Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz joins Parks, Recreation and Forestry Commissioner and leadership from the Buffalo & Erie County Workforce Development Board and Erie 1 BOCES to celebrate the first ten graduates of the new Erie Corps initiative.
Proposed by Poloncarz in his 2024 State of the County address, Erie Corps is a project similar in spirit to the Civilian Conservation Corps created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of his New Deal and will create seasonal jobs for 18- to 22-year-old county residents living at less than 200% of the Federal Poverty Level.
The new Corps members receive training that could lead to a career in environmental and conservation efforts. They will work on various projects throughout the Parks system, implementing both the Parks Master Plan and the recently announced Erie County Community Climate Action Plan.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration's request to keep billions in congressionally approved foreign aid frozen, but that fight isn't over.
The court did not set a timeline for when the money should be released, allowing the White House to continue to dispute the matter in lower courts, where U.S. District judge Amir Ali ruled last month that much of the money cut off by the administration should continue flowing while he reviewed the case, reported CNN.
"When you step back and look at what's happening in this order right here, it's 5-4," reported CNN's Katelyn Polantz, "and the four dissenters of what is being done right now for Donald Trump, those people are all the the conservative justices and what they are saying is, we can't believe that this Supreme Court is going to override what the executive wants to do here and just give this lower-court trial judge Ali in Washington, D.C., on the district court the power to figure this out right now, so a big struggle between the court system and Trump."
The administration had frozen billions in aid from the State Department and the US Agency for International Development, and several nonprofit groups that rely on that money filed lawsuits challenging the order as unconstitutional.
Ali had set a deadline for Wednesday to allow the funding to flow, but the administration rushed an emergency appeal and chief justice John Roberts unilaterally issued an stay that paused the case.
The government argued they're making “substantial efforts” to review payment requests to comply with Ali's order, but the plaintiffs were unsatisfied with that explanation.
“The government has not taken ‘any meaningful steps’ to come into compliance,” the groups said a Supreme Court filing last week.
