Marine veteran Jon Pierowicz. (LinkedIn)
ALBANY (Tribune News Service) — Nearly 250 years ago, a movement to secede from the State of New York was successful.
During the midst of the Revolutionary War, when 13 colonies were fighting for independence from Britain, Vermont also declared its independence from New York.
Since the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788 — and contained an amendment making secession by a portion of state extremely difficult — a series of secession movements in New York have failed, including those seeking to split upstate and downstate into separate entities.
Now, in the year 2023, an Orchard Park native has begun what he describes as a more intellectually serious effort to build support for “upstate independence” than has recently been pursued.
Jon Pierowicz, a Marine turned local attorney, acknowledges many will believe the cause quixotic.
“My response to that sort of pessimism — ‘Oh, things will never change, Albany is the way it is, you just have to accept that, or move to Florida — is that that (attitude) is part of a pretty significant problem we have upstate. And I can say that with love, because I’m from here,” Pierowicz said. “We need to get out of the mindset of, ‘Everything is inevitable.’ History is replete with examples things taking unprecedented and unexpected turns.”
Though the cause of upstate secession has primarily been championed by Republicans, Pierowicz said he wants his recently formed nonprofit organization, “Upstate Independence,” to be nonpartisan.
“Thinking back to my experience in the Marine Corps., when you’re pursuing a goal together that’s huge, a lot of the other dividing lines that you may have had tend to melt away in the bonds you form,” he said. “So my hope would be, it sort of transcends that traditional, destructive partisanship — that we come together in trying to make upstate a better place.”
Pierowicz, 39, was born in Orchard Park and attended Wesleyan University. Upon graduation, he served as an Marine officer in Afghanistan. He later attended UCLA law school, then lived in New York City, working at a large, multinational law firm. He bears no ill will to New York City, which he said he “liked very much.”
Upon moving back to Orchard Park seven years ago, Pierowicz dipped a toe into local politics, attending local Republicans meetings. (In 2017 and 2018, he gave several small campaign donations to Republicans, and in 2017 told The News he supported former President Donald Trump because of policies opposing moving jobs overseas.)
Pierowicz said he was ultimately turned off by the pettiness of politics, and felt elected officials were thinking too incrementally about how to solve the “incompetence and corruption” of New York State government. Pierowicz said he is no longer active in party politics, and has registered as an unaffiliated voter.
Earlier this year, he co-founded the nonprofit with his wife, Alina, and they recently began fundraising.
“In most performance metrics, particularly population, economy and quality of life, upstate New York has performed very poorly over the last 50 years,” he said. “If this was a business case — and New York State’s budget is roughly comparable with something like Apple — if you saw two widely divergent divisions, performing differently — that would be the exact sort of candidate for a spin-off.”
Besides the political difficulty of upstate secession — it would require sign-off by both the New York Legislature and U.S. Congress — detractors cite that affluent New York City residents supply a significant tax base funding upstate spending initiatives.
But Pierowicz says a more complicated picture emerges from details within a 2011 study by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, examining regional distribution of revenue and spending in the 2009-2010 state budget. It’s the latest study he’s been able to locate on the topic.
In 2009-2010, upstate received about $14.3 billion more in state expenditures than it paid in taxes and fees, he said. Figures within the study, however, indicated upstate was receiving a disproportionate share primarily because of state funds going toward “State Operations” — the salaries and pensions of state employees — and toward “Capital Projects,” including spending on road and bridge projects, the building and maintenance of SUNY schools and prison infrastructure.
Pierowicz defines that spending benefiting upstate as primarily “collective goods” that could conceivably benefit all New York residents, not just those upstate. Meanwhile, upstate that year received less funding per person than downstate from “Local Assistance Grants.” Those grants are driven by education and health care spending — areas where, Pierowicz argues, the spending downstate does not accrue much benefit for upstate residents.
In a paper examining the Rockefeller study, he argued that, “If not affiliated with a SUNY campus, state government, or the prison system, the average upstate resident’s experience with the State Government comes in the form of crushingly high taxes and burdensome regulations.”
As for an always-contentious question — Where does upstate actually begin? — Pierowicz puts the border as north of Westchester and Rockland counties. He argues that upstate independence would not only benefit upstate, but also downstate, since upstate members of the State Legislature would no longer have influence over policy matters impacting solely New York City.
Among his nonprofit organization’s initial goals, Pierowicz said, is to sway public opinion so that at least here — in upstate New York — a majority of residents support independence.
In 2019, a Sienna College poll found that 38% of upstate residents supported dividing New York into two states, while 56% opposed it.
“That number is incredibly high,” Pierowicz said, “when — in my opinion — this case has never really been seriously made to the people.”
(c)2023 The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.)
Visit The Buffalo News
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
