And being at MCC is really significant for me. It was a decade ago when I sat down with the former president, Anne Kress, and we talked about the needs of this community and focused on the fact that they were going to be so many more jobs and opportunities coming. But we would need to have a very intentional strategy to ensure that they had the workforce that met their needs.
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And we've talked to many social services organizations to say, how are we going to do this? So I really truly hope that before long we'll be able to welcome them here and know that 20 million New Yorkers stand with all of you during this time of great pain and sorrow. So I want to recognize all of you as well.
Including the Forward Center, part of the URI initiative, which I just had a chance to tour. I'll be back for a ribbon cutting in May, mark your calendars. Some beautiful day in May. Maybe we'll hit 73 degrees again, like we did yesterday. And I want to come back to celebrate. Again, the brilliance behind this idea. That you talk to the local employers, you engage them, you find out what skills they're looking for. Not today, today's already history. What skills they're going to need in their workforce three to five years down the road. That's always the conversation I have when I gather here with business leaders and people from MCC and everywhere else, our educational institutions, when I was in Congress. And now I see how important it is.
I also want to talk about some of the specific projects, when I was here back in September I think it was. We did the announcement about Constellation Brands. Wow. That was significant. To know that this globally renowned company is so confident about the future of downtown Rochester, that they're bringing their headquarters and bringing the vitality of their workforce, and the whole ecosystem of people that are going to want to go out for lunches, I was going to say drinks. But drinks, not during lunch. Drinks after work. Make sure you got that right. Rob Sands is going to be mad at me for that one.
Being a place where people from every corner of this planet come and feel comfortable here. What we have done with making this community so welcoming to refugees has really set us on a path forward of diversity and welcomeness. And that is why we're going to continue welcoming, not just the people of Ukraine when they are able to come here, but from all over the world.
Also our farmers, we have to make sure that our farm community is strong and vital. I have to thank all the farmers who helped us during the toughest time of the pandemic. They, themselves, were under stress, dairy farmers in Wyoming County, Genesee County, in particular, all across the state. They had no market. Think about when schools are shut down, there's nobody buying milk. Restaurants shut down, nobody's buying their produce. It was a very tough time. So very quickly, the state jumped in, purchased all these products, commodities, and got them to food banks. And I've had the opportunity to witness the food from upstate New York and places as far away as Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, feeding hungry people while keeping our farmers alive and able to continue on for another year or more, but let's keep them going. They're an important part of our industry and our economy.
We're going to keep investing also in our healthcare. My gosh, if we ever realized that there were fractures in our healthcare system, it came to light during this pandemic. We knew we were heading toward a shortage of healthcare workers. We saw that back in 2018, you could see the trends. People retiring, the needs getting greater. Older population, more people with healthcare needs, and we weren't ready for it. Then you hit a pandemic and people got sick themselves, had to walk away because they had to take care of people in their own families. People were exhausted after nearly two years of this, they just said I can't take it anymore. I've looked in their eyes. I've met them. And what they've been through is excruciating.
This is a necessity. It's hard to make this much of an investment right now, but I say if we don't put this $10 billion and now we're going to regret it later. We're going to regret it if we don't build this whole system of more workers coming in and we have a very aggressive plan to recruit more doctors and nurses. I even said, anyone coming in from Ukraine, if they have a nursing degree they can work with us. Let's bring them here. Let's bring them from all over and, you know, reduce any bureaucratic burdens that might be in their way. I've talked to our health department of how we can do just that.
Our schools. Our schools have taken on the chin as well. Think about all that our kids and the teachers and parents just came through all this remote learning and we saw that there was an incredible digital divide. When the thought was, well, just go home and learn on your iPad or your family computer. What if you don't have internet connection? What if that's not something your family could afford? What if you don't have a device that works? So we lost a lot of education time for our kids and we're going to be paying for that for a long time. To lose a year, year and a half, two years of education in a normal setting, not to mention the social dynamic of kids being isolated, not having access to friends and a support system or people who need particular assistance. I don't know if we're going to know for a long time, the real impact on our children, but we have to do something about it now. We need to get them to mental health services. We need to invest in our schools. We need good after school programs so there's productive activities for children when they leave at the end of the school day, because not everybody's parents are able to sit home and wait for them. They have their jobs to do as well.
Also, tuition assistance. It is, it has long been absurd to me that we don't help part-time students with their tuition, because you're basically saying you have to be wealthy enough to say I'm leaving all my jobs. I don't have to work. I'm going to be a full-time student in order to get assistance because you don't have that much money. Do you realize how inane that is? The people who need the money and the ones who need the work go to school part-time because they're trying to earn money for this semester to pay for the next semester. So, let's just make it easier on everyone to have access to a great education at places like MCC and allow part-time students to have eligibility for tuition assistance. $150 million will help make that happen. It's common sense. It should have been happening all along and we're going to do that in this year's budget.
And supporting an energy crisis, energy prices are going through the roof. We have, we have programs, we have to get information out there about HEAP and other opportunities we have to help people get through those tough areas. Tough, tough times of paying those bills. And I do want to shift to an issue that's very much in the headlines, not just in Rochester, not just New York City, all across the country. And someday sociologists will try to determine what happened during this pandemic that led to the human condition changing and people losing hope, and people losing their jobs and feeling very desperate. And, you know, why we have seen an increase in crime and we'll deal with the root causes. And that's important. But we also have to deal with the fact that we have to save people. We do have a record number of homicides here in Rochester. And again, it's not just here, but we know what we have to do.
David Levinsky, Burlington County Times: You have outlined the importance of daycare for essential workers in the state to make sure their kids are being watched so they can do their jobs. All of the other people in New Jersey are at home and many of them have kids as well. Has the state given any thought to how that should be handled in terms of community daycare situations or is this just something that people are going to have to work out themselves?
At night, I could barely eke out a decent nightscape at ISO 3200; going higher to ISO 6400 might be acceptable for folks with lower standards and no plans to share their images anywhere besides Instagram, but, personally, I found that with a bit of moonlight, ISO 3200 got the job done. Barely. 2ff7e9595c
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