Democrat Anna Kelles of Ithaca has introduced state legislation to improve broadband service and improve care for people who have opioid addictions in her first term in the state Assembly and she is running unopposed for a second term.
Kelles represents the 125th District, which includes Tompkins County and the Cortland County communities of Cortland, Cortlandville, Virgil, Harford and Lapeer.
She chairs the subcommittee on agricultural production and technology and is a member of the Agriculture, Corrections, Environmental Conservation, Housing, Local Governments, Mental Health committees, the Legislative Women’s Caucus and the Task Force on Women’s Issues.
She was a Tompkins County legislator for five years. She is also an environmental and human rights activist and an epidemiologist.
Broadband
Kelles said she and Sen. Rachel May (D-Syracuse) won inclusion this year into the state budget provisions to facilitate community-based broadband and an exemption for municipalities and nonprofits from a state fee for running cable along state highways.
Kelles plans to work toward a financial structure to enable municipalities to move forward with community wide broadband access and enable communities to form collectives for cost and maintenance sharing or set up a shared public authority. This creates another option for upstate municipalities rather than the sole dependence on large corporations charging individuals fees to extend lines and provide fiber to homes, she said.
Childcare
“There are two (Assembly) districts that have been recognized by the state as being in a formal state of crisis with respect to childcare access and ours is one of them,” Kelles said. “Not only are we lacking childcare facilities and slots but we are lacking workers as well.”
The childcare system was under great strain even before the coronavirus pandemic and it has gotten worse since, she said.
“The COVID pandemic set the engagement of women in the work force back an entire generation and a lack of childcare is one of the biggest hurdles families face to getting back on their feet,” she said. “A chronic shortage of financial support to childcare and daycare facilities compounded by unsustainably low wages for childcare workers has made it very difficult to rebuild our childcare system.”
This year’s budget extended funding and access to pre-kindergarten for families and provided $3.5 billion of state and one-time federal funds to rebuild the childcare system.
“I will continue to support investments in childcare facilities, fight for fair wages in the budget and provide direct support for centers in Cortland to help increase childcare access for families,” Kelles said.
Opioids
A state Department of Health report was released Monday that showed a 14% increase in overdose deaths since 2021 in the state, Kelles said. The report also showed a 24% increase in emergency room visits, a 2% increase in overdose-related hospitalizations, a 7% rise in opioid overdoses that were not from heroin, and a total number of overdoses exceeding 2,600 in upstate New York.
“This increase is a continuation of a troubling trend we have been seeing year over year,” she said. “We have seen a parallel rise in diagnosed mental health issues and suicides, especially among youth. Many of these youth are self-medicating because of a barrier to accessing appropriate treatment. Most troubling is the siloed treatments of mental health and substance use disorder at the state level that prevents people from getting treated for these co-occurring conditions leading to too many unnecessary deaths.”
Kelles introduced legislation to merge the two departments to ensure people get timely comprehensive treatment. She also proposed a budget bill to create a state subsidy to municipalities for emergency medical services to reduce response times to incidents and decrease the risk of deaths due to delayed response times.
