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The Batavia girls swimming team put together a 94-63 win over Wilson at the GCC pool Thursday and the girls were clearly excited about the victory after the meet.

As the second smallest Class B team in the Monroe League, team wins are hard to come by for Batavia, but the program continues to develop promising young swimmers said Co-head Coach Sarah Geitner.

"We have a lot of very young swimmers, but everybody has fantastic attitude and wants to learn," Geitner said.

Because the school doesn't have its own pool, it can't field a modified team so it's a little tougher to build a varsity program, Geitner said.

"At the start of the season, we weren't sure if there would even be enough girls for a team and now that we're up to 14 girls, we're really excited," Geitner said.

Two girls joined the team this week.

At the top of the young roster are freshman Natalie Amico, junior Emily DiBacco, seventh-grader Elle Fulton and sophomore Brooke Leddon, the team's lone diver.

For the 14 girls on the team, team spirit was in strong supply at Thursday's match. Not only did the swimmers cheer their teammates, they cheered the Wilson swimmers as well.

Geitner said she would like to get more of the girls involved in the YMCA swimming programs to take an interest in joining the Batavia High School team.

"In order to grow a better program, we want to encourage more Y swimmers to come in and take the test," Geitner said.

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Patricia Ann Herzog, 46, of Ross Street, Batavia, is charged with petit larceny.  Herzog is accused of stealing $465.11 in merchandise from Walmart.

Nicholas Joseph Mungillo, 19, of Union Square, Batavia, is charged with petit larceny. Mungillo is accused of stealing $137.93 in merchandise from Bed, Bath & Beyond.

David M. Kohmescher, 32, of McCall Road, Rochester, was arrested on a warrant related to an aggravated unlicensed operation charge. Kohmescher was stopped by Rochester PD for an alleged traffic violation and found to be a warrant suspect from the Town of Le Roy.  He was turned over ot the Sheriff's Office, arraigned in Town of Le Roy Court, and released.

After covering Batavia High School girls swimming at Genesee Community College (post on that tomorrow), I decided to go for a drive through our beautiful county and make a few pictures.  Here are three shots from the drive.

First stop, above, Warboys Road, Byron.

Along North Byron Road.

Darkness on the edge of town ... Judge Road, Oakfield.

Volunteer firefighters from Pavilion, Bethany, Le Roy and Stafford are responding to a barn fire on Cowen Road in York.

Bergen has been asked to fill in at Le Roy's hall. South Byron to stand by in its own hall for Stafford.

Out on Route 5 this morning, kind of in the Bushville area, crews were harvesting potatoes.

After Jerry Greenfield's talk at Genesee Community College yesterday, I stopped to take a picture of the GCC clock framed by autumn color. Greenfield is co-founder of Ben & Jerry's Homemade, Inc.

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It is possible, Jerry Greenfield told the assembled audience in GCC's Stuart Steiner Theater this afternoon, to run a business that is both socially conscious and profitable.

Ben & Jerry's did it, and it's a culture that remains in place even 12 years after Greenfield and his partner Ben Cohen sold Ben & Jerry's to Unilever for $326 million.

From early on in the company's history, Greenfield said, he and Cohen shared a vision that the company would buy raw materials locally, invest in the communities where Ben & Jerry's  operated and donate to charitable causes.

They also did things like find suppliers such as a bakery in New York that employs disadvantaged workers (the bakery makes brownies for Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream).

"The way we approached it was to think how can we find ways to bring social and environmental concerns right into the day-to-day business activities so it's not central to what we do but just a part of what we do," Greenfield said

Greenfield's appearance was part of Wolcott J. Humphrey III Symposium on Leadership and Community Life.

Several times during his talk, Greenfield referenced "community" --  like where Ben & Jerry's buys product or where Ben & Jerry's donates money or how it supports its employees. He encouraged the audience to support local businesses and businesses that share the customer's values.

"I think everything is essentially local," Greenfield said after his talk. "For Ben & Jerry's, the farmers that we buy milk and cream from are neighbors. We want to support our neighbors."

Students at the New York State School for the Blind in Batavia were paid a special visit today by members of the State Police out of the Batavia Barracks, Troop A.

The troopers hosted an ice cream social (ice cream donated by Perry's) and interacted with the students, letting them touch their holsters, pet the K-9, sit in a patrol vehicle and blast the siren themselves.

This past winter Troop A hosted a fundraiser and donated the proceeds to the School for the Blind. They dropped off the donation around Christmas and had so much fun, they decided they wanted to find a reason to come back

"We received a donation and so we thought we would come out and give it to them," Sgt. David Martek said. "It's just something for the kids. We had a good time with them last year and we just thought we'd come back and do something fun for them."

Other uniformed personnel participating today were Trooper Nicole Berostko, Trooper James Jackson, Trooper Michael Swarthout and Sgt. Mike Dembrow.

Martek said, however, it was really the Batavia Barrack's civil staff who put the event together, arranged the donations and were on hand to serve the ice cream.

A $10.8 million upgrade to the county's emergency radio system is expected to greatly improve the reliability and efficiency of emergency communication, but the unintended consequence is that citizens, off-duty first responders and the media could all be in the dark for months or longer once the new system is fully operational.

It's a bit of a surprise to everybody involved, but the new technology being installed by Rochester-based Harris RF is incompatible with even the most advanced consumer scanners currently on the market.

And when new scanners are released -- perhaps as early as the first part of the year -- they are likely to cost as much as $500 to $600 each.

Sheriff Gary Maha is a big believer in the idea that citizens with scanners help solve crimes.  Clearly, when he spoke with The Batavian in the spring about the new radio system, he didn't anticipate the new technology would be incompatible with existing digital/trunking scanners.

"We're few and far between out there," Maha said. "We need all the eyes we can possibly have. If we have a bank robbery, we put that information out over the air so some citizen down the road may see the vehicle we want and can call 9-1-1. It's a benefit to us to have the people out there watching. They're our eyes and ears out there."

In recent weeks, we've had discussions with Maha about the situation and he said he's interested in finding a solution.

Getting scanners into the hands of media outlets is one thing. One solution that's been used in other parts of the country is for local law enforcement to lease emergency radios, with the outgoing transmission capability disabled, to news outlets. These radios cost in the neighborhood of $4,000 each, so it's still an expensive solution.

Another solution is putting streaming feeds of emergency transmissions from the P25 system on the county's Web site. But it's unclear at this point if the county has the available bandwidth or necessary technology to make this happen.

A Web-based solution would help both media outlets and make transmissions available to all county residents who care to tune in.

The Sheriff along with Undersheriff William Sheron met yesterday with executives at Harris.

Sheron said that Harris indicated it's a problem beyond the scope of their work, but said they are aware of other jurisdictions doing exactly what the Sheriff is considering.

"We're certainly aware of the issue and are interested in finding a solution," Sheron said.

Genesee County isn't the only jurisdiction facing this issue, as more and more agencies switch to the new technology and RadioReference.com's forums are filled with discussions about the situation.

What The Batavian has been able to piece together from the forum posts as well as interviewing Gerry Oliver, owner of G&G Communications in Le Roy, is that:

• A company called GRE America made a radio that was designed to be compatible with Phase II technology, but the company went out of business. Its radio was imperfect technology and needed improvements and wouldn't necessarily work with Harris RF communication systems. BRS Phase II TDMA radios can be found on Ebay, but you take your chances buying one.
• A company, The Whistler Group, Inc., has acquired GRE's intellectual property and is planning to enter into the scanner business. It didn't specifically announce a Phase II scanner, but presumably they'll bring one to market, perhaps before the end of March.
• Representatives from Uniden have dropped hints in Radio Reference that the company -- which is the largest manufacturer of scanners -- is close to announcing a Phase II scanner. Estimates of when it will go to market range from fiscal Q1 2014 through the end of 2014.
• Oliver believes that even after the switch-over, fire dispatch will remain on channel 4612, which means scanners currently programmed to pick up that channel will still be able to hear the fire dispatcher. There just won't be any chatter from emergency responders in the field answering the calls for people still listening on old scanners.

Radio Reference is an organization of ham radio operators and scanner enthusiasts. Through RF, volunteers from around the nation make their local emergency communications available on the radioreference.com Web site. Every smartphone app that allows people to listen to police and fire calls on their iPhones and Droids uses RR feeds, so if RR doesn't have working Phase II scanners, then those apps won't work for P25 jurisdictions.

Harris officials would not comment for this story.

The county has until March 1 to stop using one of its current 800 mhz channel so that the bandwidth becomes available for an inter-operable communication channel for federal Homeland Security.

Steven Sharpe, director of emergency communication, said installation begins next month, but current scanners will work on existing emergency channels until the P25 infrastructure is in place and operational.

Migration to the new system for emergency users should begin in December.

Beyond that the schedule of the transition depends on other factors -- from FCC licensing to tower crew availability -- though all equipment is scheduled to be installed by Feb. 1, giving the county one month to meet the 800 mhz channel deadline.

What happens at that point largely depends on what the county can make available to citizens and media for monitoring emergency transmissions, and what Whistler and Uniden make commercially available for purchase.

Oliver said there are a lot of people concerned about the issue, and people should be concerned.

"This is a public safety issue and it's a public information issue," Oliver said. "There's the average listener who pays taxes and thinks they have a right to listen in, but there's also the issue of firemen, off-duty police officers and EMTs -- how are they going to listen?

"I hope there's a solution for safety sake," he added. "Let's say I'm an (off duty) EMT and I live down the street from a call, a scanner might tell me, do I respond? What should I do if I hear nobody's responding? Those are the people who need scanners."

For the first time since April 2008, Genesee County's unemployment rate dipped below 6 percent, being recorded at 5.8 percent for August.

That's three-tenths lower than July and a percentage point lower than August 2012.

Wyoming County's unemployment rate dropped to 6.6 percent, Orleans to 8.4 percent and Livingston to 6.7 percent.

In WNY, only Ontario County at 5.7 percent has a lower unemployment rate than Genesee County.

Buffalo's rate is 7.3 and Rochester is 6.9.

The state's rate is 7.5 and the U.S. rate is 7.3.

Press release:

Congressman Chris Collins (NY-27) has introduced the Government Shutdown Fairness Act (H.R. 3160). This legislation would stop members of Congress from receiving a salary in the event of a government shutdown.

“As members of Congress, it is our job to keep the government running, and if the government shuts down, I don’t believe we should collect a salary during that time,” Congressman Collins said. “It is wrong that members of Congress should continue to get paid while programs for veterans, seniors and many others are adversely impacted.”

This type of legislation has proven effective in the past. Earlier this year, the House passed the No Budget, No Pay Act of 2013 (H.R. 325), which said members of Congress would not be paid unless they passed a budget. Following the passage of No Budget, No Pay, the Senate adopted a budget resolution for the first time in four years.

The Government Shutdown Fairness Act is consistent with the 27th Amendment in holding salaries in escrow until the end of this Congress.

“Salary and job performance should be tied together, and if members of Congress aren’t doing their job, that should be reflected in their salary. The American people deserve more from their Congress and it is time, as members of Congress, that we put ourselves at the back of the line and put our constituents first in a government shutdown,” said Congressman Collins.

Brett William Snyder, 50, of Batavia Stafford Townline Road, Stafford, is charged with two counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon (assault weapon and magazine). Following a check on Snyder's residence by the Probation Department, a probation officer contacted the Sheriff's Office for assistance in the investigation of an alleged illegal firearm at the residence. Snyder was allegedly found in possession of a assault-style weapon and a large capacity magazine. Snyder was arraigned, posted $250 bail and released.

Tyler Pasquale Schroeder, 21, of Lewiston Road, Batavia, was arrested on a warrant out of Rochester related to a criminal impersonation charge. Schroeder was turned over to RPD.

Stacey Dawn Mancuso, 43, of Seneca Street, Elma, is charged with DWI, driving with a BAC of .08 or greater, driving left of pavement markings and drinking alcohol in a motor vehicle. Mancuso was stopped at 11:32 p.m., Sept. 17, by Deputy Kevin McCarthy, after dispatchers received a report of a vehicle on Route 33 in Pembroke that was unable to maintain its lane.

A 16-year-old of East Avenue, Attica, is charged with trespass. The youth is accused of being at a residence on Broadway Road, Alexander, after being told by the homeowner he wasn't allow on the property.

Ashley Marie Kreutz, 25, of Lewis Place, Batavia, is charged with petit larceny. Kreutz is accused of shoplifting at Kmart.

Teresa Marie Stephenson, 24, of Moore Road, West Henrietta, is charged with petit larceny. Stephenson is accused of shoplifting at Kmart.

Taylor Laren Schutt, 20, of Seminole Parkway, Cheektowaga, is charged with trespass. Schutt is accused of being on the roof of the bus garage at Alexander Central School.

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A Batavia police officer is searching the area around Tops for two white males on bikes with backpacks who are suspected of shoplifting.

The suspects are believed to be in their 30s or 40s. One is on a pink bike, the other on a mountain bike. They headed east on Main Street.

The officer said the stolen items were recovered, they think, but "the camel backpack was full of something."

Press release:

Work is slated to begin Monday, Sept. 30 to add a center left-turn lane on Route 5 (East Main Street) from the city of Batavia line to Fargo Road in the towns of Batavia and Stafford, Genesee County. Temporary lane closures will be in effect during the daytime hours for approximately one week weather permitting.

The center turn lane will be created by restriping the roadway without widening the pavement. One of the two existing westbound travel lanes will be converted to a center turn lane with associated left-turn lanes striped at the side street intersections. The remaining westbound lane will serve the westbound thru traffic. Both eastbound lanes will remain the same.

The addition of a dedicated left-turn lane will provide a refuge area, reducing the risk of rear-end collisions for stopped or slow-moving vehicles waiting to turn into the Batavia Agri-Park and adjacent side streets. The restriping will also benefit left-turning traffic at other intersections along the corridor, including Fargo Road, Batavia-Stafford Townline Road, Seven Springs Road, Broadlawn Avenue and the numerous residential and commercial driveways. Signs and other lane markings will alert motorists of the change.

This work is being administered by the Town of Batavia with concurrence from the New York State Department of Transportation.

Motorists should drive with caution through the highway work zone and avoid driving distracted or under the influence of drugs and alcohol. For real-time travel information, call 511 or visit www.511NY.org. 511NY is New York State’s official traffic and travel information source.

Amanda Rose, Renza, 25, of Brendel Street, Hamburg, is charged with bail jumping, 2nd. Renza is currently an inmate at the Erie County Jail. She was arrested on a Batavia City Court warrant and arraigned on the bail jumping charge and returned to Erie County without bail. She is also accused of failing to appear on charges of grand larceny, 4th, and conspiracy, 3rd.

Tyanna Desiree Green, 18, of Lewis Place, Batavia, was arrested on a bench warrant related to a petit larceny charge. Green was in City Court on an unrelated matter and arrested on the Town of Batavia warrant for alleged failure to abide by release under supervision terms and conditions. Green was jailed without bail.

Anthony M. Mannara, 22, of Batavia, is charged with petit larceny. Mannara is accused of shoplifting at Target. He was arrested by State Police.

Amanda Dryden, 29, of Alexander, is charged with grand larceny, 4th. Dryden was arrested by State Police in Elma following an investigation into unauthorized use of a credit card. Dryden is accused of using a credit card six times that belonged to a woman she was working for as a house cleaner. She allegedly took the card from the woman's purse. Investigators used surveillance video from stores where the card was allegedly used to identify Dryden as the subject. Dryden allegedly admitted to using the card when questioned.

Press release:

In a presentation to City Council on Monday Sept. 23, Freed Maxick auditor Laura Landers, praised the City’s sixth straight year of strategic financial management and continued progress. Landers addressed City Council as part of the City’s year-end review

Highlights from Lander’s presentation included the continual progress the City has been making in becoming more financially stable. The City completed its sixth consecutive year of the general fund revenues exceeding expenditures and both water and sewer funds continue to maintain healthy cash balances. Landers also mentioned the City’s commitment to building reserves for future capital improvements.

“Another year of successful operations is a significant win with the City of Batavia,” said Jason Molino, city manager. “After facing six years of tough decisions and thorough planning, City Council’s due diligence and conservative budgeting has helped create a stable foundation for the City to complete the important capital improvements, like the Richmond Avenue/North Street paving project that was completed this year.”

Third Ward City Councilmember John Canale, a member of the City’s Audit Advisory Committee, shared his thoughts on the City’s financial improvement, “Once again this year, we receive confirmation that the city is headed in the right direction financially. This year's financial audit reinforces the actions that city management and City Council have taken, and continue to take, to create not only a positive cash flow, but the ability to accomplish major infrastructure improvements, and much needed capital equipment purchases, while at the same time building our reserve funds for future city-wide improvements and emergency needs. The financial future of this City is looking very bright.”

Fourth Ward City Councilmember Pier Cipollone, also a member of the City’s Audit Advisory Committee, supported the City’s efforts with the following comments, “The audit report continues to show the progress we have made over the past six years. The financial health of the City forms the foundation for everything we need to do as we move forward, from infrastructure improvements to providing needed services. I look forward to working with Jason and City Council to continue this trend.”

In 2006, Freed Maxick’s presentation of the City’s financial position was significantly different than it is today. At the time, the City ran a general fund deficit of almost $1.2 million and had a negative fund balance of $2.2 million. Furthermore, the City’s water, sewer and ambulance funds continued to experience operating deficits for years prior.

The City’s financial position began to show signs of improvement when in June 2011, Moody’s Investor Services affirmed the City’s “A2” bond rating and assigned the City a “positive outlook.” Moody’s assignment of the positive outlook acknowledged a modest financial position by specifically identifying City management’s ability to restore financial health, establishment of specific reserve funds, negotiated manageable settlements with three of its unions, which included wage freezes and healthcare concessions and the adoption for the City’s Strategic Plan.

The City’s reassurance that they were on the path to financial recovery was seconded in July 2012 when Moody’s upgraded the City’s bond rating from “A2” to “A1.” The upgrade reflected the City’s improved financial position marked by five consecutive years of operating surpluses as well as the City’s practice of conservative budgeting of both revenues and expenditures.

“What makes this past year’s accomplishments so unique is the fact that we identified Financial Health as goal in the City’s Strategic Plan three years ago, and improving the bond rating was a major objective,” Molino continued. “Achieving that particular goal will now lay the ground work for the City to achieve future successes in other priorities such as economic development and neighborhood revitalization.”

The City of Batavia’s Strategic Planning process is the foundation from which the City’s Business Plan for services and annual budget are based. The intent of the Strategic Plan is to allocate City resources to best meet the needs of our residents, while balancing the environmental factors that may affect the City in the future.

The City’s Strategic Plan identifies seven Strategic Priorities: Financial Health; Governmental Efficiency; Economic Development and Job Creation; Neighborhood Revitalization; Environmental Sustainability; Public Safety and Health; and Involved Community Members. The Strategic Plan has developed a performance measurement system, by identifying 24 Key Intended Outcomes (KIOs), to measure annual results of City initiatives against the Plan.