CHQ Chamber President & CEO Dan Heitzenrater moderates the panel of elected officials including (from left to right) Chautauqua County Executive PJ Wendel, State Assemblyman Andrew Molitor, and State Senator George Borrello (August 8, 2025)
Energy and affordable housing were a couple of the topics discussed with State and Chautauqua County officials at a CHQ Chamber luncheon event on Friday.
The panel included State Senator George Borrello, Assemblyman Andrew Molitor, and County Executive PJ Wendel. CHQ Chamber President and CEO Dan Heitzenrater moderated questions collected from the audience.
An early question was on what is or isn’t happening with nuclear power in New York State. Wendel said he has email communications daily on modular micro nuclear energy and that people are excited about the prospect of bringing it to Chautauqua County, specifically to the former NRG Plant in Dunkirk, “You can power with natural gas for 15 years, the time it would take to get a nuclear facility up and running in Dunkirk and then being able to transition, having a back-up source of abundant, clean energy… clean, natural gas which we have abundance between the Utica and Marcellus shale right beneath our feet.”
Wendel said this technology has been around since the 1950s on military ships and there hasn’t been issues with people being poisoned by radiation.
Molitor added his support, saying that officials are being constantly warned about electric grid capacity in New York State and that nuclear energy is another way to expand the grid’s capacity. Borrello also agreed with the idea of repowering the NRG plant with natural gas until the point that modular micro nuclear power can be brought online.
The issue of the lack of affordable housing in New York State was poised to the elected officials with Borrello responding first. He said that in order to make housing more affordable, the state needs to be made more affordable first. Borrello said he hasn’t seen anything built in the state that didn’t receive massive incentives to happen and that there needs to be more incentives for things like market rate apartments, “We need a maintenance free apartment where they’re not worried about cutting the lawn or spending their weekends doing renovations, and we have a severe lack of that in our area. And the state’s solution is low-income housing. And then they have this myth, this unicorn, that they call workforce housing which, somehow, every workforce housing project I’ve ever seen starts out as an application for workforce housing that turns into low income housing.”
Molitor cited the lack of affordable housing as a problem created by the state and its Climate Act which he says is pushing the cost of housing higher due to requirements for new housing to be all electric starting in 2026.
The full conversation with the elected officials can be heard on WRFA’s Community Matters these next two weeks at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, August 14 and 21.
Leave a Reply