Do better, NYC
There are plenty of upstate New York counties whose elected officials have used every legal means at their disposal (and a few that will soon be tested in court) in their attempts to bar New York City from transporting asylum-seekers from the beleaguered five boroughs to temporary housing elsewhere. Albany County is not one of them.
While it’s true that County Executive Dan Mccoy declared a state of emergency earlier this month, that order was not an effort to pull up the drawbridge but rather to make sure that migrant arrivals were coordinated and well prepared for. This editorial board offered praise in Sunday’s print edition for Mr. Mccoy’s plan, and we’ve seen no reason to adjust that opinion in the intervening five days.
But little did we know, as we were preparing that editorial, that it would appear just as New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ administration was treating Albany County’s thoughtful plan as if it were fishwrap.
In an incredibly inauspicious development, the town of Colonie was the first Capital Region community to receive a busload of migrants in the wee hours of Sunday morning — without any notification to Mr. Mccoy or other officials ahead of time, according to the county executive and city of Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan.
The result was an ugly round of sniping on Saturday by Colonie Town Supervisor Peter Crummey, who in addition to criticizing Mayor Adams’ “utter disregard” for the county’s emergency declaration accused Albany officials of foisting the migrants off on Colonie despite the capital city’s sanctuary status. (Mayor Sheehan called that charge “an outright lie.”) Two more buses carried migrants to a hotel in Albany over the ensuing 24 hours, once again without New York City coordinating with local officials.
On Tuesday, Mr. Mccoy expressed his frustration with the Adams administration’s actions: “Sending migrants to us without a plan in place is not the answer,” he said. “We need direct communication with Mayor Adams to find the best solution, so this isn’t creating further chaos.”
He’s absolutely correct. And what’s worse, this bungled execution by New York City and its contractors is playing directly into the hands of officials who would cast these new arrivals — whether their stay in the region is long or brief — as an undesirable horde straight out of a nativist pamphlet from a century ago. Mr. Crummey’s Saturday statement, for example, noted that “the Wolf Road area has no services necessary to service an influx of persons of unknown health, dietary and behavioral histories,” which suggests that the town supervisor either has a bizarre sense of what people from south of the U.s.-mexico border eat, or a poor understanding of the culinary offerings on one of the main commercial thoroughfares in his town.
On Wednesday, Mr. Mccoy said that he and New York City officials had agreed on a better process, and we hope that proves to be durable. As previously noted in this space, there is much more that state and federal officials can do to tone down the fevered rhetoric surrounding the current migrant surge as well as this nation’s larger immigration quagmire. But as a first order of business, New York City needs to be a good neighbor to the communities who have offered a helping hand.