green ROCKS inn makes Bloomberg news
- At July 31, 2011
- By Admin
- In blog
green ROCKS inn makes Bloomberg news thanks to the civility and sanity of NY State’s most recent decision.
New York Prepares for Same-Sex Wedding Surge as State Makes Unions Legal
Barbara Simkins might have been just another struggling bed-and-breakfast owner after opening the Green Rocks Inn near the New York state line in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
After her state’s Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in October 2008, Simkins, 60, was named a justice of the peace. She performed more than 75 weddings for such couples in 2010 and may more than double that number this year.
“We saw an opportunity,” she said of the inn she runs with Natacha Merav Friedman, her 41-year-old fiancee. “We’re doing very well.”
New York’s June 24 enactment of a law permitting same-sex marriages may provide a shot of much-needed economic stimulus for the country’s third most-populous state. It may also draw new residents after the population shrank almost 1 percent to about 19.4 million people in the past year.
A study released last month by New York’s Independent Democratic Conference, four state senators who favored the new law, found that same-sex weddings would generate about $284 million in economic activity, producing $26.8 million in tax and fee revenue in the first three years. They estimated that about half of the state’s 43,000 same-sex couples living together would marry while more will come from out of state.
