Move To Strip Trump Name From State Land Approved By N.Y. Senate

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An effort to get the “Donald Trump” name off a state park in New York is gaining traction after the New York state Senate passed a bill on Thursday that “directs the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation to conduct a legal review and figure out how to go about renaming the site,” the New York Daily News explains. The bill now needs to be approved by the New York state Assembly, which is the state’s other legislative chamber, ahead of any signature from the governor. Although the bill appears oriented towards procedural steps, the idea is to eventually get Trump’s name off the site, so that’s what appears to be the presumptive end result of this process.

As New York state Sen. Brad Hoylman (D), a lead sponsor of the bill, pointedly put it:

‘New York’s Senate just gave Donald Trump an early birthday present: we’re stripping his name from a state park. Trump has dishonored the state and should not be honored with a state park named for him.’

The state park in question mostly goes unused and isn’t even included on the state parks website, so there doesn’t appear to be much, if any, public usage of the site. It has no formalized amenities — basically, it’s apparently just land. Trump himself originally gave the land — totaling 400 acres — over to the state after a plan to develop a golf course on the site fell through. Trump used a different tactic — establishing a large conservation easement — after development plans at another New York property fell through, and now that Trump property (the so-called Seven Springs estate) has been under criminal investigation. Trump may have fraudulently inflated the value of that conservation easement to obtain a tax break.

It’s not yet clear whether the New York criminal investigation will culminate in any charges, although the recent convening of a grand jury — which would decide whether to issue potentially proposed charges — in connection to the case suggests that prosecutors may be preparing for that route. Trump is also currently facing other legal trouble including a pair of lawsuits from members of Congress over his role in inciting the deadly January riot at the Capitol.