Monroe County Legislator Rachel Barnhart (District 17), a member of the Monroe County Planning Board, today submitted formal comments on the county’s draft comprehensive plan, the first in 40 years.
Barnhart praised the plan’s detailed portrait of Monroe County’s economic, demographic, and climate challenges, but called on the county to significantly strengthen its treatment of poverty, housing affordability, and benefits administration.
“This plan does an excellent job diagnosing Monroe County’s challenges,” Barnhart said. “But it has a glaring gap: it assigns almost no role to the Department of Human Services, the county’s largest department, in addressing poverty. Human Services represents nearly 39% of our budget — more than $600 million. A comprehensive plan that doesn’t grapple with that department’s role in addressing poverty isn’t really a plan for the county that exists.”
Barnhart’s comments focused on four areas:
Poverty and benefits administration. The plan places poverty primarily in the public health chapter while assigning no meaningful planning role to the Department of Human Services. Barnhart called for a dedicated section addressing DHS goals, strategies for improving benefits access, and metrics for measuring whether residents are successfully receiving assistance. In a report published in 2025, Barnhart documented that Monroe County denied more than 22,000 public assistance applications in 2024, an 81.5% denial rate that ranked among the worst in New York State and highest among peer urban counties.
Housing for the poorest residents. The plan’s housing chapter focuses primarily on the “missing middle” — households earning 60-80% of Area Median Income — framing affordability largely as a workforce recruitment challenge. Barnhart called for the plan to address housing needs at the bottom of the income spectrum, noting that the word “homeless” appears only once in the entire document.
Vision Zero. Barnhart strongly supported the plan’s call to adopt Vision Zero as a strategic framework for transportation safety, but urged the county to define what adoption requires — a formal resolution, a county action plan, measurable targets, or road design standards — so the commitment can be implemented and measured.
Implementation. Barnhart called for the addition of near-term county commitments with timelines and named lead agencies, so that the Legislature and public have a basis for measuring progress.
The draft comprehensive plan is available at monroecounty.gov. Public comments are being accepted at monroecounty.gov/PlanForward-events.