Hawkins for Auditor

Howie Hawkins, the Green candidate for Governor, will campaign in the Buffalo area on Sunday.

From 1:30 pm to 3:30 p.m., Hawkins will participate in a Fly Kites, Not Drones demonstration on the east side of the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station to raise awareness about a proposal to transform the military base into a fully functioning solar panel farm and factory. The proposal projects that the solar facility could produce electricity for as low as 5 or 6 cents per kilowatt hour, far below the over 16 cents per kilowatt average cost of electricity in New York State in 2013, the highest cost for electricity in the lower 48 states.

At 5:00 p.m., Hawkins will hold a Meet and Greet at El Buen Amigo Fair Trade Store in the Latin American Cultural Center, 114 Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo.

Hawkins is calling for a Green New Deal to provide jobs creating a 100% clean renewable energy system for New York State by 2030. He wants to ban fracking for natural gas and rapidly phase out New York's nuclear power plants.

Hawkins supports fully funding public schools and tuition-free public higher education at CUNY, SUNY, and community colleges. He opposes Cuomo’s push for Common Core aligned high-stakes testing, charter schools, and mayoral or state control of local school districts.

Hawkins would reduce property taxes substantially. He would enact single payer health care, which would eliminate county spending for Medicaid. He would end the reliance on property taxes for school funding by enacting an equitable state school funding formula to fully fund schools with progressive state taxes. He would restore state revenue sharing with local governments to their former statutory level of 8 percent of state revenues. Under Cuomo, state revenue sharing is below 1 percent of state revenue, with no increases planned in his five-year financial plan in the most recent state budget.

Hawkins opposes the austerity budgets and tax cuts for the 1% that Cuomo has enacted in his first four budgets. Hawkins wants to restore the more progressive tax system New York had in the 1970s, with its lower taxes on middle and low incomes, higher taxes on high incomes, far lower special tax breaks for corporations, and retention instead of full rebate of the stock transfer tax. Hawkins contends that the 1970s tax structure today would cut taxes for 95 percent of New Yorkers while raising about $30 billion more per year, or about 20 percent more for the state budget, enough to fully fund public education, revenue sharing, and a public jobs program for the unemployed.

Howie has been an organizer for peace, justice, labor, and the environment since 1967. He is a Teamster who unloads trucks at UPS in Syracuse. Hawkins received 59,906 votes for Governor in 2010, finishing third out of seven and securing a ballot line for the Green Party through 2014.