Maggie Brooks

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Maggie Brooks is the County Executive of Monroe County, New York. A Republican, she was elected to the office in 2003 and re-elected for a second term in November of 2007. She is the first woman to hold this position.

Brooks, formerly a local television journalist at WHEC-TV, leveraged her name recognition from a career in Rochester for her political career. She served in the Monroe County Legislature before becoming Monroe County Clerk. She was first appointed in that position by Gov. George Pataki to fill a vacancy, then elected to two terms in her own right. She served as County Clerk until her election as County Executive.

She was considered a potential Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in 2006, as a running mate for former Masschusetts Gov. William Weld. Weld choose New York Secretary of State Christopher Jacobs as his running mate. Weld and Jacobs later withdrew from the race for the Republican nomination.

Brooks graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in Political Science.

[edit] Political Activity

In February 2007, Brooks acted to remove funding from the Central Rochester Public Library because the computers were being used to access pornography and could potentially be viewed by children. This action followed from an investigative report on Internet pornography that aired on local affiliate News 10 NBC.^[1] The library had a pornography filtering policy that allowed for Internet filtering software to be temporarily disabled for individual adult patrons by request.^[2]

In spite of the filtering policy already in place, and "despite objections from the Rochester (N.Y.) Public Library board, the Monroe County Library System adopted ... a policy to use filtering software to block all websites deemed pornographic...." ^[3] Later, the board accepted the new policy,^[4] and Maggie Brooks was awarded for her efforts in "serv[ing] as a valuable model for elected officials and appointed library board trustees across the country."^[5]

In September 2007, Brooks announced her so-called F.A.I.R. plan, which stands for fairness, accountability, innovative and responsible. The complex plan had two main prongs: the first prong enacted a local law allowing New York State to "intercept" a portion of Monroe County's sales tax revenue in exchange for the elimination of the county's medicaid payments to the state; the second prong reduced the amount of sales tax revenue the county distributed to suburban Monroe County school districts.

The school districts claimed Brooks' plan violated a sales tax sharing agreement called the Morin-Ryan Act between the county and all the municipalities and school districts therein. The Morin-Ryan Act established how Monroe County's sales tax was to be allocated, and the School District decided to file suit. After suffering a loss in the New York Supreme Court, the state's trial level court, the district's appealed and succeeded in overturning the so-called F.A.I.R. plan.