Designers, lawmakers agonize, tangle over Center of Government
“They’d (his constituents) said very clear they’d prefer to go to the mall.”
Newfield/Enfield Legislator Randy Brown, Center of Government debate, June 16.
“Well, the mall’s not going to be an option.”
Legislature Chair Shawna Black, same meeting.
Reporting and analysis by Robert Lynch; June 20, 2026
Yes, it would have showers; changing rooms too. Why would an office worker need to bathe and dress on the job? Good question. Oh wait, the architect wants us to ride our bikes to work, instead of drive. Wise idea, since there wouldn’t be many places to park.
Welcome to Tompkins County’s newly-shrunk—yet quite politically correct—Downtown Center of Government.
For nearly an hour last Tuesday night, the Tompkins County Legislature listened—and reacted—as Holt Architects’ Quay Thompson, the Center of Government’s lead designer, detailed the latest changes his firm has made to the ambitious project, including its centerpiece jewel, the 45,000-square foot office building at the corner of North Tioga and East Buffalo Streets in downtown Ithaca. His were changes made by necessity. They’d contain the project to within a $50 Million budget, a price cap that’s supposedly hard and fast.
Gone is the building’s fourth floor (well, kind-of). Its ground footprint is pulled in a trifle, both at the side and the rear. Yet holding true to its Green New Deal bona fides, the structure would remain framed of wood timbers, not steel. It would treat windows with “bird-friendly glazing.” It would heat, cool, and power everything only with electricity (of course). And there’d be geothermal, too. But with all that said, Holt has pared the structure to the point that the County Administrator wouldn’t be able to work there.
That face-only-a-mother-could-love façade, a hybrid of brick and stone, would remain the same as it was when unveiled last December. And so would those annoying third-floor sunshades across every window, shades that hauntingly resemble fake eye lashes. Street side, you’d hardly notice a difference from December’s rendering. Municipality names would remain tacked along the side, if for no apparent reason. And no, there wouldn’t be a basement.
“I think you came up with something pleasant and nice, and I think it fits the bill,” Dryden representative Greg Mezey said approvingly of Thompson’s redesign. He gave Holt’s redo the most praise of anyone.
But even Mezey didn’t welcome everything. A plainly-faced, penthouse-sized smidgen of a fourth floor—that’s where the showers would be—remains in the plan. Of that, the Dryden lawmaker said, “It looks kind of like a trailer plopped on top of a beautiful government building.”
Left adrift by a pair of deadlocked votes at their meeting March 3, Tompkins County legislators have defaulted to a pledge they’d made last year to build a Center of Government no larger than 45,000 square feet and costing no more than $50 Million.
And for Holt Architects, that promise posed a problem. During their six months of architectural refinement between last June and December, designers came to realize they’d need as much as 57,000 square feet to shelter all of the departments Tompkins County wanted to put in the center. And the bigger the building got, the more it would cost. Estimates of $60 Million or more got tossed about.
Cutting corners became Holt’s big challenge these past three months.
“I’m going to show the one thing that sort of solves this entire problem,” Thompson told legislators in his freshened, June 16 presentation. “We made the Center of Government smaller by taking County Administration, Human Resources, and Planning out of the new building.” he said.
The revisions Thompson shared that night were the same ones he’d described to a sub-set of legislators at a committee meeting May 21. They sounded odd then. They still do. Why target these three departments? Their culling sounds ill-conceived.
If the Center of Government is truly a place where most Tompkins County office staffers do their day’s labor, doesn’t it make sense to have the big boss there in the building, maybe sitting in a top-floor corner office? Shouldn’t the personnel administrator be in the building as well? And Planning is a department whose tentacles reach out to overlap many others.
There’s a sense of randomness to the departmental shuffle Quay Thompson has advanced, apparently with the blessing of County Administrator Korsah Akumfi.
“Who’s decided who’s going to be in this building?” Newfield-Enfield legislator Randy Brown asked Akumfi. “Is this a proposal, or are you telling us this is the way it’s going to be?”
“This is a proposal,” Akumfi answered. “This building is being built to be very flexible,” he explained. Akumfi and Thompson indicated that departmental placements could change even before the building is finished three years from now.
“I think it’s really important to know definitely who’s going to be in the (building) when you design it,” Brown rebutted.
To shrink the new building down to its mandated size, Akumfi’s department, Administration, as well as Human Resources, would return to the Old Jail, a building that until recently had housed both those departments for decades,. Planning would remain on the Legislature building’s first floor. Gone is any talk of spilling significant legislative space onto that ground floor of legislative chambers, the Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins Building, and putting conference rooms and legislator offices there.
Meanwhile, Tompkins County’s Office for the Aging (COFA), soon to move temporarily to an office park in Lansing, would become a Center of Government ground floor resident. Designers doggedly place COFA’s foot inside the new building, even though legislator Brown says it makes no sense.
“These are people, elderly people, that really come to visit,” Brown said of Office for the Aging patrons. “And they don’t want to come down here,” he said of seniors visiting downtown.
Brown recalled that at a Newfield Town Hall meeting, older constituents were “all on me” to make their case. They want accessibility, Brown said. “I don’t see a lot of access here,” he said of the Center of Government site. “I’m worried about that.”
“Item number one should be accessibility for constituents,” Brown stated emphatically. “And this does not address that.”
Tompkins County’s march toward a Center of Government has always resembled that of a healthy, 50-year old scheduling his first colonoscopy. There’s desire to get the job done, but also a temptation to postpone the inevitable. Fear of the consequences prompts anxiety and encourages delay.
The corner lot on which the $50 Million building would sit was purchased nearly five years ago. Secret negotiations to buy the pair of properties actually commenced a couple of years before that. Since 2021, there’ve been endless design meetings, bureaucratic impediments, indecision, and snail’s pace progress.
In a key legislative decision in September 2023, leaders voted overwhelmingly “to proceed with Space, Architectural, and Engineering Plans for a Center of Government.” Lawmakers reaffirmed and sharpened their commitment in June of last year, setting both the projected 45,000 square foot size limit and the $50 Million cost ceiling.
Yet when they voted last summer, Akumfi acknowledged that the vision the Legislature had set for the project was “not a binding document,” but “just a direction from all of you to tell us that there is a commitment for us to move the project forward.”
Then this past March, when Thompson and team realized they couldn’t pack all the departments our county wanted into a building so small and priced so low, legislators looked anew, yet failed to change course. They voted down making the building larger and more expensive than before. They also defeated a second resolution that would have made it smaller and cheaper.
Resulting from the March impasse, a $50 Million, 45,000 square foot building survived as the default, Goldilocks choice. It’s constrained the architects ever since.
But there’s little time for continued delay. If timetables hold, construction contracts will go to bid around Halloween. Legislators will award bids near the turn of the year. Work will commence shortly thereafter.
And dragging things out brings only pain. With construction expenses rising at 4.75 percent annually, Thompson warned that every extra month adds $200,000 to the cost. That’s $2.4 Million in a year.
Legislators cast no votes on the Center of Government project June 16. And the majority showed little desire to retreat from prior commitments. Randy Brown proved the exception.
The Republican from Newfield took on the project from several fronts. He faulted its location and its operational priorities. And when he did, it put Brown squarely at odds with Legislature Chair Shawna Black, a Center of Government supporter, albeit a cautious one. Theirs produced the evening’s most riveting exchanges.
Brown objected to placing “front-facing” departments, like COFA and Assessment, in the building. “I think it should be administrative focused,” he said. Cluster departments that “work closer together,” Brown advocated. And if you attempt “to bring people downtown who don’t want to come downtown, they’re not going to come.”
“That is going to be an operations decision and Korsah will make that decision,” Black said of departmental placement. Even though the Legislature is Akumfi’s boss, Black would delegate to the Administrator the operational power otherwise accorded to an elected County Executive. “It shouldn’t be 16 legislators being lobbied by different departments” as to whether they’d be in the building or not, Black insisted.
“That just doesn’t make sense,” Brown said of leaving office assignments for Akumfi to decide. “I want to see logic. There’s no logic to this,” he observed.
”We respect our department heads, right? And their opinions,” Brown challenged the chairwoman. “And they gave it to us and we go, ‘You know, we don’t care about that because we’re going to leave it, the decision, to somebody else.’”
The project would reduce the supply parking, yet increase its demand, of course, The nearby Seneca Street ramp has closed permanently. And the Center of Government, once built, would cut on-site employee spaces from 104 to 93, a reduction that understates the true squeeze, since many of the slots are always reserved for State Court’s employees.
“I just don’t get it,” an animated Randy Brown continued. “My constituents have made it loud and clear. Enfield did a Resolution to say, please, we don’t want to come down there.”
“I’m not sure your Newfield people would want to go anywhere outside of Newfield, right?” an impatient and annoyed Shawna Black tossed back the argument.
“That’s not fair,” Brown rebounded. “They’ve said very clear they’d prefer to go to the mall. They’ve said that very clearly.”
“Well the mall’s not going to be an option. We voted against the mall,” Shawna Black reminded her critic.
But have they? To the best recollection, legislators have never cast a stand-alone, up or down vote on whether to relocate governmental offices to Lansing’s vastly-ghosted Shops at Ithaca Mall, at least not in public session. One can only infer rejection from other votes taken to double-down on downtown.
Nor has the Legislature formally and publicly dismissed another fallback option; quartering departments in modern, low-slung buildings at the Cornell Business Park. They’re nearby the airport and begging for a buyer. Black, Akumfi and others would like us to believe the business park’s been tossed aside as well.
But has it?
“We’re looking at a situation at the airport that I think most of you know about,” Shawna Black remarked at the meeting, her enigmatic message directed to insiders’ ears only. “We don’t know if that’s going to pan out,” she piqued curiosity. “If it pans out, it moves people everywhere. And so we have a lot of balls in the air.”
Black did not reveal more. But we do know that the bank which had foreclosed on the Business Park developer’s mortgage would love to sell us some buildings. Those many closed sessions that legislators hold after public business is done hold a purpose. Remember Black’s words.
Many of those you’d expect to speak during the June 16 Center of Government discussions remained silent. And those who did offer opinions usually stuck to a congratulatory script or else turned to the superfluous stuff—like those employee showers.
“As a runner, I can say it’s also nice to have showers so you could run on your lunch break and then go back,” freshman legislator Iris Packman remarked.
In fact, Packman would go one step beyond and install “a small gym” with a couple of workout machines, “something for people on very cold, icy days,” she said.
“Anything is possible,” Quay Thompson answered her.
Veronica Pillar also liked the shower idea. She reiterated her call for public restrooms and an outside drinking fountain.
But as Greg Mezey saw it, at some point the change orders—big or small—must stop.
“I think it’s very important to my colleagues that we lock and load, and we trust, and we figure it out, and we dial in whatever project we’re going to move forward with,” Mezey asserted. “Because if we keep throwing change curveballs in the process, it’s going to get so expensive, and $50 Million can go out the door very quickly.”
“We can have some minor debate,” Mezey admitted. “But really the big debate is over.”
Greg Mezey might like to believe it. But is it true?
A mere four months before the Center of Government bid documents hit the table, a nervous unease still pervades the process. Critics like Randy Brown continue to pepper leadership with questions tough to answer. Office placement remains a game of musical chairs. Competing visions fight for attention. And what about that “situation at the airport,” tossed out to tease us?
Meanwhile, costs escalate. And because they do, no one can predict how high those bids will come in. They could break the bank or kill the project.
“So here’s the issue moving forward,” Shawna Black laid plain as she pushed back on Randy Brown’s go-to-the-mall alternative. “We’re committed to doing a $50 Million building. We’re not going to let our employees dictate where they want to be. We are going to listen to our constituents. And everything that Quay is proposing here, he said this is not our final presentation,” Black cautioned.
“So I would ask that people calm down. We’re going to figure this out,” the Legislature’s Chair sought to assure us. (Did she?) “You know, I think we have a lot of growing to do. And I don’t want to get wrapped up in who’s going where right now, because we have a lot of moving pieces.”
Yes, when it comes to the Center of Government, the Tompkins County Legislature is, indeed, that 50 year old who never books his colonoscopy. And to Randy Brown: Yes, it would be so simple—and likely cheaper—to just go to the mall… or to someplace else. You can even put the showers and treadmill there.
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