On Thursday, Aug. 2, town officials held a special meeting to discuss the county’s new law restricting where convicted sex offenders can live.
Supervisor Steven Tommasone said the town plans to vote on a resolution asking the county Legislature to rescind the law that he said would negatively impact the suburban towns in Schenectady County.
If the intent of the legislation is to protect kids, this legislation does not do that, Tommasone said.
At the June 12 meeting of the county Legislature, a law was passed that would keep convicted sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school, park, swimming pool or daycare, and force offenders who currently live in restricted zones to move by Oct. 1.
Rotterdam’s Department of Public Works put together a map of the town covered with red circles depicting where sex offenders would be banned. The only areas without red circles were in the northern and western parts of Rotterdam. If the county law goes into effect, by Oct. 1 the highly populated areas of Rotterdam would be off limits to convicted sex offenders of any level.
Officials from Schenectady County’s towns including Rotterdam, Glenville and Niskayuna are against the legislation for many reasons, including the fact that offenders would be moved out of the city and could settle in rural areas of Glenville and Rotterdam.
At Thursday’s meeting Tommasone said the state should be doing more to protect people from harmful criminals, including using available technology to track and prevent offenders from harming children.
Tommasone said creating arbitrary pedophile-free zones would not stop sex offenders.
`Creating circles doesn’t mean that miraculously people won’t go there,` he said.
Karen Johnson, D-Schenectady, one of the three county legislators who voted against the sex offender legislation made the same point at the Legislature’s June 12 meeting. `Restricting where people sleep does not mean we can prevent where they go,` Johnson said. Michael Eidens, D-Niskayuna, and Carolina Lazzari, R-Rotterdam, also voted against the legislation.
Rotterdam resident Kevin March said the county’s sex offender law only protects the city of Schenectady and foists the problem on the rural areas of the county. He also agreed that restricting where people sleep wouldn’t solve the problem.
`The (county) legislators are looking to empty their areas of the people they don’t want,` March said. `My kids live in a protected zone, but they may go somewhere else that is unprotected.`
Angelo Santabarbara, director of Rotterdam’s Industrial Development Agency and Republican candidate for county Legislature, said the law concerns him, and he is upset that two of Rotterdam’s representatives in the county Legislature voted to pass it. Republican Joseph Suhrada and Democrat Anthony Jasenski voted to pass the law.
`Anyone voting for this does not have the best interest of the towns at heart,` Santabarbara said.
In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Aug. 7, Suhrada said the county legislators should revisit the issue and if mistakes were made in the legislation, they should be fixed.
`I’ve heard various concerns from law enforcement and from the public and I think we should revisit this. If we made mistakes and we can amend them to make this more effective, we should do it,` he said.
Suhrada said the county legislators are becoming less in tune with the needs of the people. He said he was shocked that the town’s supervisors were not notified about this issue until the last minute.
`This was a tough vote for a lot of people and I think the public would appreciate the fact that we are looking at this from all sides,` Suhrada said. “