Working the phones
Inside the New York State Capitol, where people in suits and heels rush back and forth and political jabber echoes in grand staircases, Betty Little’s office is a slice of North Country life.
On a Wednesday in January, Little sat on her couch in the small room. She wore an evergreen suit, surrounded by hints of home—a framed landscape from the Adirondack Balloon Festival, pine cones and greenery on a side table, a poster featuring Washington County’s grassland birds.
She held a printout of her day’s schedule. Her greatest accomplishments over roughly 18 years in the state Senate and seven in the state Assembly were scribbled in a few lines on the same sheet.
“I think one of the things I’m most proud of is the constituent service that my office has done,” Little, R-Queensbury, said. “You don’t itemize those things because they aren’t very important to somebody else, but they’re very important to that person.
“That’s my main role.”
Her District 45 spreads over 6,800 square miles from parts of Washington County, up past Plattsburgh, to the Canadian border and west past Tupper Lake. Her devotion to the more than 300,000 constituents is perhaps what many will miss most about Little, who announced in December that she is retiring from the Senate.
Even some who
