POTSDAM – Former St. Lawrence County Chief District Attorney David Haggard, D-Potsdam, says he’ll help establish clear economic goals and work to ensure employment opportunities for youth exist in years to come if he is elected to the District 10 legislature seat.

He is facing off against Nicholas Pignone for seat being vacated by Joe Timmerman.

Haggard, an attorney, says he has “a unique set of skills and experience” that he can apply to “bring about a meaningful change” for the future of county finances, and help create “an economy in which our leading export is not our young people.”

At he same time, Haggard says, there is a “responsibility to serve our senior citizens” through continued sport for programs such as Meals on Wheels.

The continuing position of St. Lawrence County at the bottom of employment statistics in the state, Haggard says, gives emphasis to his concern for the future of opportunity in young people’s lives here. Not only are there many unemployed, but there are also underemployed people who might be working but who are not making a living wage. “Each and every action the St. Lawrence County Legislature takes must consider how their actions effects the economic challenges we face,” he said.

“We must first articulate clear and obtainable economic goals,” Haggard says, such as committing to job retention “by assisting existing enterprises,” fostering new businesses through “shared creative investment,” finding ways to bring business and government together such as the university business incubators in the county, and partnering with “resource providers, like Cornell Cooperative, helping to fund specific projects that help the farm community stabilize, store and bring products to market,” and finding ways “to address the challenge of displaced workers who are unemployed through no fault of their own.”

Haggard notes his experience as an attorney, prosecutor, educator, and as a commercial lender “will assist in addressing such issues as the current legislative leadership’s proposal to privatize the solid waste department,” which will only work “if the private enterprise has incentives to work in the public interest ... The current leadership, it appears, has failed to ask basic questions that must be answered before privatization should be even be considered ... The simple transfer of ownership from public to private hands may not ultimately reduce costs or enhance the quality of service (to) the people of St. Lawrence County and in fact may have just the opposite effect.”

“I am committed to ensure that while working to continue to improve the fiscal health of our county, it is not done at the expense of individual communities and taxpayers,” Haggard says. “We can neither afford or should we tolerate a continuation of lack of communication and understanding (of) how these decisions (affect) individual communities.”