Assemblyman Marc Butler, R,C-Newport, says he is disappointed by the governor’s veto of Veteran Buyback legislation, which was passed in both the Senate and Assembly with near unanimous support.

The bill, A.8174, which Butler sponsored, would have allowed honorably discharged veterans to purchase up to three years’ worth of military service to put toward their state retirement. The legislation outlined a funding mechanism to ensure there would be no local burden from this program.

This is a benefit for all veterans with active duty military service time to receive credit for their military service time so it can be added to whatever time they may have in civil service with the government, resulting in an increase in their retirement annuity.

“The governor should be ashamed for ignoring the needs of our veterans who have sacrificed so much for the sake of our protection and freedom,” said Butler, whose district, the 118th, includes St. Lawrence County towns from Norfolk and Madrid south to Colton, Clifton and Fine.

“Our state spends so much on trivial expenditures; it is completely disheartening that the governor cannot listen to the will of the people’s representatives who wish to honor and recognize the service of our veterans. We’re not asking to move mountains here; we’re just asking to expand an existing veteran buyback program to all deserving veterans,” Butler said in a press release.

The current veteran buyback program in place at the state is arbitrarily restrictive, Butler said, because it leaves out many veterans in major wars due to date restrictions, medal criteria, and geographical requirements. The current rules have also been discriminatory toward women veterans, Butler said.

He said this legislation would have ensured veterans who served in Israel, Turkey, Germany, the Middle East, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and at the Demilitarized Zone of North and South Korea would be able to participate in this program.

Butler noted that the governor took similar action in 2014 when he vetoed the previous version of the bill only days before Veterans Day. The governor’s major criticism was that he believed there was no funding mechanism in the previous version of the legislation, but according to Butler, the 2015 iteration of the bill, which passed both houses with strong bi-partisan support, addressed the governor’s concerns. “Dishearteningly, the governor is using the same rhetoric while hypocritically promoting the use of public dollars to pay for the college tuition of illegal aliens and incarcerated criminals,” the release said.