July 14, 2020

Saraid Gonzalez:
Hi, I’m Saraid Gonzalez and welcome to “Sullivan 180 Presents… Take Five!”. Our guest today is Senator Jen Metzger . Welcome Senator, thank you for joining us today.

Sen. Jen Metzger:
Thanks so much for having me, Saraid, it’s great to be here.

Saraid Gonzalez:
So it’s hard to believe that you’ve only been in office for 16 months. It feels much, much longer.

Sen. Jen Metzger:
I know! You know, in some ways it feels like it went by quickly and in other ways it feels like it’s been a lifetime. A lot, a lot has happened in the last 16 months.

Saraid Gonzalez:
Can you talk about some of your initiatives?

Sen. Jen Metzger:
These last months, I have been focused really entirely, on trying to help constituents with anything they needed. You know, this pandemic has just, it’s up-ended everyone’s lives. Our local businesses, our children’s education… how we access healthcare.

Sen. Jen Metzger:
It’s touched about, just about everything and I’ve been dealing with and trying to address different aspects of this. Throughout, and during the surge in cases, I was really focused on trying to expedite PPE, getting it to where it was needed. We’ve been doing a lot of work just trying to help constituents navigate unemployment insurance, help businesses access loans, and a really big focus of our work has been getting needed information to people. That has probably been one of the biggest needs that we’ve seen during this pandemic, because really a hallmark of it has been ‘uncertainty’. The knowledge about the virus is changing every day. Government policies were changing almost on a daily basis and response to it, also because virtually every aspect of society and the economy had been affected by the pandemic, people needed information about it: how they can access healthcare services through telemedicine medicine, for instance, or families could get school meals with school closed, or, as I mentioned, how businesses can get loans and this sort of thing. So we put together, it’s now close to 60 page COVID-19 Information and Resource Guide in my office. It’s a living document that we update continuously with new information and it’s available online on our website and all our social media platforms. And this has been a really helpful resource to people because it just puts everything in one place and that was really missing. So that’s been incredibly helpful. We also started a Community Conversation Series, which is a Facebook Live series, much like we’re doing right now on COVID related topics that constituants would raise, they wanted more information about, and we’d bring experts in and do a deeper dive into those topics. So we brought in the head of the Touro Medical School to talk about evolving information about COVID. We brought in teachers from Tri-Valley to talk about educational resources for children and their families while kids were distance learning. We brought in food security innovators, like Sims Foster, to talk about what his incredible project with A Single Bite and it’s really been focused on connecting people with information, with resources and with really any assistance that they could possibly need. And that’s been sort of at the local level and the district. And then at the state level, I’ve continued to work on legislation, my legislative initiatives too have been really focused on what are the needs of the moment. I introduced a bill not long ago that would actually helps both our farmers who are struggling right now, as well as the food insecure, by doubling funding for a program, a state program called Nourish New York, which uses state food assistance money to enable food pantries or food banks to purchase directly from New York’s farmers in order to get fresh food into the hands of the food insecure and actually Bethel Creamery in Sullivan County participated in that program, which has been great. I’ve got a couple of bills and we can probably spend a whole episode talking about the problem of broadband access in Sullivan County. It’s just been a tremendous, tremendous problem. And this pandemic has really, really shined the light on how critical it is, to have access to the internet in this age, and especially under these types of circumstances. So I’ve introduced two pieces of legislation to close the broadband gap, improve, expand access to reliable internet in Sullivan and throughout New York, and also to hold internet service companies accountable for the services that they are supposed to provide in terms of like the speeds, internet speeds, that people are paying for essentially. And I’m hoping that now the pandemic has really shown how important this is that we’ll be able to, to get these bills passed this session.