Rochester City Council added its voice to those rejecting – even mocking – President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming Lake Ontario.
“This desperate and flaccid stunt by the President is a clear distraction from the issues that matter most to U.S. voters: the failing economy, housing, affordability and, lest we forget, President Trump’s unwanted and unwarranted war with Iran,” reads a proclamation unanimously signed by all nine members of the all-Democrat council on Friday.
Trump wants the lake renamed Lake America and has directed all arms of the federal government to make it so. Reliably blue New York is the only state bordering Lake Ontario, and Rochester is the largest U.S. city on the lake. Trump’s pronouncements have tied the name of the lake to the Canadian province of Ontario, but the lake was named by the indigenous people long before the province came into being or the first European settlers arrived.
“No serious person from the Native Tribes or U.S. and Canadian cities which share the Lake will ever … call Lake Ontario ‘Lake America,’” the proclamation reads, likening the president’s claim of renaming Lake Ontario to “giving a new nickname to a Great Lake whose cultural legacy will outlive us all.”
City Council President Miguel A. Meléndez also plans to introduce a resolution calling on the federal government to reverse the president’s order.
