation Health Housing, Construction and Community Development Legislative Women’s Caucus  State-Native American RelationsMay is running against Caleb Slater, who is running on the Republican party line.Early voting begins Oct. 26, which is also the deadline for voters to register to vote. Election Day is Nov. 5.Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.What’s one thing you plan to do if elected to help bring Micron to fruition?Well, I am working hard on expanding our housing base here in Central New York so that Micron employees and people who live here now will have good, safe, healthy, affordable places to live.So I’ve carried a number of bills – some of them have passed already, some of them will keep working on – to make it easier to build apartment buildings. Right now, the regulations drive the costs of building up enough that it’s hard to provide apartments that are affordable to people.We’re also trying to work on incentivizing dense, walkable communities, and in conjunction with that public transportation like bus rapid transit that is attractive and convenient for people to use with housing clustered around it. So I’m working at a number of different levels, both legislative and budgetary, to try to make it possible for us to see the kinds of communities that we need to in order to support Micron.What’s one thing you plan to do to make Micron a boon for everyone?I have been very involved in things like the Urban Jobs Task Force and helping make sure that the people who live in the city of Syracuse are being considered for jobs in any industry that is expanding in this area, because, often, populations of the city get overlooked. So, making sure that there are apprenticeship programs, that there’s transportation for people to get to job training as well as job sites, and that we’re starting in the high schools and growing up through community college and other methods of providing the kinds of training that people need – so our kids in our city schools, for example, are positioned to take advantage of opportunities as they come.Should Micron be unionized?I’m in favor of unions, and I think unions make life better for all of us, and they are the building blocks of the middle class. So, I would support unionization, yes.Since the law was changed in 2019, Raise the Age has become a lightning rod topic. Do you think it should change? What should change about it?Raise the Age was put in place before, maybe it came into effect in 2019, but it was acted on before I came into office, just to put things in perspective.So we have seen rashes of juvenile crime several times in the last few years. I remember in Eastwood, there was an issue that business owners had a couple years ago, and in Westcott right now. We’ve had rashes of car thefts as well. And I recognize that people feel frustrated by it, but I don’t think the Raise the Age law is to blame for it. I think there are tools in the law that aren’t being used enough. I think judges and prosecutors can be more proactive when somebody is a threat to recommit a crime. But I also think we need just more supportive systems in general, for substance abuse and mental health for young people, for helping parents who have kids who are out of control to hold them accountable, that kind of thing. So I just think this is not an issue of just locking people up. I don’t think that solves problems, especially for juveniles. But I do think we need to work, you know, to see law enforcement, the judiciary and the legislature working together and seeing where there are problems. I know there aren’t the resources necessarily. We have created more family court positions in the state because of backlogs, and we’re hoping that that’s going to make a difference. After they get elected in this coming election, there will be a much larger number of family court judges across the state. We’ve been addressing, one by one, some of the pressure points where the law isn’t necessarily working as intended.Do you think New York State has enough tools to boost affordable housing? How would you add to those tools?I do not think we have enough tools, and I have several pieces of legislation that I would love to see us pass, including one that I’m working on now. We haven’t introduced it yet, but it would create a revolving fund that municipalities could use, or developers could use to just create more housing, because I know the financing is difficult, especially upstate, where the rents are lower than they are downstate, and sometimes it’s just hard to build units that you can rent affordably without some kind of assistance. So I definitely think the state should play a role in supporting the financing, but I also think we need to find ways to support mixed income housing. Right now, there are subsidies for 100% affordable housing, but we have a problem in Syracuse and in our upstate cities with concentrated poverty, and some of that comes from having housing that is exclusively for people who are in poverty to begin with. So if we can set up more mixed-income housing so that we’re not guaranteeing concentrated poverty by our housing policy, that’s a really important thing, and for that, we need more tools in the toolbox.I also think we need more communities to consider and adopt the Good Cause legislation that we passed, so that people aren’t seeing just massive rent increases that are designed to push people out of their homes. We want to see people having more stable housing, even if they’re renters or homeowners.Do you support the right to counsel in housing court?When someone is facing eviction, it’s a huge issue, and it’s a complicated legal problem, and the landlords always have lawyers on their side. I do think that tenants should have that minimal support in court so that they can challenge evictions, because we know a lot of people, if they get an eviction notice, or they think they’re going to get an eviction notice, they just self-evict. They move out. Right now, there isn’t always a place to move to, so they may end up homeless.But if people challenge evictions, they’re pretty likely to be able to stay in their homes. Housing stability is so important to our communities. It’s important for school success. It’s important for keeping crime down. It’s important for helping people keep their jobs. And so whatever we can do to make eviction less likely is a good thing.Editor’s note: May is sponsoring this legislation. Do you support the Equal Rights Amendment? Do you support codifying abortion rights?I do support the Equal Rights Amendment. I voted for it twice in the legislature, which is why it’s on the ballot now, because we passed it twice. It’s been 50 years since voters had the chance to vote on an Equal Rights Amendment in this state, and I dearly hope this time I will pass it. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about it. I thought the Post Standard did a good job of kind of cutting through some of that misinformation. It doesn’t change any existing laws. It just makes it harder to roll back the protections that people have currently in the law.We did codify in state law abortion rights. That was one of the first things I voted on in 2019 when I came into office. We took abortion out of the homicide code, and put it in the health code, which was important also because that’s really where it belongs. This Equal Rights Amendment would, once again, put what we already have in state law in the state constitution, which just makes it much harder for it to be rolled back or changed.What would you do to fight energy rate hikes affecting working families?So that’s a combination problem. We don’t set energy rates at the state level, but we do have some oversight of the energy regulators. I think we need to do strong advocacy and also make sure that wherever we have levers of power in legislation or the budget, that we make sure that there’s equity and an understanding that there are a lot of people who simply can’t afford their energy bills. I do think we’ve done a lot to try to promote insulation, energy audits, energy efficiency, that can bring down people’s energy costs, and we just need to do a better job of getting those tools in the hands of people who are struggling with their energy expenses, because there’s a lot that we could do to just reduce energy waste and make people more comfortable in their homes without having it cost more, or actually having it cost less. So I think we need to do more with that, and that is an investment. Right now, there are subsidies for certain changes – for insulation, for example – in your home, but there aren’t subsidies for swapping out your windows, which are often one of the places where the most heat gets lost, or the most heat comes in in the summertime. So just making Windows more efficient in a low-income household could be a huge game-changer on energy costs, but it’s expensive to do so. We need to figure out how to support that kind of change. My efforts toward just building more housing are partly about reducing energy costs, because new housing, the way housing is being built now, is just a lot more energy efficient than the old housing that a lot of us are living in. And the more new housing we can bring on the market, the more we can hope to contain some of those costs.How will you make sure that taking construction on the I-81 viaduct doesn’t worsen health outcomes for residents that live near it?So I’ve been in conversation with DOT about this issue, and they are taking what precautions they can. One of the things that they are doing, and I think it’s been successful so far, is that they have divided up the project into a lot of phases, and they’re trying to do each phase really quickly. And for example, they’re talking about, when they actually take down the viaduct, that there’s a new way they can just basically chop it into pieces and take each piece down right away. And that involves a lot less dust and debris getting into the air, getting into people’s lungs, that kind of thing. But construction like this, it’s dirty, it’s hard to keep all of it out of the air. The thing we have to keep in mind is the context, because the existing route of I 81 goes within inches, literally, of some people’s windows in on the south side of Syracuse, and has been a health hazard for decades in those communities. Transforming the corridor into something different than a multi-lane, high-speed highway is, should be anyway, far better for the health of the people who live along it. So at some level, you know, construction just comes with its cost. But it’s short term, and we’re hoping that the result afterwards is going to be far better for the people who have been breathing that air, suffering from the noise pollution, and the hazards, the debris that comes off the highway, for decades.The post 2024 election Q&A: Rachel May seeking her 4th term in the NYS Senate appeared first on Central Current.