SARANAC LAKE – State Assemblywoman Janet Duprey stopped by the Enterprise office unannounced Thursday and sat down to discuss a wide range of topics, from Donald Trump to people with disabilities.

The moderate Republican from Peru said she will probably vote for Hillary Clinton because of Trump’s derisive treatment of veterans and women.

She said the state must do better for people with developmental disabilities but must also keep dangerous Sunmount residents locked up. She also said the state Justice Center, meant to crack down on abuse of special-needs people in state care, isn’t working and should either be overhauled or abolished.

She said the state must increase Department of Environmental Conservation staff in the Adirondacks to keep visitors safe.

Duprey said the state’s tax cap on local government “is setting the counties and the schools up for failure” when it limits their property tax increases to a fraction of 1 percent a year. She said it should be set at 2 percent, as it’s commonly thought to be, or abolished.

She called the governor’s economic development initiatives a “mixed bag” and says she has faith developers will figure out how to complete the Adirondack Club and Resort in Tupper Lake.

Her top legislative priorities are ethics reform, resisting the heroin-opiate drug plague and giving schools more money, as well as breathing room from exams linked to Common Core.

But she may never get another vote in the Capitol on this or any other state business. After almost 10 years in the Assembly, she is not seeking re-election this November. Unless the governor calls the legislature back to Albany for a special session later this year, her lawmaking days are done. She’s still active, however, in representing the 115th District, which includes Clinton and Franklin counties.

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May vote for Clinton

Unlike most Republicans, Duprey has been vocal about saying she cannot vote for Trump, the party’s nominee for president. She reiterated that Thursday, saying she still hopes he’ll improve but doesn’t see signs of that happening.

She said she won’t vote for a third-party candidate because that would be “throwing away my vote, and I’ve never thrown away my vote.”

Therefore, she said, she will probably vote for Clinton, although she didn’t seem excited about that.

She said the final straw for her against Trump was when he publicly insulted the Khan family after the father spoke at the Democratic National Convention about his son who died as an Army captain fighting in Iraq. That made her so angry she couldn’t sleep the night of Aug. 3, she said, so she got up and wrote on Facebook about the heartbreak she faced when her brother-in-law Arthur Duprey was killed as a Marine corporal in Vietnam on Aug. 16, 1968. She had been friends with him before she met and married his older brother Elmer.

“I vividly remember the anti-war sign a local man was holding outside the bank in Peru the morning we learned of Art’s death and how bitter and angry his sign made me feel,” she wrote that night. “This man apologized to me later as he didn’t know Art was killed; upon learning of Art’s death he immediately left with his sign. He was a gentleman who knew he had added additional grief to a family suffering a most horrific loss.”

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Developmental disabilities

Duprey, who has a 22-year-old grandson on the autism spectrum, always wears a puzzle-piece-shaped pin for autism awareness and strongly supports services for people with disabilities. She said the state budget for these services is “atrocious,” both through ARCs and the state Office for People with Developmental Disabilities, which runs the Sunmount center based in Tupper Lake.

But she isn’t for treating all people with disabilities equally. She said Sunmount should not move residents with histories of violence or sexual abuse from secure facilities to group homes. Not only is that a risk to neighbors, she said; it also endangers nonviolent people with disabilities who share the home.

“Violent sex offenders should not be in our neighborhoods,” Duprey said. “I think there are some people who can never be rehabilitated.”

She said she has written letters and met with OPWDD officials, but to little avail. Because it’s an executive branch agency, she said major change would have to come from the governor.

She bemoaned that state fund shortages force ARCs such as the Adirondack Arc to pay low wages, to close day-use respite centers and to close early intervention programs.

She also supports sheltered workshops, where people with disabilities work for less than minimum wage, “to give these people who would just sit at home and do nothing the pride of having a job.” The state has been closing such workshops due to a court ruling that they must pay minimum wage.

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On retiring

Duprey said preparing for retirement is hard, even though she knows in her head it’s “the right decision.”

She and her husband Elmer got married 49 years ago, and she has held elected office for 41 of those: first on the Clinton County legislature for a decade, then as county treasurer for 20 years and since 2007 in the Assembly.

“He and I are both looking forward to being able to just kind of say, ‘Let’s go do something,’ and not have to check the calendar and check the emails,” she said. “That’s the one thing I look forward to. But I will miss so much of what I do. Whether it’s my prison tours or school tours or businesses – I’ve been at some businesses the last few weeks – I just love what I’m doing.”

After surviving some rough primaries, she’s also happy not to be campaigning for herself this fall, although she is doing so for her Republican successor candidate, Franklin County Sheriff Kevin Mulverhill.

She’s glad to leave office on her own terms.

“I think I’m going out as much at the top of my game as I ever have been or ever could be,” she said. “I don’t feel that I’ve been forced out in any way, except by my daughter … and my son, too. Good for them.”