NATE WILL BRING PUBLIC POWER HOME

NATE WILL BRING PUBLIC POWER HOME

Walk down Main Street in Niagara Falls. Be honest about what you see.

Boarded storefronts.

Empty windows.

Too much concrete.

Too little life.

This is not because we lack history. This is not because we lack assets. This is not because we lack power. We generate it.

Just a few miles away, the turbines at the New York Power Authority’s Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant spin day and night. The river roars. The grid hums. Homes across New York flip on their lights because water moved through our gorge.

Niagara Falls helped launch the modern electric age. Nikola Tesla proved alternating current could travel from here to Buffalo and beyond. Modern energy distribution was born here.

And yet — the executive headquarters of the New York Power Authority is in White Plains.

White Plains. Nearly 400 miles from the river that makes the entire system possible.

Why?

Why are roughly 900 jobs there — and only a handful of executive-level positions here? Why is the leadership, the payroll, the daily professional foot traffic clustered downstate, while the turbines, the infrastructure, the environmental burden, and the landscape impact are here?

Why has no one seriously demanded that public power live where public power is produced? Main Street doesn’t need another feasibility study.It doesn’t need another consultant’s report.

It needs people.

It needs payroll.

It needs daily professionals walking to lunch, buying coffee, renting apartments, hiring local firms, attending local events, sending their kids to local schools. Executive headquarters are not symbolic. They are economic engines.

Relocate NYPA’s executive offices to newly assembled land near downtown Niagara Falls, and you change the trajectory overnight:

Hundreds of professional jobs.

Six-figure salaries.

Year-round stability.

Institutional gravity.

Developers build housing. Restaurants survive the winter. Main Street fills — not with tourists for three months — but with professionals twelve months a year.

White Plains does not generate hydropower. Niagara does. This isn’t about punishing anyone.

It’s about correcting a decades-old imbalance. If we believe in regional equity, then the communities that generate public assets should share directly in the institutional benefits of those assets.

If we believe in fairness, then the birthplace of American hydroelectric power should not be an afterthought in its own story. If we believe in economic revitalization, then we move real institutions — not just slogans.

I will introduce legislation to relocate the executive headquarters of the New York Power Authority to Niagara Falls, adjacent to the hydropower project that helped build this state’s modern energy system.

Niagara Falls is struggling.

We can change that.

But not without demanding fundamental, systemic change.

We don’t need charity. We don’t need symbolism. We need alignment.

Niagara Falls powered New York.

Now it’s time New York powers Niagara Falls.