Coming from a blue collar family, and the first in his family to graduate from college, Greg understands how tough and unforgiving a bad economy can be. As Greg goes door to door, he meets countless seniors trading between utility bills and medication, working families balancing between child care and their rent and mortgage payments, small businesses watching some on Wall Street cleanup after multi-billion dollar bailouts, yet cannot find a local bank that will extend them a loan, and finally, young professionals forced to live at home because the region is just too expensive.

For Greg, it’s a grassroots effort to get local people back to work. Senator Greg Ball has partnered with two “one-stop employment centers” that exist in his district. One is situated in Peekskill, N.Y. and the other in Carmel, N.Y. The Senator is proactively working to connect residents in his district with the tools, knowledge and resources they need to find jobs. Presently, Senator Ball is demanding a special session focused on nothing but job creation and retention.

Locally, Senator Ball has created a number of initiatives designed to help the unemployed including: forming an Economic Development Advisory Committee; launching a One Stop Career Center Website, hosting Open House Fridays for the Unemployed and providing Apprenticeship and Internship Opportunities in his district office.

Greg strongly believes that New York State must reclaim its greatness by becoming an economic engine driven by job growth, and to do so, we must focus on reversing New York State’s openly hostile environment toward small businesses, new businesses and entrepreneurs. For Greg, his daily focus has always been, “Jobs. Jobs. Jobs!”

As an Assemblyman, Greg Ball worked proactively with local businessmen and women to help reverse New York’s openly hostile business climate. He now has a three-pronged approach that he has directed his Senate staff to focus on with laser-like precision.

• First, Greg is working to entice new businesses and entrepreneurs to call our region “home.” Greg has had impressive results working alongside Governor Andrew Cuomo, the various county executives and with the regional economic development teams, securing thousands of new jobs to this Senate district alone.
• Secondly, Greg is working with local business owners who are having a hard time staying afloat. The key is to remove the unnecessary barriers that may be forcing some small and new business to shut their doors.
• Lastly, Greg works with local business to help them expand. We need both a long and short-term approach to creating jobs in the Hudson Valley.

From a planning perspective, a balance of smart growth within the business community, and with pre-existing residential development, is critical. Many of our communities are suffering from residential overdevelopment, meanwhile many of our towns have an insufficient tax base created by poor and haphazard planning. Greg believes that we must protect our environment and quality of life, while embracing commercial and mixed use developments that focus on environmentally friendly, transit oriented development.

Greg knows that small business owners are the backbone of America and New York. Senator Ball will work to reward companies that create jobs in the Hudson Valley and penalize those that send them offshore. He will continue to fight for us in Albany to make sure that stimulus dollars, sent from our wallets, are used to employ New Yorkers on New York projects, and not to fund budget gaps.