ALBANY — A growing chorus of upstaters is calling for secession from New York because residents are furious about economic hardships they say have been brought on by lawmakers who oppose gun ownership and hydrofracturing for natural gas.
“Downstate has dominated upstate for decades, and upstate has no future in a state controlled by New York City’s needs and desires,” a coalition of pro-fracking conservatives and gun enthusiasts — including Americans for Restoring the Constitution, local Tea Party members and the Divide New York Caucus — said in a statement before a rally in the Southern Tier on Sunday.
“They have this dream of becoming billionaires, and it ain’t going to happen,” countered Eileen Hamlin, a Southern Tier environmentalist and opponent of fracking and secession.
A recent study by the Center for Governmental Research found that upstate benefits from New York City taxes, and Wall Street alone accounts for nearly 20 percent of state tax revenue.
Undeterred, the secessionists are eyeing two routes to reach their uphill dreams of breaking away from “city-slickers.”
“One is that everything north of Poughkeepsie becomes a new state,” Hamlin said. “I think they’re calling it New Amsterdam. The other one is to annex to Pennsylvania.”
It’s not clear yet how many upstate residents want to break up with Gotham, but two Quinnipiac polls showed that 55 percent of upstate residents rely on wells for drinking water and oppose fracking.
That leaves 45 percent pinning their hopes of economic vitality on the practice. Other residents are furious about their inability to build casinos and the gun-restricting SAFE Act.
The gun law restricts the amount of ammunition gun owners can carry, bans assault weapons and imposes stricter requirements for registering firearms.
This isn’t the first time New Yorkers have become fed up enough to seek an act of the state legislature and Congress to split from their fellow voters and taxpayers in the Empire State.
The shoe was on the other foot in 1969 when two famed authors and newspapermen, Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin, campaigned in New York City’s mayoral democratic primary to make the Big Apple the union’s 51st State, using the slogan “Power to the Neighborhood.”