At the age of 17, he was hauling hay and herding cattle on his own 50 acres of land.
Forty years later, state Sen. Darrel J. Aubertine, D-Cape Vincent, is still hauling and herding — but now he devotes a greater part of his time seeking grants and finding co-sponsors for legislative bills.
And if he can haul in enough votes Tuesday, he will be re-elected to the state Senate for another two-year term.
Mr. Aubertine was first elected to public office 16 years ago as a Cape Vincent town councilman. At that time, he said, he hoped to be the "voice of reason" he thought was lacking in government, but he never planned to seek statewide office.
"For me, it was never a real conscious decision to say, 'By God, someday I'm going to be a senator,'" he said. "In all honesty, I was probably the biggest cynic of government on God's green earth. And it kind of goes back to the fact that I bought that farm at a very early age and was literally the only kid in school, as far as I know, who was actually paying school taxes while I was going to school."
A Buffalo Sabres fan, gun collector and outdoorsman who has fished and hunted since his youth, Mr. Aubertine said his political career prevents him from spending as much time as he would like on his Triple-A Aubertine Farm nowadays.
But farming is an Aubertine lifestyle that goes back to the 1800s that he never plans to give up.
"I'm not different from a lot of farm people my age," Mr. Aubertine said. "It's that when we grew up, you just didn't differentiate between the farm and the family and the lifestyle. There was never really any conscious choice or anything. I mean, it was just, of course, what else would you do? And for me, I still do it."
Mr. Aubertine said his children — Erin Churchill and Paul and Timothy Aubertine — all were brought up the same way, and his infant granddaughter, Grace, is the ninth generation of the family to live on a farm.
"I can't think of a better way to raise a family," he said. "We're fortunate. My granddaughter, hopefully, is going to know both her great-grandmothers and one of her great-grandfathers. Of course, my kids all know their grandparents. They knew their great-grandparents. So it just continues. I'm just a link in the succession, that's all."
SUCCESSFUL POLITICIAN
A Democrat, Mr. Aubertine has been successful in a district leaning Republican.
In 1995, he was elected to Jefferson County's newly formed Legislature — where he served three two-year terms — and in 1998 was elected the first Democrat ever to lead Jefferson County government, although Republicans outnumbered Democrats 12-3. Mr. Aubertine was chosen, by an 8-7 vote, to lead as a compromise candidate when the Republican majority couldn't agree on a chairman.
Within a week of the election, Mr. Aubertine said, his views on the role of government began to change.
"And a few days later came the ice storm," he said. "During that event, it was the government that was able to help put the pieces back together after the ice storm. All the things that went on, 90 percent of it went back to government doing its job at that point in time. I could see the government wasn't always the enemy. People turned to the government at that time to help them get back on their feet."
He ran unsuccessfully against Assemblyman H. Robert Nortz, R-Cape Vincent, for state Assembly in 2000, but in 2002, after redistricting put him in a district with more Democratic voters, Mr. Aubertine was elected to the Assembly, becoming the first Democrat to represent Jefferson County since 1910.
His Republican opponent at the time was St. Lawrence County Clerk Patricia A. Ritchie, who is challenging him again in the November election, this time for the 48th state Senate District seat.
Mr. Aubertine also made history when he replaced former state Sen. James W. Wright, R-Watertown, in a February 2008 special election, becoming the first Democrat to represent Oswego, Jefferson and St. Lawrence counties in the state Senate since 1880.
He was re-elected later that year in the November election and helped flip the majority in the state Senate from Republican to Democratic.
In the Senate, he has been a leader on issues concerning the north country. He chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee and the Legislative Committee on Rural Resources and is the vice chairman of the Senate Energy and Telecommunications Committee.
Sen. Aubertine has helped pass 59 bills in the Senate, often garnering support from Republicansand sometimes standing up to his own political party.
"Some politicians make it seem like it's all about the majority-minority rift and how that all impacts us. It's not about that," he said. "It's about going to Albany and representing the people, and not the politics, of the region. And I have done that now for eight years, since I was elected as an assemblyman in 2002."
NO. 1 ISSUE IS JOBS
Retaining and creating jobs in Northern New York always has been his top priority, Mr. Aubertine said.
He pointed to his efforts to keep open state parks, Ogdensburg Correctional Facility and Alcoa in Massena, and in helping to secure a $34 million state Department of Health grant to provide ongoing residential care for the elderly in Jefferson County.
"But without question, the single biggest issue right now would be the Energize New York issue," he said.
The proposed Energize New York bill would double the allocation of power put aside for Power for Jobs, which he co-sponsored, and extend benefits to upstate farmers and small businesses that are not covered by the current program, he said.
More recently, he opposed New York's proposed ballast water regulations that would require ship operators to retrofit their vessels by 2012 with the most modern technology available to kill organisms in ballast tanks.
Mr. Aubertine said the state Department of Environmental Conservation rules would "threaten the future of shipping" on the St. Lawrence Seaway and at the Port of Oswego.
His opposition was blasted by Save the River, an environmental group in Clayton, which argued that these stricter measures are necessary to prevent the spread of invasive species and protect the region's tourism industry.
Mr. Aubertine argued that he always has been a proponent of stronger ballast water regulations, but that the technology to meet DEC's new standards does not exist and that the rules would eliminate thousands of jobs in the area.
He is an advocate for a cap on property tax increases, which would base taxes more on ability to pay and less on the value of a person's property. He co-sponsored a Senate bill to enact performance-based budgeting that would require agency and department budgets to reflect actual spending and budget needs for funding and reward departments that cut spending.
Mr. Aubertine also played a role in defeating a bill in August that aimed to expand rights of farmworkers by requiring farmers to provide rest days, overtime pay and unemployment benefits.
"I will give the advocates their due that that bill was put together with all the best intentions. But from a farmer's point of view, from a farm labor point of view, from a consumer's point of view, they could not have done a worse job," said Mr. Aubertine, who argued that the bill would have forced farmers to cut jobs, limit employees' hours or close their farms.
Mr. Aubertine argued that U.S. farmers are being exploited, largely reflecting on his own experience as a dairy farmer.
The Aubertine farm, which had been a dairy operation since the late 1800s, once had some 125 dairy cows before Mr. Aubertine and his father decided to sell the cattle because of low milk prices.
"I sold the dairy Oct. 14 in 2002 and it was really a sad day for us," he said. "We were at a point where the equity we had accrued — in equipment and real estate and in the cattle — we would've had to borrow back into that equity to stay there, essentially paying for the privilege to milk cows."
Today, the farm mainly produces beef cattle, hay and corn.
"I think with the best of the intentions, people who are making regulations and rules to govern how agriculture operates are some of the same people that wouldn't know a Holstein from a John Deere," he said.
"I will never stop working for dairy farmers and farmers in general, whether I'm in or out of politics. It's something that's part of me."
