Enfield first-look Budget would hike levy 7.3%

Supervisor sidelines Rollins’ request for secretary

by Robert Lynch; September 11, 2025

Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond took the wraps off her Town’s Tentative Budget Wednesday night with these words, “It remains very high.”

Very high, perhaps, but it could have been higher. The three-term Supervisor, currently in (uncontested) pursuit of term number four, presented her spending recommendations to the Enfield Town Board that September 10th night.  But although the law didn’t require that she do so, Redmond also shared with Board members a second budget compilation, one based on recommendations she’d received from departmental leaders, particularly from Enfield Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy” Rollins.

Redmond’s “2026 Tentative Budget,” the Town Board’s official budgetary starting point, would raise next year’s property tax levy by 7.32 percent.  Highway Fund allocations would contribute 6.07 percent of the averaged increase in the levy; General Fund expenses 10.35 percent.

In terms of appropriations, what the Supervisor recommended would spend $2,605,859, a total up $106,587 or 4.26 percent from the budget adopted for 2025.

The alternative “Requested Budget,” essentially a planning document that carries no official weight, would have raised the overall tax levy far more, by a combined 19.68 percent.  Under that alternative, tax levy increases for the Highway Fund would have climbed by 14.36 percent and for the General Fund by a whopping 32.64 percent.

Notable within the General Fund calculations, the “Requested Budget” would have granted Highway Superintendent Rollins’ long-standing request—though intensified this year—to add to his staff a “part-time  administrative assistant/clerk” to aid him with his day-to-day paperwork.

Redmond’s recommended budget deleted the secretarial position, thereby saving the Town an otherwise-budgeted $26,000.  The Supervisor offered no comment on the deleted request at Wednesday’s Town Board meeting.  Highway Superintendent Rollins did not attend the session.

With neither Rollins nor Town Bookkeeper Blixy Taetzsch in the room Wednesday night, Redmond and Town Board members spent relatively little time on the budget, about 20 minutes.  They deferred any careful scrutiny or major revisions until a special budget meeting scheduled for one week later, September 17. 

Wednesday’s postponement stands in contrast with last year’s hurried budget review, a process in which much of the fiscal slicing and dicing was completed on the night Redmond had first released her proposal,. That night’s busywork—and frictions—led to a 2025 budget that underwent very little change later before it was finally adopted.

That earlier 2025 Town of Enfield Budget, adopted by the Town Board one year ago, raised the property tax by 6.12 percent.

In a departure from the common practice of her predecessor, former Supervisor Beth Magee, Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond does not customarily accompany her Tentative Budget with a written narrative.  Nor did she do so this time. 

But in an email message to Town Board members September 8, one appended to the budget drafts, Redmond commented: “As you can see I’ve already took (sic) the liberty of making some of the painful decisions to cut things back.” 

The Supervisor continued, “Clearly we will need to discuss how to cut this further.”

Those further budget cuts, should they occur, would likely come at the September 17 meeting, or at meetings thereafter.

Additional items requested in the budget planning process—most of them by Rollins—requests not included among the items recommended by Redmond included:

• Construction of a “cold storage facility,” essentially an unheated barn to store equipment at the Highway Department, a likely mid-six-figure investment;

• An equipment wash bay at the Highway Department;

• Blacktopping the Highway Department yard and driveway;

• Similar paving in front of the Town Hall and its driveway, as well as perhaps driveway paving north of the Enfield Courthouse; and

• Construction of a storage building for the recently-purchased Highway Department generator.

Town Justice Heather Knutsen-King had also requested a heftier raise than Supervisor Redmond has recommended.  Knutsen-King and her court clerk each currently earn $16,000 annually. The Justice asked that pay for each position elevate to $18,000, a 12.5 percent increase.  The Supervisor instead held each of those raises to three percent (to $16,480), a percentage in line with those for most other elected Enfield officials.

Redmond’s recommended budget would raise salaries in 2026 for herself, for the Town Councilpersons, for the Deputy Supervisor, for the Town Clerk/Tax Collector Mary Cornell, and for Highway Superintendent Rollins.  Pay for each would rise by three percent.

The Tentative ’26 Budget would elevate the Supervisor’s pay to $27,865.   Councilpersons would earn just over $4,000.  Clerk Cornell’s combined pay would rise to $41,200.  Highway Superintendent Rollins would earn $85,274, his raised from this year’s $82,790.

Highway Superintendent’s pay had proven a hot-button topic in budget discussions last year.

In September 2024, Redmond had initially recommended five percent pay raises for both Rollins and for his Highway Department work staff.  During that first night of testy budget deliberations, Rollins had successfully negotiated higher, ten percent raises for himself and for his staff.  Rollins promised the Town extra services in return. 

The double-digit increase, especially for Rollins, drew criticism last September.  It drove this Councilperson, Robert Lynch, to later vote against the entire budget.

So far, neither the Highway Superintendent nor anyone else—other than the Town Justice—has complained about the size of this year’s proposed raises.  But outside of the elected class, a few stand to benefit more than do others.  To that point, Rollins’ subordinates in the Highway Department would each receive raises of five percent under the Supervisor’s Tentative Budget.

Questioned about whether Superintendent Rollins was comfortable with the pay raise differential between himself and his men—he’d objected to such disparate treatment as recently as last year—Redmond reported that Rollins was satisfied.  In fact, the Supervisor claimed it was Rollins, himself, who had proposed the three percent/ five percent difference.

Budgeting for health care coverage, however, could worsen the budget numbers once the Town Board revisits the tentative spending plan next week. 

The Greater Tompkins County Municipal Health Insurance Consortium (GTCMHIC) has proposed and will likely adopt later this month 18 percent increases in its premiums.  The GTCMHIC provides health insurance coverage for Rollins and for each of his staff.  Redmond said she’d included only about an 11 percent premium increase when she drew up her Tentative Budget.

 “That’s a bummer,” Redmond said, when she learned of the planned, higher GTCMHIC rate hike.

Aside from the health insurance premiums, what’s driving the projected Enfield tax levy upward this year is not just inflation; its also predicted reductions in revenues apart from the property tax.

The Supervisor’s proposal would drop anticipated Justice Court fines and forfeitures from this year’s budgeted $12,000 to only $5,000.  Redmond explained that the $7,000 cut reflects not that people are necessarily behaving themselves better, but rather it represents a downward adjustment arising from the correction of prior errors and omissions.  It’s predicted the Town will only receive $5,000 in fines this current year.

Expected mortgage tax receipts will also fall; down from $45,000 budgeted for 2025 to just $35,000 for 2026, better in line with those receipts expected to come in for the current 12 months.

“We are not getting what we’d planned on getting,” Redmond told the Town Board regarding mortgage tax.

Once again this year, the Supervisor’s budget would draw down Enfield’s bank account a bit—its fund balance—to underwrite day-to-day operations. The 2026 budget would tap $100,000 in fund balance, some of the savings derived from a nearly six-figure building permit fee paid when Applegate Road’s Norbut Solar Farm got built.  For its 2025 budget, the Town skimmed off a larger amount, $125,000, from the Norbut-fattened fund balance.

“We did allocate quite a lot of fund balance,” Redmond conceded Wednesday as to the latest-proposed six-figure draw.

The Supervisor’s strategy has always been to rely upon the Norbut money little-by-little until the Enfield Highway Garage bonds are fully repaid next year.  Highway garage bonding this upcoming, final year, 2026, will be just over $102,000.

But the contrary opinion advanced by this Councilperson, Lynch, is that new bonding will later be needed for something else.  An undetermined amount would be required, it’s argued, to build the Highway Department cold storage building that Superintendent Rollins wants.  This writer maintains that the structure stands as a priority to protect Enfield’s increasingly sophisticated machinery from the rain and the snow.

Redmond said Wednesday she’d only support the cold storage building’s construction were the Town to find grant money to cover a large portion of its cost, ideally half.

Current figures would place the 2026 Tentative Budget’s property tax increase well above the 3.26 percent ceiling that New York State calculates as this year “tax cap.”

The tax cap, though a persuasive metric to encourage municipal frugality, has become more of a symbolic benchmark in recent years.  Towns pay no penalty should their budgets exceed the cap.  Taxpayers reap no benefit should a budget comply with it.  At its August meeting, the Enfield Town Board voted to override the tax cap.

But if the Enfield Town Board were to set its own ideal taxing limit, what should it be?  Town Board members pondered that question Wednesday night.

This Councilperson, Lynch, said he’d be satisfied with the four and one-half percent levy hike.  It would match what Tompkins County’s Administration has most recently proposed for next year’s County Budget.

“I think the target should be zero,” Supervisor Redmond advanced, speaking if only partly in jest.  “I’d like two percent” the Supervisor then posited, perhaps more realistically.

The Enfield Town Board has scheduled its budget refinement for meetings on September 17, October 8, and if necessary, October 15.  Current plans call for a Public Hearing on the budget October 29.

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Budget Message Delivered… and Delegated

Tompkins County 4.5% Levy hike recommended

by Robert Lynch; September 6, 2025

[Writer’s note:  Saturday night, Sept. 6^th, a full four days after the Tompkins County Legislature had met and County Administration had presented its recommended 2026 Budget, a budget that impacts each of us, neither the County’s Communications Department nor any of this community’s media has written one word about this story.  I had not intended to write about it myself, but will now do so in view of the dearth of reporting.  Others may view the meeting differently.  I will report it as I believe it deserves to be reported. / RL]

Korsah Akumfi, Tompkins County Administrator only since January, does things differently.  And for reasons never fully explained this week, that departure from local custom includes how he fulfills his most vital public-facing responsibility of the year:  presenting his department’s recommended annual budget to the Tompkins County Legislature.

For the first time in anyone’s memory, the County Administrator didn’t present the budget himself.  Instead, Akumfi let his second-in-command do it.  Equate it to having the Vice President deliver the State-of-the-Union address.

For three-quarters-of-an-hour September 2nd, Deputy County Administrator Norma Jayne delivered to legislators and to the public the budget numbers and the explanations behind them.  She struggled.  Jayne’s halting, sometimes nervous speaking style gave testament to the likelihood that she’d been pressed into service on short notice.

As the Legislature Chair’s, Dan Klein, had turned last Tuesday’s meeting over to the County Administrator to unveil his fiscal recommendations, Akumfi, appearing only remotely via Zoom, responded, “I’m in the middle of a few things that I’m dealing with, so I will invite my deputy, Norma, to go through the presentation.”  Klein may or may not have known in advance that it would be Norma, not Korsah who would navigate the PowerPoint.

Akumfi, as County Administrator, earns $180,000 annually.  Before he was hired, Administrator’s pay was increased substantially over that of Akumfi’s predecessor, Lisa Holmes.  (Those with long memories will recall that two years ago, after Holmes had inopportunely tested positive for COVID-19, she’d delivered the budget message remotely while under self-quarantine.)

Two nights after this latest Tuesday budget presentation, and during the first of the Legislature’s many “Expanded Budget Committee” meetings—committee-of-the whole conclaves that commence with department and agency heads trudging in and defending why they need the money they want—Akumfi also appeared remotely, and spoke little.  It was Deputy Administrator Jayne who again sat with legislators at the big, oval desk and represented Administration.

“I just wanted to say, nice job, Norma; it’s not easy to step in,” Budget, Capital, and Personnel Committee Chair Mike Lane commended Jayne following her budget briefing to the full Legislature.  “I know Korsah would have been here if he could for the full presentation, but circumstances didn’t allow that,” Lane conceded.

And Lane’s words were all that would be said that night about why Akumfi was absent.  And that absence helped explain why this year’s legislative budget rollout proved so different; so much less dramatic—and indeed, understated—from presentations of the past.  The boss’s presence matters; it carries stature.

At this early stage, one shouldn’t paint the Tompkins County Budget with anything but the broadest of brushes.  Specifics needn’t be memorized; because legislators will invariably amend many of them before a final vote in November.  So here are those budget basics as Deputy Administrator Jayne presented them:

• The 2026 Recommended Budget would spend $239.8 Million, up $8.1 Million or 3.5 percent from the current 2025 budget.

• $57.3 Million would be levied in property taxes, an increase of 4.5 percent in the tax levy over that of the current year.  The percentage increase stands 1.8 percent over the (pain-free and essentially-symbolic) New York State “tax cap” of 2.7 percent, a figure that still may change.

• For the “median” homeowner in Tompkins County—a largely-worthless metric in rural places like Enfield, as it assumes a house valued at $300,000—next year’s tax bill would rise by $37.

• Tompkins County’s Solid Waste Fee would again increase, this time from $82 to $85, even though ever-stricter Solid Waste rules lead the recycling truck to take less and less stuff.

• County funding of capital projects would eat up $7.7 Million.  The investments would include preliminary spending toward the increasingly expensive $60 Million Downtown Center of Government.  Much of the office building’s cost would be incurred in future years and bonded. 

• The budget would continue the three-vehicle, limited-schedule Rapid Medical Response (RMR) emergency service into 2026, yet not expand it into a small-scale ambulance operation that some municipal advocates and departmental leaders have urged.

“The key message is despite our challenging economic condition, we’re proposing a responsible budget that exceeds the tax cap, but addresses critical needs,” Jayne told the Legislature in her introduction.

“This budget reflects the reality that sometimes responsible governance requires difficult decisions,” the Deputy Administrator concluded her PowerPoint narrative, this time apparently reading from Korsah Akumfi’s notes.

Korsah Akumfi, new to Tompkins County’s budget process this year, has adopted many new practices. Most notably he rejected early-on the long-standing Tompkins legislative tradition that starts the process in the spring with lawmaker-set targets that project maximum tax levy increases.  Getting their top-level direction, administrators have traditionally then worked backwards and whittled departmental requests in an attempt to reach those target percentages.

But instead, Akumfi bundles departmental requests first.  His chosen method produced in late-July the unrealistic worst-case forecast of an $11 Million budget deficit and tax levy increases of 20 to 40 percent. 

What Norma Jayne outlined at this month’s meeting, namely a 4.5 percent increase in the levy, stands more in line with revised estimates the County Administrator presented to the Legislature August 19.  At that August meeting, Akumfi had held out recommended levy increases of four to four-point-five percent.

One year ago, when funding constraints were also tight, Tompkins’ legislators adopted a 2025 Budget that carried a 2.72 per cent tax hike, exactly equal to the tax cap.

To legislators who must withstand the annual multi-meeting ordeal of budget preparation, Administration’s altered format and its deconstruction of familiar—though quite likely, unique-to-Tompkins County—budgeting norms (and jargon) have left many confused. “Over-Target Requests” now become “Enhancements.”  Former Legislature Chair Shawna Black was among the baffled.

“When I look at the budget book, I find it much more confusing than in years past,” Black informed Deputy Administrator Jayne last Tuesday, “because we aren’t able to clearly see what has been taken away from departments or nonprofits, or the Human Services Coalition (the group which reviews outside agency funding applications).”

“So what I would ask as we’re moving forward is that we actually have those line items of what’s been taken away, because we don’t know what we don’t know,” Black said.

Deputy Administrator Jayne explained that the “in’s and out’s,” as Black described them, are, indeed, incorporated into the budget book, only that one has to search differently to find them.

As evidence of that bewilderment, legislator Amanda Champion found it necessary to ask whether the position of Chief Equity and Diversity Officer had secured retention within the Administration’s recommended proposal.  Norma Jayne assured Champion that the job remained intact.

If there’s one outreaching initiative within the new administrative budget deserving attention—and maybe scrutiny—it may be a plan to bail out the overly-expensive, yet under-utilized Ithaca-Tompkins International Airport.  The airport’s now “international” in name only.

As outlined in Jayne’s PowerPoint, and elaborated upon within the Administrator’s 5,600-word Budget Message, a narrative placed onto the Tompkins County website at the time of Tuesday’s meeting, $1.97 Million would be funneled into airport operations during each of the next three years.  The lifeline would attempt to plug airport deficits, lower passenger rates, and make the local airport more competitive with reginal terminals in nearby, larger cities.

To resuscitate the airport and fund the initiative, the budget would draw $1.1 Million from Tompkins County’s newly-imposed sales taxes on short-term rentals, pull in another half-million by imposing room tax charges on those Airbnb-type hostels, with gather the remaining $371,000 from the property tax levy.

Still other Administrative-viewed priorities have captured their own budget lines.  They include emergency shelter assistance for the homeless, and a “County-wide Security” initiative, disclosed only in recent weeks.  It would institute magnetometer screenings and bag searches for visitors at the Tompkins County Whole Health Building and for attendees at meetings of the Legislature and its committees. 

Exceeding the state tax cap “wasn’t our first choice,” Norma Jayne said, again reading from her boss’s script.  But Albany mandates “account for nearly half of the increase,” Jayne recited.  And from what Akumfi wrote and Jayne then read, the Administrator discounts any taxpayer pain inflicted by the levy increase he recommends.

“For the median homeowner, we’re talking about $37 per year, about a dollar a week,” Akumfi’s statement qualified, and spending it “to address humanitarian crisis, maintain infrastructure and invest in our economic future,” that latter defense clearly referencing the airport.

Of course, there’s also that office building

County administrators long before Korsah Akumfi have been warned not to get ahead of the elected lawmakers who employ them.  And that demand for legislative supremacy resonated from a couple of those seated at the giant oval desk this past Tuesday night.

“We’re excited about having a recommended budget,” Budget Committee Chair Mike Lane explained before Jayne even took to the microphone.  “But… as of course we always do, we will discuss it thoroughly and make whatever changes we think should be made to the budget, not because it’s not a good budget, but because that’s what we do,” Lane cautioned.

And that they do.  Nearly a dozen meetings lie ahead to dissect what Administration has now proposed.  Money usually gets added in, not taken away.  But accumulated savings—the “fund balance,” in bureaucratic budget-speak—frequently gets tapped at the last minute to ease the tax bite.  (Fund balance management deserves a story all its own.)

“This is just a proposed budget from the County Administrator,” Shawna Black noted as she tapped the brakes a bit midway through the deputy administrator’s presentation.  “And so at the end of the day it’s up to the 14 of us.  We can add things.  We could take away.  At some point we have to balance the budget.”

“If you decide that you want to spend the fund balance, that’s…” Jayne’s thought trailed off, but then snapped back.  “Just keep in mind that every time we spend more of the fund balance, it’s harder to put that back in…. But certainly you can add items and increase the tax levy.”

Of course, taxpayers don’t like tax increases.  On the other hand robbing government’s piggy bank to the average person may seem painless.  Administrators think differently. Nonetheless, expect Akumfi’s 4.5 percent levy hike to become this year’s tax hike ceiling, never its floor.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Groton legislator Lee Shurtleff wrapped up the budget discussion, speaking more to the room as a whole than to anyone in particular, including the County Administrator whose profile was limited to the still photo on his Zoom tile.  But directed to Norma Jayne, Shurtleff remarked, “You’ve given us a solid proposal and a lot to consider.”

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Reimagining SkateGarden

by Robert Lynch; September 2, 2025

In 2024, visionary and skateboarding enthusiast Dan Woodring conceived and constructed Enfield SkateGarden.  He elicited the Town Board’s consent, helped secure a $5,000 Tompkins County parks grant, and then marshaled an army of like-minded volunteers to finish the project’s ever-changing first-phase.  A nonprofit umbrella group held weekly concerts there last fall.

Now, one year later, Woodring’s out of the picture, there’s no more parks money, SkateGarden lies dormant, and the Enfield Town Board finds itself out of ideas regarding how to placate angry neighbors while at the same time giving this municipally-owned, woodchip-covered ghost of a park a respectable second life.

“Take a bulldozer and flatten it.  That’s my idea.  It’s an eyesore,” Enfield resident Rosie Carpenter, a candidate this year for Town Board, interjected August 13, as the board she seeks to join held an impromptu, off-the-agenda discussion to address SkateGarden’s future.

Carpenter struck an immediate alliance with the man seated beside her in the gallery’s front row, John Rancich, owner of Stoneybrook apartments, the complex the abuts the Town-owned SkateGarden site to its north and rear.

“Well, it is an eyesore,” Rancich affirmed.  “And it’s an eyesore to my 14 tenants.  It’s a health hazard… Children can get hurt there.  It’s a hazard, and the Town Board doesn’t have enough land to do what they want.”

But doing what they want remains very much a question unanswered.  And during the Town Board’s 20-minute SkateGarden discussion that August night, Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond emerged as the one person in Town Government most passionate about promoting a futuristic initiative.  Aside from asking the occasional question, the Town Board’s other four members stayed silent.

Regarding the lonely half-pipe that Woodring had built, “We have that there; it’s the start of something,” Redmond said.  “But I want us to understand, it’s only a start.  Now let’s collaborate and think of how can we create something beautiful there… I really want to see something lovely there that people will use.” 

But beauty always remains in the eyes of the beholder.  And unless you’re a skateboarding fanatic, like Dan Woodring is, Enfield SkateGarden leaves very much to be desired.  There’s the half-pipe, of course, and then there’s… well:  there’s a single picnic table; and nearby there’s a tiered attempt at an amphitheater, one that never gets used anymore.  There’s a pollinator garden that was left unattended for much of the summer.  And of course, there are the wood shavings underfoot, a whole lot of wood shavings underfoot, a poor substitute for natural turf.  With no shelter and zero shade, SkateGarden is no place for a picnic.

“You know, it’s just poor planning,” Rancich told Redmond and the Board.  “If Dan was your planner, I understand entirely how it all went amok.  But he’s not here to take the blame or to pay for the mistakes, you are,” Stoneybrook’s landlord admonished the Town Board.

And that brings one to the second—and maybe the third—parts of this story:  How and when did SkateGarden architect Dan Woodring fall out of favor with the Enfield Town Supervisor?  And how and when did the Town Board commit itself to developing—and by inference, funding—a ramp-enhanced public park in downtown Enfield Center, assuming it ever had?

Dan Woodring has dreamed of reconstructing a miniaturized replica of Philadelphia’s famed “Love Park,” a concrete-covered urban space oasis that skateboarders had more or less appropriated and assigned Mecca-like reverence.  Love Park may now be gone, but its vision remains firmly ingrained in Dan Woodring’s mind, heart and soul.

“This is a classic case of it started small and it just kept building and building and building,” this Enfield Councilperson, Robert Lynch, remarked as his only notable contribution to the evening’s SkateGarden discussion, a conversation dominated by back-and-forth between Supervisor Redmond and Rancich.

Dan Woodring first approached the Enfield Town Board in March 2024.  This website’s reporting at the time stated that initial plans had called for “a wooden ramp, 24 feet long, 16 feet wide, and three feet high.”  Woodring estimated construction would require “24 sheets of plywood and some volunteer labor.”

Woodring drew the Town Board’s attention to a similar ramp employed at GrassRoots festivals and parked off-season behind Trumansburg’s Maguire dealership. Given its rudimentary construction, the ramp could easily be moved or even dismantled.  Woodring invited the Enfield Community Council (ECC) to quarter the ramp behind its own community center, but insurance issues precluded its location there.  A rider on the Town’s liability policy costs a fraction of the premium ECC would have had to pay.

To make the ramp accessible to ECC youths, the Town Board rejected siting it on a vastly larger alternate site near the present Enfield Highway Garage and instead opted to place it on a small grassy patch of Town property between the park-and-ride lot and Rancich’s apartments, across from the Town Hall. 

But month after month, as Woodring revisited the Town Board with updates, his vision evolved, and with it, the project’s scope grew.  With the help of a $5,000 Tompkins County-funded Parks and Trails grant, initial plans for a portable wooden platform gave way to an in-ground ramp made of poured concrete.  At one point, Woodring had proposed a heart-shape oval basin in tribute to Love Park.  Economies and issues of skater safety yielded to the simpler half-pipe configuration.  Volunteers poured concrete last fall.  Yet boards, boulders, and even Woodring’s cement mixer littered SkateGarden’s site through winter.

This spring, Supervisor Redmond, with the help of Councilpersons Cassandra Hinkle, Melissa Millspaugh, and the Enfield Highway Department, engineered a cleanup.  Debris was hauled away and highway crews smoothed out some of the dangerous drop-offs that Woodring’s crews had left near the half-pipe.

But at about that same time, Stephanie Redmond and Dan Woodring had an all-too-apparent, yet never-stated-in-public, falling out. 

This spring Redmond made clear to other Board members that Dan Woodring was off the project.  She more or less just declared it to be so.  Tompkins County’s parks grant program had ended, so there was no more money.  Woodring’s proposed “phase two” design for SkateGarden was informally scuttled, although no official Town Board votes were ever taken. 

And the Supervisor privately made known there’d been disagreements.  “The original project got away from those involved and we are now looking on making the location safer,” official minutes from the Board’s June 11 meeting record the Supervisor as having stated.

Dan Woodring shared his frustrations as well. 

“I feel used for the over 500 hours of manual labor, dozens of organization, hundreds of out of pocket expense, care and enthusiasm I put into your community park,” Woodring wrote this Councilperson, Lynch, in early July.  “Nobody else would give a quarter of their work year towards community. I wouldn’t have done all that if you hadn’t of agreed to a long term goal, and I feel misled and exhausted by your mistreatment,” SkateGarden’s visionary said to the Town.

Woodring’s email quoted a text message he’d received from Deputy Supervisor Greg Hutnik, Enfield’s point-person on parks.  Hutnik’s purported message stated in part:

“The town supervisor is the only one who sets the agenda, it is entirely their (sic) discretion. The town board made it clear at the last meeting that they do not want any further additions to the skate park at this time.”

Hutnik’s message continued, “I can assure you that people, including Stephanie and I, are very appreciative of your work and motivation to do the project.  You made something incredible in Enfield, and even though it’s not the full vision you had in mind, I hope you can be proud too”

“We are not working with that contractor any longer,” Redmond bluntly replied to Rancich’s criticism of SkateGarden’s status during this August’s impromptu discussion.  Quite, plainly, she referred to Woodring and the nonprofit organization he’d established.  “We’re not going to add onto the skate ramp in the sense that he had wanted to.  That’s not happening,” Redmond insisted.

“Obviously Dan has floated a lot of ideas for there,” Redmond acknowledged that night.  “They no longer seem feasible financially, and also there were things that just didn’t happen there the way we wanted it sort of tidied up after each phase,” the Supervisor maintained.  “And so we are feeling like that couldn’t go forward with the plan that he had sort of laid out in front of us.”

Repeatedly, Supervisor Stephanie Redmond spoke single-handedly on behalf of the entire Enfield Town Board, even though state law controls that a Supervisor’s powers stand limited, and that final authority always rests with the five-person Board.  The Enfield Town Board’s last recorded vote on SkateGarden was in August of last year, when members approved ground rules for Woodring’s nonprofit organization to stage weekly concerts there.   

By law, town supervisors in New York set the agendas, preside over meetings, pay bills, and address emergencies.  Their powers do not equate to those of a city mayor or a county executive.  With Enfield SkateGarden, Stephanie Redmond has chosen to exert her executive authority about as far as it reaches, if not a trifle beyond.

In reply to this writer’s, Councilperson Lynch’s, inquiry at this latest August meeting, Supervisor Redmond confirmed that the Town of Enfield has no remaining contractual ties to Woodring or his organization, obligations that would bind the Town to Enfield SkateGarden Inc. in any of its further actions.

But if fancy performance stages and heart-shape ovals do not lie in SkateGarden’s future, what does?  Supervisor Redmond tossed that question into the August night’s sky last month, begging for direction.  She didn’t always like what she heard.

“You should seriously consider what Rosie says, treating this with a bulldozer,” John Rancich reasoned, “because everyone was happy with a grass field there.  I was actually mowing some of it for you,” he said.  Rancich hinted he’d even buy the plot, but wouldn’t keep it as a skate park.

No, Supervisor Redmond tersely countered, leveling the site isn’t happening.  Nobody ever used the grassy area, the Supervisor maintained.

“We are not going along with (Woodring’s) next phases because we realized that Phase One was as much as we could handle,” Redmond informed those present.  Rather, there’ll need to be re-landscaping, the supervisor explained, Redmond attempting to speak for all of us on decisions not yet made.

“And so we are deciding to do something different with that area,” Redmond said, “and we want to know what does that look like?  What’s the vision?  And don’t say grass here because that’s not being used, and we’re asking to create a park there.”

To some of us in the room, including some Town Board members, Redmond’s self-stated initiative caught us by surprise.

But if John Rancich is to be believed, Enfield SkateGarden will indeed, soon look different.  That night he promised to erect a big fence to separate the skate park’s ramp from his own property.

Rancich has also followed through on another promise he’d made that night. Within days the landlord invited each of  Stoneybrook’s 14 tenants to attend the Town Board’s September 10 meeting “to make suggestions to the board about what you feel should be done with the ‘SkateGarden.”’

“I’ve got 14 families living there bitchin’ to me,” Rancich said.  “What am I supposed to do?”

So expect the skate park’s discussions to spill into a second month, perhaps longer, and maybe intensify.

Though quite unrelated, representatives from Ithaca’s Community Arts Partnership (CAP) later during the August meeting shared a very preliminary sketch of the community sculpture CAP will donate to Enfield and place on Town property.  The initial rendering would take the form of a 16-foot tall stainless steel clump of sunflowers surrounded by corn stalks and resting on a giant turtle.

Up until now, plans have called for placing the sculpture on property near the highway garage—where some would like another town park to be put someday.  “It is out in the middle of nowhere,” Tony, the assigned sculptor, acknowledged.  Upon the suggestion that SkateGarden would be a more fitting, visible location, others, including Redmond, welcomed the sculpture’s relocation.

But bulldozer or no bulldozer, sculpture or not, much remains for the reinvention of one man’s ever-evolving dream, a project that innocently began with a simple wooden ramp, and then spiraled out of control meeting after meeting only to reach an unceremonious dead-end; hitting that dead end while engendering hurt feelings.

“I’m not happy with this Town Board and their treatment of me as their neighbor,” John Rancich put it squarely to Enfield’s leaders sitting at their head table August 13.  “You guys have had a pretty decent idea.  You actually had a really good idea, except you chose the wrong spot.  OK?  And now you did it without talking to me.”

Supervisor Redmond, for her part, posited random thoughts:  Maybe the Enfield Community Council would welcome a “natural play structure” on the site, one that won’t fit on its own property, she opined.  Redmond saw that solitary picnic table as a start.  “That’s there; awesome,” Redmond exclaimed.

“So now, what does the Town want to happen?” the Supervisor tossed out into the room for anyone to grab.  No one did.  “What would be nice?  Would a playground be nice there?  I have no idea.”

###

Enfield’s “Peeling Paint” Fire Budget

by Robert Lynch; September 3, 2025

Long, long ago in an apparatus factory far, far away, somebody forgot how to paint a fire truck.  And because of that forgetfulness—more likely, cut-corners negligence—Enfield taxpayers may need to spend $10,000 out of next year’s budget to repaint it.

Tuesday night, September 2^nd, the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners adopted its first draft of a 2026 Enfield Fire District Budget.  The preliminary $644,631 plan would increase spending (costs minus increased revenues) by a bit over $24,000.  The budget’s tax levy would rise by 3.89 percent over that for the present year.  The 2026 tentative tax rate computes to $1.95 per thousand of assessed valuation.

By standards set in recent Enfield fire budgets, the 2026 spending proposal isn’t sexy.  It lacks glamor and inflicts minimal pain.  No new fire trucks would be bought; no staggering new bond obligations incurred.  In fact, given that its purchase principal is gradually being repaid, annual financing for Enfield’s once-controversial $830,000 pumper engine would actually go down a little.

But if one looks for a budget line item to which your precious tax dollar would notoriously fly, the proposed 2026 budget assigns “bumper sticker” prominence to Tanker 621 and to its peeling paint.

The Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) purchased Truck 621 in 2007.  As part of Enfield’s transition to fire district governance for the town’s emergency services, the EVFC gifted the truck to the Enfield Fire District last year.  The truck’s expected service life is 25 years.  It’s not due to be traded off until 2032.

There was “some lack of attention in the preparation of the metal,” Board of Fire Commissioners’’ Chair Greg Stevenson remarked after Tuesday’s meeting.  The truck’s red paint has peeled in many places away from the stainless steel to which it’s supposed to adhere.  Volunteers have at times touched up the blemishes with a paint brush.  Stainless steel shouldn’t rust, but the EVFC takes no chances.

Fire officials say it’s possible that a local paint shop could remedy 621’s problem with only a professional touch-up.  Yet they have doubts.  “I wouldn’t be surprised if a collision place wouldn’t want to sand down some of the existing paint,” Stevenson told the board.

Fire trucks are customarily made in two places and by two companies.  First, a major truck manufacturer, like International or Freightliner, manufactures the chassis and cab.  Then the chassis goes to an apparatus specialist to install the firefighting equipment. 

Think of it like placing a camper on the back of your pickup.

Paint on Tanker 621’s cab is fine.  But it’s the apparatus paint that’s flaking off.  A company named “KME” caused the problem.  The truck’s warranty has long expired. There’s no known recall.  And what’s more, Stevenson says, KME got swallowed up by the mega-conglomerate, the “REV Group.”

While it’s convenient to blame the peeling truck paint for the tax increase, the assignment of blame may prove unwarranted.  Had the commissioners not earmarked $10,000 for Truck 621’s partial repainting, it would likely have assigned the same new money to the equipment or apparatus reserve accounts.

As the proposed budget stands now, $20,000 will be assigned to the pair of reserve funds in 2026, the same as for the current year.  Had the repainting issue not arisen, commissioners would likely have put $30,000 into reserves.

During the nearly two hours of budget deliberations Tuesday, commissioners had considered putting that added $10,000 into reserves and then drawing it out for the painting only if needed.  But they feared complications.

“Taking it out could be difficult,” Stevenson warned concerning a reserve withdrawal.  Doing so, he said, might require a referendum.

“If the money’s hanging around, you’ll spend it,” Fire Commissioner Barry Rollins, Enfield’s Highway Superintendent, cautioned.  If it’s locked away in a reserve account, Rollins concluded, it’s harder to raid.

The preliminary 2026 Enfield Fire District Budget passed the Board of Commissioners by a vote of four-to-one.  Commissioner Donald Gunning quietly voted no.  Gunning did not explain his opposition.

The fire budget won’t become final until after an October 21 public hearing.  Commissioners have until early-November to make any final revisions.  The Enfield Town Board no longer holds any control over how much the Enfield Fire District spends or on what.

In October of last year, the Board of Fire Commissioners approved a record budget that carried a whopping 28.3 per cent tax increase.  First-ever bonding payments for the $830,000 pumper got the blame then.  This time around, because the ten-year bond’s principal is slowing getting retired, the truck’s bond scheduled payback, principal plus interest, has shrunk from $126,576 to $115,744.

Truck 621’s repainting may be unavoidable, but there’s another budget sticking point that Commissioners created for themselves.  Affirming a tentative decision made at a budget drafting session two weeks earlier, the board set aside funds to potentially award the Fire District’s Secretary and Treasurer each 50 percent raises.

The preliminary budget assigns money to raise each appointed officer’s pay from its current $5,000 to $7,500.  For perspective, the Fire District had only paid the Secretary $2,000 in 2024.

Both Secretary Amanda Walrad and Treasurer Jenna Oplinger are recent-hires.  Each replaced former officers who resigned earlier this year, each resigning staffer citing the job’s pressing workload.  Walrad and Oplinger each volunteer with the EVFC.  Former District Treasurer Cortney Bailey did not.

“I don’t think that obligates us to make that expenditure,” Stevenson said of the boosted budget lines for Walrad and Oplinger.  “It enables us.  It does not compel us.”

The commissioner’s chair had said at the board’s August 19 meeting that the raises for the Secretary and Treasurer would be negotiated with each officer.

“We’re on the low end,” Stevenson said of the Secretary’s and Treasurer’s compensation during the mid-August meeting.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Commissioner Robyn Wishna remarked at the time concerning the raises.

By law, the fire commissioners, themselves, serve for free.

Still another spending change within the Enfield Fire District’s proposed budget may initially raise eyebrows, yet allow them to relax a bit upon a closer look.

By a three-to-two vote, Commissioners Tuesday approved a continued one-year lease with the EVFC for use of its fire station, a structure kept in the fire company’s possession for legal and financial reasons.  Notable in the new lease, Fire District compensation to the EVFC would rise from its current $75,000 to nearly $100,000.

But Commissioners make clear that the 33 percent increase deceives at first glance.  Upon the advice of attorneys, the new lease would transfer to the fire company a host of obligations; from buildings and grounds maintenance to pest control and trash removal to buying water and soda for volunteers.

The fire district would still pay to heat and light the fire station.  But when the redirected costs all got added up, the lease carried with it only an inflation-reflective 2.7 percent rental increase.

Barry Rollins had problems with the rounding-up that Chairman Stevenson had attempted for simplicity.  Instead, Rollins nickeled and dimed every adjustment line in the proposed lease.  After doing so, the amended document reduced an initially-rounded one-year lease payment of an even $100,000 to a precise $99,639, a mere $361 less.

After he’d performed that sharpened-pencil refinement, Rollins joined Gunning in voting against the lease altogether.

One lingering point that the Enfield Fire District’s proposed 2026 Budget failed to resolve Tuesday was how and where firefighter physicals will be performed long-term. 

In March, Commissioners deferred moving physicals from Trumansburg Family Medicine to an on-site provider arguing that their budget lacked the money to underwrite the change.  But under the 2026 proposal just drafted, it still wouldn’t support the transfer. The same $6,000 would be set aside, no more.

“If we’re ever forced by OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) to go to a medical director, it’ll cost us more than $6,000,” Stevenson warned.  But, he added, “I don’t see that happening immediately.” 

And with that, the Board of fire Commissioners kicked the can of medical migration down the road.

###

Posted Previously:

TC Legislature may add Guards, Mags

by Robert Lynch; August 26, 2025

Upon learning of the news, one former Tompkins County official greeted it this way:  “Welcome to the Police State.”

A legislative committee Tuesday recommended a major hardening of building and meeting security for Tompkins County Government.  As one key component, security guards and screening devices—wands and/or magnetometers—would confront attendees to all Tompkins County Legislature and legislative committee meetings.

Key members of the Legislature’s Public Safety Committee made no secret of why they’d endorsed County Administration’s security recommendation.  They fear political violence.

“There’s a national trend of people being frustrated with government and with people struggling with mental health issues,” legislator Shawna Black, the committee’s strongest supporter of the new security measures, told colleagues at the August 26 session.  “And so I think it’s important for people who are at this table as well as for our staff to feel safe whenever they come to work, and that hasn’t always happened.”

The resolution won support by a four-to-one committee vote Tuesday.  Its text was not made public prior to the meeting, nor was it readily available that day other than in legislative chambers.  But based on what committee members disclosed during their discussions, the proposal would authorize hiring seven new security guards and station them at selected building entrances at specific times. 

The resolution would also purchase a magnetometer for the DeWitt Park ground floor entrance to the Legislature’s meeting place.  And it would station guards at both the Whole Health and Mental Health Department buildings, bolstering existing security at that latter location.

The security spending would draw $138,000 from the current budget’s contingency account to cover 2025 expenses.  Additional “over-target” spending of $610,000 would cover expected costs next year.

“This was something we were asked to put together by County Administration to help address some of what were considered immediate needs for security and public safety coverage in some of our buildings, including having staff for the Legislature meetings and  also for our committee meetings,”  Michael Stitley, Tompkins County’s Director of Emergency Response, told the committee. 

Stitley said County Administration had directed his office to construct the security plan.  County Administrator Korsah Akumfi, hired only last January but quickly and eagerly assuming his leadership stature, attended the meeting and defended the security measures he’d recommended.

Security is not just for legislators and employees, “but for members of the public as well,” Akumfi insisted.

“They need to feel safe, they need to feel protected, and they need to feel guided,” Akumfi stated.  “A sense of security that is visible around the county seat area is very helpful,” the Administrator asserted.

Akumfi broadened expected benefits beyond just for meetings and for the buildings, extending them “for the community as a whole,” for instance, to places like DeWitt Park, not far from the 19^th Century building where lawmakers meet.

But take a step back for a moment and ponder the Administrator’s statement.  One could analogize the same principal of community benefit to the deployment National Guard troops on the Washington Mall, or in Downtown Los Angeles or Chicago.

The Department of Emergency Response’s recommended staffing plan backed by the committee would not provide full-time guard-duty at legislative chambers. It would only do so during meetings of the Legislature and its committees.  After-hours guard staffing would rotate somewhat.  Guards would secure the Whole Health and Mental Health Departments when those offices hold evening counseling sessions, yet seek to coordinate health departmental schedules with nights when the Legislature meets and avoid staff being needed two places at once.

As part of the plan, staffing would harden at the Mental Health facilities on Ithaca’s East Green Street.  Security would extend bag and visitor searches to outside the front lobby and just inside the front door.  Security at Whole Health would be something new. 

Employees paid by the State Courts system already search those entering Tompkins County’s Main Courthouse and have done so for decades.  Guards and Magnetometers showed up at the County-supervised Human Services Building about a year ago.

Tuesday’s resolution left unclear whether some of the proposed added spending would cover existing security measures at the Mental Health and Human Services buildings.

“I don’t want people to think that government is any more or less safe than any other workplace,” Republican legislator Mike Sigler qualified.  “This is bigger than I had anticipated,” Sigler said of the seven-person hiring plan and its expected cost.

Republican committee members Sigler and Lee Shurtleff each joined Democrats Shawna Black and Veronica Pillar in supporting the security resolution.  But Sigler and Shurtleff did so with reservations.  Each voted his support arguing the proposal deserved the full Legislature to weigh in.  Yet neither promised he’d give the resolution his final support.

Public Safety Committee Chair Rich John cast the committee’s only dissent.  But he, too, remained torn as to how he’d vote when the Legislature considers it, likely on October 7.

“The trouble I’m wrestling with if this passes and we put it in place, we will have more security on any given day for the County than we do Sheriff’s deputies on the street,” Sigler concluded. “That’s hard to reconcile for me.  There should be a way to secure a building like I secure my house.”

To some extent, that’s already been done.  At a meeting in December of last year, the Legislature authorized several building hardening measures that a security study had recommended.  Among other things, visitors to the Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins Building, the Legislature’s home, can now only enter by first “buzzing in” a legislative clerk.  Similar security protocols exist at the “Old Jail” offices next door.

But legislative staffers routinely disable the buzz-in system prior to public meetings.  What’s proposed now is not so much a building security measure as it is one founded on an inherent suspicion of anyone who seeks to participate or observe public democracy’s  daily tasks.  That’s a far different matter.

The City of Ithaca has long employed magnetometer screenings and bag searches.  Security tightened after a heckler once tossed his shoe at former Ithaca Mayor Carolyn Peterson during a Common Council meeting. 

“If someone is going to come in here and harm any of us, whether it be us or our employees, this will hopefully be a deterrent,” Shawna Black said as she referenced the new security measures she supported.  “I know other communities and other municipalities have taken steps before us, and we tried to put it off a little bit, but I hope that we do move forward with this because I am afraid that if we don’t, something tragic could happen to us.”

Black asked County Attorney Maury Josephson whether Tompkins County incurs legal risk by not instituting tougher safeguards.  Josephson replied it’s a question of negligence law:  did government exercise an adequate “duty of care,” a standard that he admitted is “hard to define with precision.”

“I would imagine if there were a significant shooting event, where there were deaths, one or more deaths or serious injuries, and there was not security, that the County could face a hefty liability in those situations,” Josephson opined.

Shawna Black claimed that if one considers “threats” read in word but not conveyed in deed, public antipathy against those we elect locally—including her—has grown of late.  Black claimed that for her, “concerning emails” have multiplied “20-fold, even from last year.”

“I don’t know this is getting us where we need to go,” Public Safety Committee Chair Rich John observed of what the committee that afternoon had recommended.  John recalled his serving as a congressional intern decades ago and having then roamed freely under the Washington Capitol dome, security almost nonexistent.  Security’s much different there now, he said.  Maybe it needs to be here as well.

“Unfortunately, it seems like our society has just fundamentally changed since when I was an intern,” Rich John lamented, “in that the acceptability of atrocious behavior is now allowed and particularly by a lot of political leaders, where we should know better and we don’t.”

Rich John didn’t name names.

Whether necessary or not, the new security people and expensive things proposed for Tompkins County’s facilities come at a price, a significant one.  Lee Shurtleff cautioned that adding $610,000 to next year’s budget would bring with it a more than one percent increase in the tax levy.

“It’s money that doesn’t do anything,” Rich John acknowledged.  Yes, it protects a few from potential harm that may come—or may never come.  That said, John concluded, “I doesn’t provide services to constituents, other than when they attend a meeting, perhaps.”

###

Ithaca Schools’ messy, measured cell phone ban

by Robert Lynch; August 22, 2025

Yes, it would be simpler if the principal or her assistant just grabbed phones away at the start of school, locked them up in her office, and didn’t give them back until dismissal.  It would be easier, and also probably cheaper.  But the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) doesn’t want to do it that way.

This coming Tuesday, August 26^th, at a meeting that comes only about a week before the start of class, and with the imposition of a state-mandated, bell to bell ban on student cell phone use then to take effect, the Ithaca Board of Education is expected to adopt rules to implement Albany’s hastily-enacted prohibition.  Most likely, the ICSD will issue high-tech, signal-canceling pouches to students.  Pupils would put their phones within those Velcro-sealed pouches, stuff the pouches into their backpacks, and then keep them there throughout the school day.  That’s the plan.

“Now, don’t take them out, Abigail and Aiden.  Please.  Scout’s honor?”  Sure.

The 21^st Century classroom environment has changed.  Unless you learn there, work there, or visit there, you may not comprehend the transformation.  Some say the change accelerated on the eve of the pandemic.  A near-parasitic attachment has now glued the learner to his or her electronic device. Yes, it’s an addiction, an unhealthy one.  And yes, the habit’s tough to break.  The teenager of today has never known life differently.

“I used to joke and say that my grandbaby could watch YouTube videos before she could speak,” School Board President Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell told the Board of Education August 12. ”And that was a fact, that wasn’t a joke.”

“We are still so embedded in using our phones in every part of the day,” Board colleague Erin Croyle later remarked.  “I support not having cell phones in school,” Croyle affirmed.  But then she added, “My kids hate me because I’m always telling them no screens and they’re not having phones.”

“All these things are dependent on a certain level of student trust, some level of culture shift,” Eversley Bradwell cautioned in matching the new rules to ingrained behavior.  “It’s a generation that’s grown up with these devices.  How we change that, that’s going to be the real question.”

For nearly an hour during their August 12 meeting, ICSD educators agonized over how best to implement Governor Kathy Hochul’s initiative to keep smart phones away from students as they learn.  The ban was ratified by the State Legislature in May as part of New York’s yearly budget.  Toward achieving compliance, ICSD Board members talked at length August 12, yet never achieved consensus.

The Ithaca Board of Education that night gave perfunctory, performative “first reading” acknowledgement—yet it stopped short of line-by-line approval—to a vaguely-worded compliance policy, one that would pretty much sanction any remedial measures the school district would choose to take:

“The ICSD Board of Education prohibits the use of personal internet-enabled devices by all students in preK-12 during the school day and on school grounds,” the draft policy states in part. 

The draft document continues:

“The District shall provide at least one method for students to store internet-enabled devices on-site during the school day.  Storage options include, but are not limited to the following:  school-issued secure pouches/containers, secured lockers, and/or administrative office storage.  Student backpacks are not considered adequate for storage purposes.”

That said, the internet-blocking, yet darned easy to open Velcro pouches will likely become the default method of smartphone confinement.  Why?  Because as was revealed at the meeting, administrators have already bought them.  The pouches cost the district about $20 each, $20,000 in total, partially reimbursed by the state.

“I guess I’m a little bit surprised that the pouches were already purchased,” Board member Adam Krantweiss inquired at the early-August session.  “I’m curious about the cost of that.”  In short, shouldn’t the Board of Education have decided the issue first?

In Krantweiss’ opinion, quite simply, Administration put the cart before the horse, or more aptly stated, the purchase before the policy.

“We knew there was going to be a rush,” Kari Burke, ICSD’s Director of Athletics and Wellness and the District’s point-person on cell phone policy-writing, told Krantweiss.  Not only is Ithaca buying the Hochul-compliant pouches, so, too, are many other districts, she said

“We didn’t want to be waiting in the queue,” Eversley Bradwell concurred, defending the arguably presumptive purchase.

“We knew we had to do something,” School Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown weighed in.  “I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to it either,” Dr. Brown added.  “But we are being compliant with what I see as a paternalistic and oppressive law.”

Ouch!  Dr. Brown’s words revealed much.  Not only students, but also many educators and parents dislike the cell phone ban that reelection-eyeing Hochul muscled through the Legislature last spring. Some “caregivers”—the newly-PC synonym for “parents”—believe cell phone access enables quicker, better student notification in the event of a school shooting, even though many in law enforcement disagree.  Parents like to helicopter their kids.  And there’s the heavy-hand-of-Albany argument too.  Eversley Bradwell said some districts are considering lawsuits.

At a pre-election candidates’ forum May 15, Madeline Cardona, subsequently elevated to a one-year school board term, voiced concern about the cell phone ban.  She warned it might compromise student safety.  Cardona remained mostly silent during the board’s August 12 discussions.

Todd Fox, a conservative elected to the ICSD Board in the taxpayer-driven, back-to-basics boomlet of 2024, came to the early-August meeting as the cell phone ban’s most ardent defender.  But Fox questioned the Velcro pouches’ effectiveness and the wisdom behind the district’s buying them.  Each board member had been given a sample pouch.  Fox waved his around as a prop.

“My concern is, they’re not going to use these,” Fox asserted during his show-and-tell. “They’re big.  It’s bulky… If I was a student, I wouldn’t carry this.”

“We bought these because we had to comply with the law,” Fox conceded.  “What I’m saying is we didn’t need to purchase these because I don’t think they’re going to work.”

And then, Todd Fox argued, there’s the issue of student compliance. Velcro pouches entail about the lowest level of achievement predictability permitted under Hochul’s law.

“How does this stop kids from using their phones?” Todd Fox asked.  “What I’m curious about is what’s to stop them in the middle of class kind of just opening this up and pulling their phone out,” Fox said, holding the pouch.

“Besides the obvious of their knowing that they may be violating a policy or norm in the classroom setting,” Kari Burke replied, attempting a plausible, though strikingly ingenuous answer.  She then added, “The Velcro is a bit of a deterrent because it’s obviously pretty loud.”

“This seems like an adult solution to a kid’s problem.” Fox concluded of the pouch idea.  “Kids are looking at this like, ‘You gotta’ be kidding me.  I’ll put it in my backpack.”

What validates Todd Fox’s suspicion are the tepid enforcement procedures currently envisioned by the ICSD. 

“No student will be suspended if the only reason for taking such action is the student’s violation of this policy,” the draft document explicitly prescribes.

The proposed policy also speaks of a “common set of tiered responses” for those who violate the rule.  It also qualifies that:

“The Superintendent shall emphasize equitable, restorative practices when enforcing this policy and ensure that responses considered punitive in nature do not disproportionately affect protected groups or exacerbate inequity.”

A three-page document appended to the proposed policy details “Restorative Justice Supports and Suggestions” for enforcing the ban.

The referenced document advises that when a student takes out a phone:  1) Stay calm and use a supportive approach; 2) Offer a gentle reminder about the new regulation and invite a brief dialogue; and 3) Check in with the student and ask ”What do you need right now?”

And should a student have “broken an agreement or classroom norm,” the document advises instructors to pose questions like: 1) “What happened?”; 2) “What were you thinking or feeling at the time?”; 3) “Who was affected by your phone use?”; 4) “What part of our school expectations did you go against?”; and 5) “What do you need to do to make things right?”

Most with logic gained in the real world, far outside the educational bubble can find the problem here. 

“I see this as a multi-minute conversation with any student who then brings out a cell phone during class,” board member Jacob Shiffrin observed.  “And I don’t see how that’s feasible, so I’m struggling to understand.”

“There’s always a place for restorative conversations in that situation,” Superintendent Brown insisted.

Stressing what he termed “the addictive nature of cell phones,” Board President Eversley Bradwell said, “I never want to be in a situation where I’m being punitive for someone who relapses.”  He added, “For me, it is restorative.  It has to be from a place of love… When people are struggling for cultural change, the response is not to be punitive.  The response is not to be regressive.  The response is to be restorative.”

Largely based on the fine lines of enforcement, the Board of Education postponed its specific policy endorsements until its meeting on the 26th.

Aside from the Velcro pouches, other compliance options do exist.  So-called “Yondr” [a brand name] magnetic-locking pouches came up in discussion.  They’d cost more, yet provide greater assurance of  proper enforcement.  A Yondr locking device, presumably stationed at the door, would seal the phone-holding bags upon student arrival, and then release the magnet at day’s end.  But Yondr technology is not perfect.  Students can buy magnet releases online for as little as $6.

“Students are incredibly clever,” Burke advised her board.  They can buy the unlocking device “and have a nice side business unlocking other students’ pouches.”

State rules also allow learners to keep their phones in their lockers all day, the Board was told.  But welcome to the high school culture of 2025, one where the pupil doubles as a packhorse.  “Kids walk around with all their stuff all day,” Erin Croyle reported.

Eversley Bradwell shared one novel idea a few districts have tried.  It’s most bizarre; painting the entire school with radiofrequency-blocking paint.  “Please don’t do that,” he said the State Education Department has advised.

And back to this story’s original idea—and it’s permitted within Ithaca’s draft policy—bell-to-bell phone confiscation.  But as far as ICSD’s concerned, it’s a non-starter.

“We do not issue these devices to students,” Kari Burke reminded the board of the phones.  “We do not want to take them off of their person.  We do not want to be responsible for them.”

“That comes with all kinds of liability,” the board president said as to administrative sequestration.  “We’ve heard feedback from parents:  ‘No, I don’t want that; I don’t want you having my child’s phone while they’re in the school day,’” Eversley Bradwell said caregivers have told him. “I would feel uncomfortable holding—having the school be liable for people’s property for a significant amount of time,” the board president said.

The proposed ICSD cell phone policy would carve limited exceptions, allowances to students needing phones for insulin monitoring, for translation to English, or to those responsible for another family member’s care.

Exceptions aside, and all obstacles considered, Board member Karen Yearwood offered perhaps the best idea.  It starts at home.

“We as adults should be responsible in guiding our children,” Yearwood maintained.  “Why are the students bringing the phone to school unless they need it for any medical reasons?” Yearwood asked.

“It’s going to be messy,” Board President Eversley Bradwell predicted in finding the cell phone ban’s sweet spot.  “That’s just a fact.  It’s going to be messy.”

###

Enfield Chief expands EMS response, decries TC dispatching

by Robert Lynch; August 20, 2025

The stock price of Tompkins County’s 911 dispatching system did not gain value in Enfield Tuesday night.

“There seems to be a real issue with the County,” Enfield Fire Chief Jamie Stevens broached the subject bluntly during the early minutes of the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners meeting August 19.

And with Chief Stevens’ words, a session whose focus was expected to bring a first peek at  next year’s Enfield Fire District budget rewrote its lead headline to one far less fiscal and far more a matter of human injury, if not life-and-death.

Chief Stevens expressed to Commissioners his displeasure with Tompkins County 911 Dispatch, the emergency operations phone center that receives emergency calls, prioritizes them, and then sends out ambulances and volunteer rescue squads according to perceived need.  Based on his involvement with an in-home medical emergency the weekend before, the chief concluded the current system is overly-rigid, arbitrarily applied, and disproportionately reliant on what’s read from a book rather than what’s found in the field.

And because of that incident, Jamie Stevens announced his decision. 

“I’m now responding to all EMS calls, including ‘Alpha’ calls,” the Fire Chief enounced. 

By his orders, Enfield Rescue Squad volunteers will now be sent routinely to those second-to-the-bottom types of emergencies, to medical events to which they hadn’t in recent times been summoned.  Up until now, the Rescue Squad had only been activated by the 911 Center on its determination of the next-higher level of emergency, the “Bravo” call, and to call levels more serious.

Before Tuesday’s discussion had ended and the meeting had moved on, not only Stevens, but also Board of Fire Commissioners Chair Greg Stevenson and Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) President Dennis Hubbell had all joined in their criticism of the Tompkins County’s 911 Dispatch unit and of the Department of Emergency Response (DOER) that oversees it.

“They do a poor, poor job of it,” Stevenson characterized the 911 Center’s performance. “They don’t listen; they want to argue,” Stevenson complained. 

“I have significant concerns about the County being able to manage what they have.  I hate to think what it would be like if they had an ambulance service,” Stevenson continued.

Toward that end, the Department of Emergency Response had prepared and submitted to Tompkins County legislators this past May a plan that would vastly expand the County’s Rapid Medical Response (RMR) program, now in its second year of implementation.  The expansion would include a limited ambulance operation that would provide basic life support and hospital transport services.  Its goal would be to gap-fill an overstretched Bangs Ambulance service as well as ambulance services operated by several municipalities, principally by Dryden and Trumansburg.

The “Enhanced RMR” proposal currently faces a rough governmental ride.  DOER’s plan would increase the service’s funding nearly six-fold.  Key lawmakers warn that Tompkins County just doesn’t have the money to fund it.

The heart of Tuesday night’s complaints involved the 911 Center’s doggedly-followed “Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD) Codes,” the ones guiding dispatchers when they assign the severity level of each 911 call.  The six categories range from “Omega” calls (non-medical public assistance) through codes “Alpha,” “Bravo,” “Charlie,” “Delta,” and “Echo.” (Note the alphabetical advancement of the final five codes.) 

According to a DOER PowerPoint slide shared with county and local lawmakers in October 2023, threats to life would be assigned “Echo” status.  The “Alpha” code would be given to “non-emergent, minor injuries,” those where a patient was merely “sick and injured.”  By contrast, “Bravo” calls would elevate to “emergent minor injuries,” where someone “falls with bleeding, striking head, etc.,” medical events that may require transport to an emergency room.

The 911 Center’s categorization impacts not only whether a volunteer rescue squad will be activated, but also the sophistication of ambulance equipment and personnel deployed.  It also affects whether the ambulance is sent “hot,” with lights flashing ad sirens blaring; or “cold,” proceeding quietly, at normal highway speeds.

The weekend incident that raised Chief Stevens’ ire and prompted his EVFC edict took place at a private residence.  It involved a patient with a perceived hip injury whose host called the 911 Center, the caller familiar with the fire service and 911 protocols.

As the Fire Chief and the Commissioners’ Chair pieced details together after Tuesdays meeting had ended, the subject caller had phoned 911 dispatch. The caller had described the patient’s condition.  The 911 dispatcher accordingly assigned the “Alpha” severity status.  A Bangs Ambulance was sent to the scene, but without lights or sirens… or a paramedic.

As minutes passed, the patient showed increasing signs of injury, an injury likely requiring paramedic-level treatments.  The caller phoned back and urged an elevated response. 

“We don’t upgrade calls,” the dispatcher firmly told the caller.  At that point, the caller enlisted Fire Chief Stevens’ assistance.

“I am the Fire Chief, and I want the call upgraded,” Stevens sternly informed the 911 Center.

At that point, as officials later informed Tuesday’s meeting, the dispatcher backed down, Enfield Rescue was alerted, and a second, better-staffed and equipped Bangs Ambulance was sent.

Last weekend’s botched response wasn’t the first time such an error has occurred, Chief Stevens recalled.  One time, he said, “I went on an Alpha call that happened to be a full cardiac arrest.”

Neither Enfield’s rescue squad nor most others respond to the lowest-level “Omega” calls, ones that may not require any medical attention at all.  Company President Hubbell equated the typical Omega call to complaining about a “toothache.”

Multiple officials within the Enfield fire service recalled Tuesday that the six-levels of EMD codes were put in place in the early-2000’s at the request of Tim Bangs, President of the private Bangs Ambulance service, Tompkins County’s largest transport agency.  And those officials allege Bangs requested the coding protocol for both professional and legal protection. 

“The problem is years ago Tim Bangs and his attorney requested the County to do this,” Stevenson told Commissioners.

But EVFC President Hubbell also places blame on the emergency dispatchers themselves and on the arbitrary discretion they employ.

Hubbell remembers that service as a 911 dispatcher used to require one’s holding an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) certification.  No longer.  A dispatcher qualifies by having acquired a largely textbook- and lecture-based Emergency Medical Dispatch certification.  One completes a course at the Fire Academy in Montour Falls, takes the test, and then starts answering calls.

“You do well on your test, but you have no real fire or EMS service experience,” Hubbell complained.  “It’s like having a truck driver who doesn’t have a license.”

The company president Tuesday endorsed the heightened local response protocols that Chief Stevens imposed effective with Tuesday’s meeting.  Yet Hubbell concedes those rules have a downside. They will summon volunteers more frequently and place increased strain upon each member’s time and commitment.

“I agree with what we’re doing,” Hubbell stated.  “It’s going to cover our butt.”

At the same time as the Board of Fire Commissioners was addressing dispatching, County Administrator Korsah Akumfi in downtown Ithaca was briefing the Tompkins County Legislature on his progress in refining next year’s requested Tompkins County Budget and in narrowing an earlier-forecast $11 Million budget deficit.

As it stood that night, Akumfi still forecast a $4 Million to $4.5 Million budget shortfall.  Yet among the programs retained in his draft calculations, Akumfi said, was “the Rapid Medical Response service, as is.”

Those final two words hold meaning.  If they are taken at face value, Akumfi’s budget, to be finalized for legislators next week and shared with the public after Labor Day, would not include the more expensive RMR enhancements that DOER has strongly lobbied for.  DOER’s initiative, if adopted, would boost the RMR annual budget from its present $544.828 to more than $3 Million.

County-run Rapid Medical Response currently operates only during daytime hours and only on weekdays.  The enhancements the Department of Emergency Response seeks would expand the service to nights and weekends.  And though its rules stand slightly at odds with the dispatching codes, Enfield fire officials report that the RMR vehicles, staffed by EMT’s do, indeed, answer Alpha-level calls.  And they respond using lights and sirens.

Had enhanced RMR been operating on the night of the Enfield Fire Chief’s publicized emergency, RMR might have then responded.  Still, its lone after-hours van might have been deployed elsewhere in the county that night, rendering its availability meaningless.  And the RMR unit may have had only an EMT on board, not a more-skilled paramedic, a professional authorized to administer a higher level of care and provide more specific medications.

And any new ambulances requested to bolster RMR’s stature would only provide basic life support and hospital transport, not advanced life support, were it needed.

And, of course, the dispatch system would remain the chain’s weakest link.  Heightened emergency response is only as effective as the dispatcher who requests it. 

Enfield is not the first local fire company to expand its responses into Alpha-level emergencies.  Most of Tompkins County’s fire companies have already done so, Chief Stevens stated after the meeting.  Enfield and Lansing, he said, were the final holdouts to expand into this (supposedly) less-serious status of medical events, less-serious, that is, if you can believe that the 911 dispatcher is correct—which, of course, has become the problem.

The Board of Fire Commissioners came close Tuesday to formally endorsing Chief Stevens’ expanded activation rules through passing a resolution. The board stopped short of doing so at the last minute, concluding that a unanimous, informal expression of consensus stood sufficient.

“It’s a shame we have to address our policies to make up for the poor performance on the other end,” Chairman Stevenson remarked as the board ended its discussion of 911 Dispatch and moved on to other business.

“Is the County ambulance the right decision?” Stevens asked fire commissioners, the fire chief implying that such a service would not be.  Can life-and-death decisions “be made by one phone call,” Stevens asked?

But for Enfield, the Fire Chief’s weekend call may have made a long-term difference.  Enfield EMT’s will now be called out more often.  The community’s rescue squad will have an added presence.  Expect the fire station door to open more frequently. 

And yes, expect Enfield fire officials to urge a change in what may have become an imperfect Emergency Medical Dispatch coding system, not to mention the way that system’s getting applied.

###

“Nickel and Diming” toward a tolerable Tompkins tax

by Robert Lynch; August 20, 2025; additional reporting August 21, 2025

Rest assured, Tompkins County, your county tax bill will not rise by the 20 to 40 percent that a worst-case budget scenario, unveiled in late-July, had portended.  Something like a four-to-six percent increase now seems more likely.  That said, your personal contribution toward keeping our county’s government solvent and humming stands likely to take a bigger bite out of your wallet next January than in years past.

Revised projections, detailed by County Administrator Korsah Akumfi to the Tompkins County Legislature Tuesday night, cut by more than half the roughly $11 Million deficit he’d earlier forecast following a publicly-shrouded Budget Retreat legislators attended July 23.  As updated to the Legislature at the August 19 meeting, the Administrator now forecasts a deficit of $4 Million to $4.5 Million.

“How I interpret the process that we adopted is nickeling and diming the departments and agencies and taking $50 from here, $100 there, a thousand from here,” Akumfi described his new style of budget crafting.

“We evaluated the numbers, we as a team… and we have as of now been able to close the gap down to about $4 Million; $4.5 Million,” the Administrator said.

At a July 24 meeting of the Tompkins County Council of Governments (TCCOG), held one day after the Retreat that presumably only legislators and government staff had attended, Akumfi had shared two scenarios.  The more restrained of the two, a “Maintenance of Effort” budget would have kept current programs in place, but incurred an $11 Million deficit, one that could only be closed via a 20 percent increase in the property tax levy.

An alternative spending plan, one that would tack on an added $12 Million in spending to underwrite a list of “Enhancement Requests,” would have pushed the 2026 tax levy over that for the current year by a whopping 40.3 percent.

Korsah Akumfi is new to Tompkins County and to its budget process this year.  But even he understood that tax increases of the magnitude he’d warned of stand far beyond reason.  Instead, at the July Retreat, and also the day later, he’d shared a PowerPoint slide listing alternative levy increases ranging from four to ten percent and predicting the financial impact of each.

“Our goal… is to be able to present a proposed budget that falls within four to six percent,” the Administrator told legislators Tuesday based on his updated fiscal calculations. “We are now hovering around about six-and-a-half percent.  So we still have a few days to go.”

Those “few days,” Akumfi predicted, will likely end this Friday.  The Administrator plans to reach final recommended figures by August 22, compile budget books for lawmakers to peruse privately next week, and then unveil his recommendations to the public Tuesday, September second, one day after Labor Day.

But at that point, the 2026 Tompkins County Budget will still be far from final.  Legislators first will invite department heads and agency representatives to a series of meetings for each to plead his or her individual hardship.  Lawmakers will then review budget lines to the point of micro-management.  A final budget won’t be put to a public hearing until late-October, followed by the Legislature’s vote in November.

Whatever the finally settled-upon tax levy increase, the percentage is bound to climb above the 2.72 percentage point rise legislators last year adopted for the 2025 County Budget now in place.

“It’s a moving target,” Legislature Chair Dan Klein aptly described Tompkins County’s confusing, labyrinthian budget process, one made even more convoluted by the new Administrator’s newly-preferred math.  “This is a process, these are snapshots in the moment, changes almost every day at this point,” Klein cautioned.

It’s next-to-impossible to compare this year’s Tompkins County budget preparation to those of years past.  That’s because Korsah Akumfi has insisted his budget flow from the bottom-up and not from the top-down.

Shortly after assuming his employment here in January, Korsah Akumfi made known his distaste for Tompkins County’s two-decade-old practice of setting legislatively-directed “target” tax increases, and then squeezing spending to fit within the target framework.  Instead, the new Administrator prefers to first solicit departmental and agency spending requests rather open-endedly, compare them with spending for past years, trim as he deems appropriate, and then hand the Legislature whatever the calculator finally registers.

So it’s of little surprise to the financially astute that a “target-free” budget like this year’s has more headroom for economy—for the fiscal balloon to deflate, so to speak—because those economies were never dictated at the outset.

Nonetheless, department heads and agency leaders never like the prospect of spending less money, and our new Administrator has found that out.

“Speaking to the agencies, we have had several pushbacks,” Akumfi acknowledged to legislators Tuesday, “and we are also pushing back to their pushback to try and present something that is reasonable.”

Something new that Korsah Akumfi has attempted this year, as he informed the Legislature, is a sort of five-year lookback at departmental spending.  It appears to be his way of gauging how one department compares to another and whose increases may be out of line.

“So the goal has been to evaluate the departments’ requests as well as agencies as compared to actual expenditures the previous five years and evaluate the reasonableness of the estimate, both revenues and expenditures,” Akumfi said.

Based on that five-year lookback, Akumfi claimed he could trim projected spending below what was first forecast in some categories.  The administrator did not identify which departments suffered the curtailments.

Of course, inflation kicks costs up, perhaps more in one department than in another.  And fluctuations with state and federal aid can affect departments differently.  As such, determining exactly how effective, practical, and successful Akumfi’s new style of budgeting will turn out remains to be seen.

Just a few weeks ago, when the earlier-predicted $11 Million deficit loomed large, Administration blamed the shortfall on a predicted $5 Million increase in spending and a $6 Million loss of revenue.  Now, in an effort to partially close the revenue side, Akumfi told legislators Tuesday he’ll recommend $2.7 Million be drawn from what had been set aside last year in a “tax stabilization” reserve.  $1.5 Million of that withdrawal would be used to pad down the tax levy; the remaining $1.2 Million would go to unspecified “one-time expenses.”

Akumfi’s Tuesday night “snapshot” defied granularity.  It painted with broad strokes.  Yet a couple items secured mention, including the Rapid Medical Response service.  Akumfi indicated that moneys existed for Rapid Medical Response’s continuation, but only for the service “as is,” not necessarily for any $2.5 Million expansion into a limited county-wide ambulance operation that some emergency response service proponents would like it to become.

Legislators asked Akumfi a few questions, though not many. Deborah Dawson inquired about how the five-year historic lookback procedure would accommodate for inflation and for recent employee collective bargaining agreements.  The Administrator retreated to talk of the ongoing “vacancy rate” and its effect on the payroll.  He never answered the question directly. 

Rich John asked the Administrator to tell him how much of the $6.5 Million in newfound deficit reduction came through lower spending versus enhanced revenue.  Akumfi couldn’t parse the numbers.

The Administrator did say there’s not much hope of tapping County Government’s sizable—though shrinking—fund balance, its savings account, for help in closing gaps.  County policy currently dictates a full 25 percent of annual expenses remain in fund balance.  Although its total lags by as much as a year behind reality, Akumfi calculated the fund balance account now stands well below the policy’s requirement.

Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown inquired whether the City of Ithaca, through its sales tax agreements, should be paying Tompkins County a larger share to fund the Department of Emergency Response, especially given the high proportion of 911 calls coming from city residents.  Colleague Mike Lane cautioned the issue’s complicated.

Rich John stated he’d prefer Akumfi aim low with his recommended tax levy increase, perhaps keeping it at around four percent, so as to allow legislators in their fall deliberations the flexibility to add-in selected spending items as they identify “where there’s real need.”

“I would much prefer if we came in somewhere closer to the four percent, and this body was looking at additional spending, rather than trying to reduce spending,” John advised.  Because when it comes to cutting spending, the legislator admitted, “I don’t think we’re very good at that.”

****

The Legislature’s agenda item that was expected to generate controversy at the August 19 meeting never did.  By a vote of 13 to one, lawmakers authorized the temporary relocation of both the Department of Assessment and the Office for the Aging to a newly-purchased one-story office building at 31 Dutch Mill Road, about a mile and a half north of the airport, off Warren Road.

The Office for the Aging would occupy space originally intended for the Board of Elections.  At the Legislature’s earlier August fifth meeting, numerous commenters, including a spokesperson for the League of Women Voters, objected to the Elections Office’s move to a rural site, and the Legislature vetoed the idea.  Critics contended that a rural office would deprive Ithaca’s urban residents of continued easy access to the Elections Board to sign up to vote or to cast absentee ballots.

In a memo attached to the August 18 agenda, Director of Assessment Jay Franklin heartily endorsed his department’s temporary move.  Assessment must relocate to further County plans to deconstruct Assessment’s current home and then build the planned Center of Government on its footprint.

But the Office for the Aging’s relocation to Lansing and out of its downtown home at State and Albany Streets would appear on its face to prompt the same concerns as did the Board of Elections’ earlier-planned move.  It would deny convenient access to older adults who may choose to walk to the location or take public transit.

But in contrast to the concerted resistance expressed two weeks earlier by voting rights advocates, no one from the public spoke against the Office for the Aging’s move at the start of Tuesday’s meeting.  And Office for the Aging Director Lisa Monroe didn’t address it either.  She may not even have attended.

County Administrator Akumfi explained that he had met with Monroe and her staff and quelled any objections.

“So they don’t see this as a disruption,” Akumfi said of Office for the Aging leadership’s attitude.  But rather, he said, they view it “as an opportunity so that they can reinvent their programming to serve the residents very well.”

The Administrator concluded that visitors unable to drive to the out-of-the-way Lansing location could take the Gadabout paratransit minibus instead.

Ithaca legislator Shawna Black cast the lone dissent on the relocation plan.  She maintained that regardless of its economic and structural attributes, the Lansing location for the Office for the Aging is just too far removed from the community’s center.

“I continue to have very strong beliefs that our forward-facing departments need to be on the bus line and need to be accessible to everyone,” Black asserted.  “There are no complaints about the building itself… just the location really does not seem conducive to County business,” she said.

The Office for the Aging relocation arrived to the Legislature last-minute, made known only days before the meeting.  Administration had recommended the Office for the Aging’s move so as to later relocate the Board of Elections into Aging’s State Street storefront and thereby satisfy the Legislature’s insistence that the Elections Board remain downtown. 

Tuesday’s resolution did not address the Board of Elections relocation.

The Legislature earlier this month purchased the vacant, 13,000-square foot Dutch Mill Road building for $1.2 Million.  Assessment and the Office for the Aging would remain there for at least four-to-five years until the Center of Government is finished.

Newfield legislator Randy Brown suggested an even longer relocation.  At nine dollars a square foot, Brown asked, Why not stay there?”

###

Previously reported:

Panels purloined, Enfield install proceeds

by Robert Lynch; August 15, 2025

Enfield solar installer Rebekah Carpenter stated the obvious: “This is a bummer.”

At One AM on Sunday morning, August third, thieves drove their big pickup to behind the Enfield Town Hall.  They latched on to an open flatbed trailer loaded with solar panels, and drove it off.  Carpenter’s company, Fingerlakes Renewables, owned that trailer and those panels.  Some were soon slated for deployment atop the Town Hall under a state-granted project.  The trailer was found abandoned several days later in Alpine.  The panels were gone.  They still are.

Yet despite that theft, Fingerlakes Renewables’ solar installation atop the Town Hall, Enfield’s largely-vacated former highway garage, is nearly done.   As of Friday, August 15, Carpenter said all that essentially remains is an electrical inspection and then connecting the array to the power company’s grid.

“We already bought the panels and put them up,” Carpenter informed this writer just before Noon on Friday.  She said work may take “another day or so on the roof,” as the replacement panels’ mountings “fit us a little bit different.”

The fact that a trailer load of solar panels got stolen at the Enfield work site took a while to reach public attention.  Carpenter first wrote about it in a Facebook post Saturday, August 9.  Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond informed Town Board members at the board’s August 13 meeting by reading Carpenter’s post to them.

“Hey folks- about a week ago someone stole four pallets worth of solar panels (144 panels in total) from my trailer parked in Enfield,” Carpenter had posted.  “They abandoned the trailer so I have that back, but the panels were worth significantly more than the trailer,” Carpenter continued.

Contacted Friday, Rebekah Carpenter declined to state publicly the estimated value of the stolen panels taken.  She admitted their value was not covered by insurance.

“I’m essentially a solo business owner so this isn’t corporate thievery; they just took a huge amount of money from a business that doesn’t make a huge amount of money,” Carpenter’s August 9 posting lamented.

Asked why the theft had not delayed the Enfield project, Carpenter explained that after having learned of the disappearance, she’d notified her supplier and was overnighted replacement panels.  As her firm did not purchase Chinese-made panels, Carpenter explained that tariff-related or supply-chain issues did not impact her reorder.

Brian Jolly, an investigator with the Tompkins County Sheriff’s Office, reported Friday that his department’s investigation into the Enfield solar panel theft is continuing.  Jolly said that contents of Carpenter’s social media posting did not compromise the department’s investigation and that her comments could be shared more widely. (Need for that assurance delayed reporting this story.)

Having just learned of the theft and unaware of how widely knowledge of it had circulated, this Councilperson, Robert Lynch, had requested a closed, executive session of the Enfield Town Board August 13 to discuss the matter, to share among board members any confidential law enforcement information that might exist, and to explore the theft’s financial implications for the Town.  Supervisor Stephanie Redmond declined the executive session request.

“It’s all over Facebook, everybody knows” Redmond replied dismissively and with a lighthearted voice. 

“We have had an issue,” a more subdued Redmond acknowledged as she returned to the topic later in the meeting.  The Supervisor then read Carpenter’s August 9 Facebook post.

At its March meeting earlier this year, the Enfield Town Board awarded Fingerlakes Renewables the contract to install the Town Hall rooftop solar, the company’s $70,248 offer determined to be the “best value” among five competing bids submitted.  Fingerlakes Renewables, coincidentally, was the only Tompkins County-based firm to bid. 

A New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (“NYSERDA”) Clean Energy Communities grant covered most of the contract expense.  Though bids came in slightly over the Town’s initial $65,000 budget, the Town Board decided to proceed with the project given the expected long-term energy savings.

As Carpenter recalls, the flatbed carrying the panels arrived at the Enfield Town Hall site on the Friday before the overnight weekend theft.  Weather conditions delayed installation, so Carpenter remained unaware of the flatbed’s unauthorized removal until the following Wednesday, August 6.  That’s when Schuyler County authorities notified her of the empty trailer’s abandonment in Alpine.

“It was so out of view,” Carpenter remarked as to the trailer’s concealment behind the long, concrete block former highway garage.  “I didn’t tell people they were back there,” the business owner insisted.

Reportedly, an Enfield Volunteer Fire Company surveillance camera from a considerable distance away caught the best view of the Sunday morning theft.  Another camera, mounted upon the Enfield Town Hall, may have caught a glimpse of the incident as well.  But Town Board members were told Wednesday that the Town Hall camera and alarm system is old and outdated and did a poor job with identification.  The Town Board August 13 voted to spend just over $1,300 to upgrade the alarm system and buy another camera.

According to Carpenter’s Facebook posting, the vehicle that hitched onto the trailer was a dark gray Toyota Tacoma extended cab pickup, maybe 2009-2011 vintage.

Presumably to avoid theft, the panel-laden trailer could have been parked inside one of the locked, largely-unused highway equipment bays inside the building.  Why wasn’t that space used?

“We could have,” Carpenter answered with a sigh of regret peppered with an ample shake of 20/20 hindsight.   

“The most frustrating thing is there’s no use for these solar panels by anyone,” Carpenter explained.  There’s no real salvage price, she claimed.  “And you have to know what you’re doing to install solar panels,” she added.  It takes professional installers.  And the “inverters,” the electrical devices that interface the panels and the grid, were secured that night at Carpenter’s house.

It’s really an “impractical stack of stuff,” Carpenter said of what she suspects now sits in somebody’s storage shed .  Solar contractors won’t touch them, she maintained, as they’d suspect they’re stolen merchandise.  The only potential purchaser could be the occasional homeowner prospect.

Of the 144 solar panels purloined from behind the old Enfield highway barn, only 62 were destined for the Town Hall project.  The remaining 82, the contractor said, were intended for “three other jobs.”

“I’m not counting on getting them back, it’s a big loss” Rebekah Carpenter acknowledged.  But she’s taking the theft in stride.  “Worse things happen to people,” Carpenter reasoned.

###

The Tractor We Lost. The Price We Paid

by Robert Lynch; August 14, 2025

This is not a news story. This is commentary, pure commentary, my commentary.  Let’s get that straight up front.  As a news story, what happened this past night may never get reported.  Maybe it shouldn’t.  And I am not the best person to report it. Not only am I too close to what happened; my reporting it would only add fuel to an all too frightful fire.  And Enfield, you don’t need another fire right now.

Wednesday, August 13, just before we laid to rest a drawn-out Town Board meeting, I placed onto Enfield’s agenda a “Discussion Item”: “Town of Enfield Purchasing Practice and Policy.”  My request for dialogue followed our failed attempt in late-July to secure at auction a good-to-excellent used tractor for the Enfield Town Highway Department.

I’m mindful, I said, of the need to keep our focus on the merits of issues rather than the people involved, and I’d written my words in advance and read them verbatim from a script; stilted, yet necessary.  When I began my statement I never envisioned what would come afterward:

Board:

“Since our last meeting, July 18, the Town of Enfield lost out on a bargain.  As Councilperson, I hold a duty to our residents to minimize its chance of happening again. Put bluntly, I came up short.

“At a Special Meeting July 18, our Town Board, at the request of Highway Superintendent Rollins, authorized Superintendent Rollins to use up to $70,000 from the Highway Equipment Reserve Fund to purchase, at auction, a 2022 John Deere mower tractor.  Among the four Town Board members attending, the vote was unanimous.

“But we did not buy the tractor, despite Superintendent Rollins’ and our Board’s best efforts.  Here’s what happened:

“Superintendent Rollins and other parties participated in an Auctions International online auction July 21 for purchase of the John Deere mower tractor owned by the Town of Arcadia.  As scheduled, the auction closed at 6 PM that day.  During the auction’s final minutes, two bidders increased their offers back and forth, generally by $100 increments.  I presume Superintendent Rollins was one of those final bidders.  The auction closed.  The recorded high bid, by bidder “ssrebel56” was $61,100. 

“Auctions International records indicate that the tractor’s seller, the Town of Arcadia, declined to accept the closing high bid.  In accordance with the auction’s rules, the seller set a Minimum Bid of $90,000, which closing high bidders could match and then purchase the equipment.  The Town of Enfield, through Superintendent Rollins, did not match that minimum bid.

“In response to my email inquiry, Tom Kuhlman, Highway Superintendent for the Town of Arcadia, wrote me the following message August fourth about the tractor’s sale:

‘Yes I have found buyer, sold for $85,000.  Last conversation I had with your Superintendent he offered $75,000.  Said that’s all he had budgeted.  Sorry I couldn’t let it go for that!’

“Understandable.  But let me stop for a moment and make one point clear. Nothing I state here is intended to disparage the Highway Superintendent; his knowledge, judgment or competence or to undercut his authority.  Superintendent Rollins exercised discretion that this Town Board, explicitly or implicitly, has assigned his office.  I applaud the Highway Superintendent for having located this good, used tractor.  I encourage him to seek another one of comparable quality.

“Town Board policy and the consensus of this Board’s majority, as expressed to me by Town Supervisor Redmond in her email message of July 25, is that the Highway Superintendent, not the Town Board, holds final decision-making power regarding capital equipment purchases for the Town Highway Department.  As stated by Supervisor Redmond: 

‘The town board does not have authority to direct how the highway superintendent expends his equipment line. We have authorized him to utilize $70k from equipment reserves for the purchase. Anything beyond that is the highway superintendent’s discretion to utilize other lines of funding he has available.’

“I respectfully disagree with the wisdom of the referenced policy.  We, this Town Board, hold final account to our residents, our taxpayers, for making wise purchasing decisions in their behalf.  In time, I will move to modify Town Policy within the confines of the law, so as to accord this Town Board greater authority in the exercise of major capital expenditures; of equipment valued at perhaps over $20,000.  But for now, I accept Town Board consensus as the Supervisor has stated it.

“’The tractor is in excellent condition.  It is a good tractor,’ I informed this Town Board during our brief meeting of July 18.  I had personally inspected the tractor in Arcadia three days prior to the meeting; even though some Town officials, judging from their comments that night, had implied that I should not have performed my inspection.  I make no apologies.  I performed due diligence on behalf of my constituents.  If given the opportunity, I’d do so again.  Based on Highway Superintendent Kuhlman’s statement to me, an equivalent new tractor—Arcadia had just bought one—would cost Enfield $161,000, about twice the cost of the auctioned tractor.

“I do not blame our Highway Superintendent for Enfield’s failure to procure the used tractor.  I blame myself, and to some extent, I blame other members of this Town Board.  We failed to provide the Highway Superintendent the sufficient guidance we should have.

“When items go to auction, our Town Board cannot predict an exact sales price beforehand.  But we can state our preference for acceptable bidding limits.  We, this Town Board, did not do so.  ‘I’m willing to go to 100,’ one Town Board member, either Supervisor Redmond or Councilperson Hinkle, remarked that night during pre-vote discussions.  I should have joined her in stating that opinion.  I did not.  I regret not having done so.  If an apology to anyone needs be made, that’s the one I should make; to this Town, to its taxpayers.  A mower tractor purchase stands in our Capital Plan, its purchase now moved to 2026.  Our taxpayers may pay a painful price for the mistake we made last month.

“I recommend that in future decisions regarding the purchase of capital equipment made available at auction, we, the Town Board, provide clearer guidance as to how high an offer we would accept, where our comfort level lies.  Furthermore, we should always transfer sufficient funds from the applicable reserve account or accounts to cover that maximum acceptable bid.  Had we done so July 18, we might have saved Enfield taxpayers $75,000, maybe more. (Expect tractor prices to rise next year.)  We’d also have a like-new John Deere mower tractor.

“We, Town Board, can do better.  Let’s try.”

I then invited responses from others.  My request got answered.

****

Put bluntly, what flowed from my invitation can best be described as an “excoriation.” Our Town Supervisor, Stephanie Redmond, in a full-throated scold of me, faulted not only the procedural reforms I’d advanced; but also, more importantly—and at her argument’s core—my even having taken the initiative to inspect and inquire into the equipment the Highway Superintendent had attempted to buy, yet didn’t.  Redmond alleged I lacked the mechanical wisdom to evaluate the equipment considered.  Asked calmly, yet directly by me as to why he’d chosen not to offer more money for the tractor, Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy” Rollins answered it was because he didn’t want to.

Already, Supervisor Redmond’s avenging words have gained their permanent place in the meeting’s audio archives.  We can all listen to them and weep.  It would be better still if they wandered their way into the nearest wastebasket.

You’ll likely not read those words quoted by me.  I’m working too hard at the moment to mend the tattered shreds of Enfield civility.  Yet the opprobrium which our Town’s highest officer heaped upon an elected colleague that night truly matters.  Not only did our Supervisor shower irreparable embarrassment upon herself, she also diminished the stature of her office and the reputation of the beloved town she professes to serve.

Most dangerously, Supervisor Stephanie Redmond’s vitriol cast a haunting chill over that hot summer night’s meeting room.  It conveyed an air of retribution. 

I’d proposed purchasing policy reform.  The Supervisor advanced a correction of her own.  She’d have Town legal counsel draft a policy that would limit officials like me from any independent inquiry into the Highway Superintendent’s purchases, of my employing objective oversight.  Another Councilperson sought to dissuade the Supervisor from pursuing her initiative that far.  We’ll see if Redmond’s wishes grow legs as time passes.  Still, it’s obvious that reprisal these days does not confine itself to people and places far removed from Applegate Road.

In May 2021, in response to past squabbles long since forgotten, attorney and mediator Ronald Mendrick authored a report for Enfield.  It was commissioned by the Town Board, paid for by Town taxpayers, and discretely tucked away, yet accessible even today on the Town website for anyone to read. (Search the “For Residents” tab under “Report of Investigation.”) 

Ronald Mendrick interviewed 13 people then involved in Town government affairs.  He drew conclusions.  The mediator found that a “culture of controversy” had infected Town of Enfield politics and had done so for many years past.  It had festered to that day.  It had prompted back-and-forth bickering among those both in and out of power.  It had led to “yelling” and “swearing” at Town Board meetings.  Once, even law enforcement needed to intervene.  Mendrick offered recommendations on how we could all break the habit, the cycle,  the culture of controversy; how we could better behave, become more productive, and serve our constituents more effectively. Running 24 pages, it’s a long read.  But I encourage you read it.

Amid the clamorous criticisms and dispensable rebukes that punctuated the close of Enfield’s August 13 Town Board meeting, I sandwiched-in a single paragraph from the mediator’s voluminous report of four years past:

“[A]ll discussion by officials should address the issue, not the person suggesting or speaking about it. That is, in debate rather than address a person, speak about the issue and the direction to be advocated, even when supporting another’s position.  For example, instead of starting with ‘Jane has a good point, and I support her position,’ start with ‘adopting the resolution would be best for the Town because …’. Making it about the issue, not a person, sets the tone for respectful discussion of the merits and gets away from the personal attributions and feeling of personal attacks….”

During much of what I recited, the Supervisor talked over me.

Enfield needs better Town Board oversight in its management of capital purchases.  In time, perhaps with new people to work with, the change will happen, but not now.  In the Mendrick Report’s preamble, an unattributed source described Enfield as the “wild western hills” of Tompkins County.  At least a few of us would like to see those hills flattened a bit.  That they have not been. 

I attempted to take the high road this past Wednesday night.  I sought to address a tough issue, one made controversial only because one or more members of our leadership team had chosen to personalize the debate.  The “high road” proved too potholed to navigate that evening.  My chosen vehicle sadly headed toward the ditch.  Maybe in time—with everyone’s help—we can steer it back toward the center line for the betterment of all.

Peace.

Bob Lynch

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