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mike parwana's avatar

Harrison Freer was an advocate for bicycle recreation, tourism, and commuting. He was an advocate for the environment, for water quality, for sustainability and resilience. That work manifested in lakefront septic regulations, in work toward municipal septic for Assembly Point on Lake George, in Queensbury being part of the Climate Smart Community program, and more.

Harrison was a hard worker, but a quiet one. He didn’t toot his own horn. He was a team player, and yes, he was part of the team at the Pentagon that developed military GPS, the civilian side of which has become integrated in all of our lives.

In recent months Harrison had been focused on the mundane issue of sidewalks in Ward 2, specifically in providing sidewalks for pedestrian safety for kids walking back and forth between Glens Falls high school and the Morse athletic fields across the city line in Queensbury. While it is more prosaic than satellites in space it is an issue that came with its own sets of problems and Harrison was working those problems one at a time.

In my mind the work Harrison did that he was not generally recognized for was in promoting diversity in government, specifically in recruiting women to serve in elected and appointed public office in Queensbury, a town with an atrocious record for women in leadership positions. Yes, there is the town clerk, but in roughly 21 other offices (supervisor, town board, county supervisor, planning board, ZBA) at any one time in the last couple of decades the number of women in those positions was often zero. Sometimes the number was (off the top of my head) as many as 3. Maybe 4 counting alternates. I believe at the moment that out of those 21 seats there is one woman serving as an alternate on the planning board or ZBA. She may have been promoted to a regular seat recently. Harrison worked hard to change that. He had a hand in recruiting nearly every Democratic woman running for office in Queensbury in more than a decade.

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Edward Low's avatar

I've read a lot of WWII books in the last year. And war is tough.. and there are situations where your best friend was killed.. I haven't read many VietNam books, but I assume many things are similar.

This is NOT a defense of Calley, but I often wonder how one doesn't become a savage during war.

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