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Mannion Announces Second Run for Soon-to-be-Vacant State Senate Seat

Toby Craner
/
WAER News

The first candidate to step forward to announce intentions to run for the soon-to-be-vacated 50th State Senate Seat made it official Wednesday during a gathering at Schiller Park in Syracuse.  Democrat John Mannion lost a tight race against Republican Bob Antonacci in 2018 by a margin of two percent.  Mannion says the pillars of his campaign are similar to his previous election run.

"I've done it before, you know. A lot of the things in the platform are the same: it has to do with the environment, it has to do with the economics of the region, and education is always going to be important to me. We have [had] a positive change in the teacher evaluation system, but we still don't have a fair funding formula that's working for school districts."

The vacancy will happen after Republican State Senator Bob Antonacci’s anticipated resignation to become a State Supreme Court Justice.  It’s still unknown if Governor Cuomo plans to call for a special election to fill the Senate Seat. 

"The Governor would have to announce [it] sometime in early to mid-February for that, and, I mean, the Republicans know the seat is open, so I'm sure they're doing their due diligence on their side to select their candidate."

Mannion says he didn’t want to be seen as a distraction prior to Election Day 2019 and that’s why he decided to delay from launching his campaign this week.

John Smith has been waking up WAER listeners for a long time as our Local Co-Host of Morning Edition with timely news and information, working alongside student Sportscasters from the Newhouse School.