Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive running for governor as a Republican, told supporters gathered at the Ag Education Center and Museum in Batavia that solar farms swallowing up farmland across New York are “a total scam.”
Blakeman made the stop Sunday afternoon at the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Genesee County facility during a campaign swing through the GLOW region.
“Why are you running for governor?” one attendee asked him.
“I’ll tell you why I’m running for governor, because people are miserable in this state, and it’s not just up here,” Blakeman said. “It’s down on Long Island, where I come from. It’s even in the city of New York. Middle-class families are struggling there: Hudson Valley, Southern Tier, Central New York, North Country, Capital District, and Western New York; everybody’s miserable because we’re the most overtaxed state in the United States of America.”
Blakeman said electric bills in New York are 70 percent higher than the national average, which he attributed to 48 rate increases he said have occurred under Gov. Kathy Hochul.
“Think about it, one every month that she’s been governor,” he said. “It’s crazy, and people can’t afford it anymore. And that’s why our young people are leaving. That’s why our senior citizens are leaving.”
He also accused Hochul of failing to back law enforcement.
“She doesn’t have respect for law enforcement,” he said. “Every major criminal justice initiative is designed to make it easier for criminals to operate in our communities. It’s crazy. She’s supposed to be protecting us. She’s not protecting us. She’s protecting criminals.”
Returning to solar farms, Blakeman argued the projects produce little energy while raising costs for ratepayers, and said developers — many of them, he said, out-of-state or foreign corporations — collect billions of dollars in subsidies while donating to Hochul’s campaign.
“Why are they taking up our rich farmland? I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I’m very concerned that these foreign entities want to ruin our agricultural business, not only here in New York State, but throughout our country.”
Blakeman recalled visiting a solar farm in Columbia County about four months earlier that he said was buried under four feet of snow.
“I said to one of the farmers there, ‘Let me ask you a question. How long has this been under snow?’ He said, ‘Only about three or four months,'” Blakeman said. “You know it’s a scam.”
He argued the state should instead tap what he called one of the largest natural gas reserves in the world beneath New York, which he said Hochul has refused to let companies extract.
“We have this big natural gas reserve that would last us for years and years and years, and Kathy Hochul won’t let us extract that natural gas — it’s a scam,” he said.
Blakeman said he met with President Trump on Friday for a law enforcement rally and that Trump has repeatedly pressed him on the issue.
“He always says this to me every time he sees me,” Blakeman said. “He pulls me aside. He says, ‘Bruce, you know you guys are sitting on the largest natural gas reserve in the world.’ … Bruce, you better drill, baby, drill.”
Blakeman claimed Hochul’s administration now buys natural gas from Pennsylvania to avoid blackouts in New York City and Long Island while spending an estimated $8 billion in taxpayer money on services for people in the country illegally — spending he said amounts to roughly $81,000 in benefits per person.
“She’s not putting New Yorkers first,” he said. “She’s taking our money and giving it away to people who haven’t earned a thing.”
Blakeman also criticized Hochul’s alignment with New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, calling him “a communist.”
“He talks about collectivism. That’s another word for communism,” Blakeman said. “It means that if you go out and you work really hard and you’ve got ingenuity and you invent something, you’re not entitled to keep what your reward has been.”
He urged Second Amendment supporters who sat out the last gubernatorial election to register and vote.
“I heard there was a million gun owners in this state that didn’t vote in the last election four years ago,” Blakeman said. “Lee Zeldin would be governor now.”
Blakeman argued that describing parents as “gestating” or “non-gestating,” rather than mother and father, is part of a broader effort to erode parental rights.
“It’s insidious,” he said. “The Ten Commandments say, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother,’ not gestating and non-gestating parent. They are trying to take control of our children away from us. They are destroying parental control. They’re trying to indoctrinate our children. They want to control our kids. That’s why they denigrate the term ‘mom’ and ‘dad.'”
He described a recent encounter with two 12-year-old girls who had just won a soccer championship and wanted to speak with him about competing against boys.
“We don’t want them in our locker room. We don’t want them in our bathrooms. What are you going to do about it?” he recalled them asking.
Blakeman said he responded by instituting a policy at Nassau County-run athletic facilities requiring athletes to compete based on their sex.
He cited a ranking placing New York 50th out of 50 states in economic outlook.
“This state is now 50, number five zero, in economic outlook,” Blakeman said. “It doesn’t get worse than that. There’s only 50 states. That’s why our kids are leaving. That’s why businesses are leaving.”
Later in the event, Attica resident Brent Snyder asked Blakeman how upstate voters could be assured he wouldn’t forget them once elected.
“I get asked that question all the time — not just upstate, but even in my own community,” Blakeman said.
Blakeman, whose Nassau County has a population of nearly 1.5 million people — larger than eight U.S. states, he said — pointed to his reelection last November as evidence he keeps his word. He said Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the county by 110,000 voters heading into that election, yet he won by 12 points and roughly 36,000 votes, including in Plainview, a heavily Democratic area he said hadn’t elected a Republican in about 40 years.
“I made promises to everybody — Republicans, Democrats, Independents. I made the same promise that I’m not going to raise your taxes, and I didn’t. Not one penny,” Blakeman said. “Matter of fact, I cut a $150 million tax increase of my predecessor.”
He said he received a call at 1 a.m. that night from Trump.
“He said, ‘Bruce, I just asked my staff whether or not he won, and they said not only did he win, he won in a landslide,'” Blakeman said. “And Trump asked me, ‘Well, how did you do it?’ I said, ‘Mr. President, it was very easy. I kept my promises.'”
A campaign aide traveling with Blakeman, who described himself as a Central New York native who grew up baling hay on a dairy farm, told the crowd their concerns would reach the candidate.
“He’s not going to forget about you because, first of all, he’s a man of his word, and second of all, I’ll be in his ear on behalf of you guys, if you need it,” the aide said.
King Smith, 21, asked Blakeman what he would do to make homeownership more affordable for young people, saying home prices in his area had climbed substantially in just two years based on listings he’d compared on Zillow.
“I was comparing the price on Zillow, my parents’ house, even two years ago, from what it is now, and I think it went up at least $20,000,” Smith said.
“That’s a great question,” Blakeman said. “The housing crisis we have here in New York State — Kathy Hochul would make you think that it’s because the value of houses are going up. What it is, it’s the taxes, the electric bills that make it less affordable.”
Blakeman said the fix was not government price controls but lower taxes, lower energy costs and better-paying jobs.
“It’s for government to get the hell out of the way, let business operate in the state, create better jobs, higher-paying jobs, jobs with better benefits,” he said.
He also pledged to invest in revitalizing upstate cities and villages he described as struggling with vacant storefronts and homelessness.
“I go to some towns where you go downtown, half the stores are boarded up,” Blakeman said. “We can repopulate those areas by bringing better jobs, bringing opportunity, bringing prosperity to our state.”
“So I promise you that I will not forget you,” Blakeman said. “I will not forget any region of the state.”
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