SENATOR MAZIARZ AS THE DEMOCRATS’ ENERGY COMMITTEE CHAIR?…BAD NEWS FOR NYPA?…RUDY’S TOO BUSY TO BE GOVERNOR

Can you imagaine Niagara County Republican Sen. George Maziarz serving as Senate Energy Committee Chair under a Democratic majority? Well, imagine it or not, it could very well happen in the wake of a recent meeting between Senator Maziarz and Senate Democratic Leader John Sampson. In fact, Niagara County’s man in Albany’s upper house is now saying that he will take the holidays to mull over Senator Sampsons’s offer of the Energy Committee chairmanship and have an answer for him sometime in mid-January. Senator Maziarz had already confirmed that he had a very good lunch last Friday with Senator Sampson at a “very casual restaurant down the street from my office” in Western New York.

“We had a very good conversation,” Maziarz added. “I would never, ever consider switching parties. I plan on doing everything I can to bring the Republican majority back in 2010. But this is very interesting, and I’m going to think about it. In the end, I’m going to do what’s best for my constituents.”

A frequent critic of the New York Power Authority, especially NYPA’s Executive Director Richard Kessel, Senator Maziarz would be in a position to keep Kessel’s feet not far from the fire as Energy Committee Chair. Possibly he could even force the agency to play fair with Niagara County and Western New York, rather than sending all the real goodies downstate…Wouldn’t that be nice!!!

Is America’s Mayor just too busy with money making ventures to make a political comeback right now? This seemed to be the message delivered today at a Rudy Giuliani press conference at which he announced that he will not run for state-wide office in New York in 2010, just as we predicted yesterday. Still, he declared that his political career is not over, insisting he hasn’t ruled out a return to political life some time in the future. Instead, he affirmed that it was his work commitments with his law and consulting firms, not a lack of enthusiasm for campaigning, fear of losing, or even his former close associate Bernie Kerik’s legal troubles that caused him to decide not to run for either governor or the US Senate next fall.

Nevertheless, he did admit that the recent hiring of his firm as a security consultant for the 2016 Olympic games in Rio was the final nail in his political comeback coffin.

“This is not a decision not to run for anything else, it’s a decision purely about 2010 and what I can and cannot do in 2010 occasioned by a lot of commitments that I have and having learned from the last time that I ran you can’t really do two things – and maybe three things at once,” Giuliani said. “I’m not right now thinking about running for offices in the future.”