Onondaga County Voters didn’t have a choice this year to select a new County Executive… that’s a year away... however, the change at top of county government is now complete. Joanie Mahoney is reflecting back on her list of accomplishments, including stepping-in at a critical point when lawmakers were poised to build a sewage treatment plant near Armory Square.
“One had been built on the South side and it created a lot of controversy around issues having to do with social justice, like why would you build a sewage treatment plant in a neighborhood where there’s concentrations of poverty when you know you would not be doing that if the same problem were in one of the more affluent suburbs. We put a moratorium on building any more of those. We switched to the Save the Rain (project). We now keep the clean water out of the system so we don’t have to spend all this money and we don’t have these overflows that were resulting in bacteria making its way into the lake.”
‘Save the Rain’ satisfied a portion of the federal Judgement to clean-up Onondaga Lake.
Joanie Mahoney speaks to WAER's Oliva Proia about her time as Onondaga County Executive.