Enfield Board ups Road Equipment line; adopts budget

by Robert Lynch; October 22, 2025; additional reporting October 25, 2025

Disagreements erupted, and the vote was not unanimous.  But the Enfield Town Board Wednesday night adopted its final 2026 Town Budget following a public hearing where at least one commenter, a candidate for Town office, suggested that Supervisor Stephanie Redmond and Town Councilpersons serve next year without a pay raise and perhaps even work for free.

The $2.67 Million final Enfield budget would increase next year’s property tax levy by 6.53 percent.  The tax rate, the amount per thousand that property owners pay per their assessments, would rise by 4.76 percent and stand next year at $6.84 per thousand.

The Enfield budget passed on a four-to-one vote October 22.  Approval followed a sometimes-testy half-hour of discussion among Town Board members.  Central to the controversy was Supervisor Stephanie Redmond’s last-minute initiative to transfer an additional $100,000 from an accumulated multi-year “Equipment Reserves” account into a budget line that Highway Superintendent Barry Rollins could spend at his discretion without Town Board review or consent.

As amended, Rollins discretionary equipment line will now have $375,000 in it for the superintendent to spend on machinery in 2026.  The earlier “Preliminary Budget,” the one that was the actual subject of the evening’s Public Hearing, had set the spending line at $275,000.  It had been only $140,000 in the initial 2025 Budget, but then climbed upwards during the year.

Councilperson Robert Lynch (this writer) equated the $375,000 equipment allowance to a “blank check.” He noted that Rollins could spend the money without consulting the Town Board, let alone getting its permission.

This Councilperson, Lynch, voted against the $100,000 transfer and also against the final 2026 Budget.  He cast the lone vote in favor of an amendment, one suggested by a hearing commenter who’s also a candidate in this year’s elections, to have Town Board members forgo their planned three percent 2026 raises in the name of austerity.

“This budget… puts things ahead of people,” Lynch insisted, noting that at a prior meeting two weeks earlier, the Board’s majority had declined to increase annual salaries for Town Justice Heather Knutsen-King and her court clerk each by $530, but had no problem supporting a new $165,000 tractor for the Highway Department.

Other Town Board members, led by Redmond, resisted rolling back their own planned raises. Redmond maintained that adequate member pay encourages residents to serve in government and avoids having only persons of privilege running for office.

The pay-critical hearing commenter, Independent Councilperson candidate Robert Tuskey, faulted board members for not considering taxpayers as well as themselves.

Pointing to the projected nearly five percent increase in the tax rate, Tuskey said, “To me, that just hinders somebody’s ability to put food in the refrigerator and onto the table and keep their property more than you getting your little bit of an increase.”

Robert Tuskey and Rosie Carpenter are each challenging incumbent Councilpersons Jude Lemke and Cassandra Hinkle in this year’s Enfield Councilperson races.  Carpenter also attended the hearing, but limited her comments to reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Supervisor Redmond defended the added $100,000 transfer of reserve funds to the Highway Superintendent’s equipment line, saying it “allows him to work more efficiently” in that Rollins can buy used equipment at auction without first returning to the Town Board and requesting a special meeting.

“I feel like he’s never led us astray with his purchases,” Redmond maintained.  “He’s always been very capable of figuring out what we need and whether it’s a good deal,” she said.  

Redmond qualified that “there’s an expectation” that Rollins would expend funds only on the machinery listed in a multi-year, sometimes-changing “Capital Plan,” a document attached to the 2026 Budget, yet not formally endorsed along with it.  “So it’s not like he’s going to take it out and spend it at Walmart,” Redmond said of the superintendent’s purchasing authority.

The Capital Plan, however, does include the $165,000 new tractor.

“But let us say if he finds the new tractor, and ‘oops,’ the price has gone up; it’s now $225,000,” this Councilperson, Lynch, countered. “He’s got the money in that budget to write that check for $225,000.”

“That’s how policies work with these equipment lines,” Redmond explained.

“And that’s reckless,” this Councilperson rebutted.

While most accounts remain open to subsequent revision during the budgeted year, Rollins made clear during Wednesday’s meeting that once the reserve funds transfer to his equipment line, only he, not the Town Board, controls them.  Even were the Town Board’s composition to change next year—which it may—the $100,000 infusion of cash could not easily be pulled back out.

It’s up to me,” Rollins insisted, “Highway funds are highway funds.”

Nonetheless, by law, equipment money unspent by the Superintendent during a calendar year would revert to the reserve account at year’s end.  Budget documents presented the Board Wednesday placed the equipment reserves account currently at just over $321,000.  Barring any subsequent rollover savings, the drawdown would shrink equipment reserves to $221,000 by this time next year.

Because the $100,000 Redmond requested for equipment is only a budget transfer—and not new money—the Board’s action has no immediate impact on the tax levy or the tax rate.

During both the Public Hearing and in later Board discussion, Supervisor Redmond pushed back on the idea of eliminating Town Board raises or to Robert Tuskey’s overture of returning to a bygone era when those governing a town served without pay.

“We feel the same inflation in our pocketbooks as everybody else does,” the Supervisor advised Tuskey at the hearing.  Redmond then advanced a philosophical justification for increasing legislative pay.

“The other issue that I have with people not getting paid is then you have a very financially comfortable to the point of privilege viewpoint as our public servants,” Redmond said.  “You cannot have somebody in a community that cannot afford to give their time away.  You can’t have it from a single mom.  You can’t have somebody that’s not supported otherwise either through marriage or whatever.”

“I think there is a significant population in Enfield of people that are underprivileged and need to have that voice recognized on their Town Board,” Redmond continued.  “They need to have people on the Board that know what it’s like to choose between groceries and rent, and you know, anything you can put on their credit card.”

Still, Tuskey pressed his defense for citizen-service.

“It is what it is. Serve the people.  Show ‘em how you’re committed,” Tuskey counseled the Town Board.  “Find another way to do it.  Where there’s a will there’s a way.  Nothing is impossible.”

The candidate’s comment struck a nerve with one Board member.  

“I feel like that’s an incredibly privileged  thing to say,” Melissa Millspaugh, a teacher and a Board member who’s not up for re-election this year, countered Tuskey, “as two of the Board members here leave our small children at home every single time we’re here for hours.” Millspaugh has two young kids.

“I object to being called privileged,” Tuskey bristled.

Millspaugh clarified that she‘d referred to Tuskey’s comment, not to Tuskey himself.  The candidate said he took the inference, nonetheless.

Town Clerk Mary Cornell intervened.  She reminded Millspaugh that the hearing is for the public to speak, not necessarily for Board members to do so.

Near the end of budget discussions, this Councilperson, Lynch, moved to eliminate the three-percent raises that Supervisor Redmond and all Councilpersons would receive. The revision lost on a four-to-one vote.  Had it passed, the revision would have saved the Town $812 in annual Supervisor’s pay, and a collective $467 among remaining Board members. Yet it would have sent a message.

Councilperson Cassandra Hinkle—one of two incumbents on this year’s ballot—seconded the Lynch motion for the salary rollback, but then voted against the reduction.

“I’m going to ask you to please not do that to yourself,” Supervisor Redmond counseled Hinkle regarding the pay cut,” because you have to think about people that are coming after you.”  Redmond referenced the hypothetical unmarried woman who must pay out-of-pocket for health insurance and can’t “ride on” their husband’s policy.

“We’ve spent years trying to get caught up,’ Councilperson Jude Lemke said of efforts to raise Enfield officers’ pay to respectable levels.  Lemke, a retired attorney, accepts no compensation.  Yet she specifically urged against cutting Supervisor’s pay, a salary now set to rise in 2026 to $27,865.

 “4.76 percent; that’s quite a bit,” another hearing commenter, Marcus Gingerich, said of the proposed, and later adopted, tax rate increase.  Gingerich had spoken just one night earlier on Enfield’s Fire District expenses as the District’s Board of Fire Commissioners took its own testimony—and later adopted—a much-smaller, yet still increasing, $638,631 Fire District Budget.

To counter Gingerich, Redmond stated that reducing “anything else is going to be a cut to services.”

As for the Highway Department equipment funding transfer, Redmond never revealed her plans to all other Board members prior to convening the evening’s hearing.  The initiative caught this Councilperson, and perhaps others, by surprise.

“I was going to support the budget tonight before the amendment came down,” this writer stated prior to his voting against the budget.  “I can’t support it now, and I can’t support it primarily because… I’m voting implicitly for the 2026 Capital Plan which I cannot support.”

Supervisor Redmond that night repeatedly described the Town’s ten-year Capital Plan as a “living document.”  Generally it does not receive a separate vote, and it didn’t receive one at Wednesday’s meeting.  The last such formal vote, as recorded in the Town Minutes, was in November 2019, a time when Beth Magee was still Town Supervisor.  For years, Supervisor Redmond had ignored drafting a Capital Plan until this Councilperson had prodded her to do so.

Nevertheless, as Town Bookkeeper Blixy Taetzsch clarified at the meeting, one’s voting in favor of the budget implies support for the capital purchases—including, most notably, the $165,000 mower tractor—that the Capital Plan expects budgeted funds will buy.

Last July, Highway Superintendent Rollins, with Town Board endorsement, sought to buy at auction a 2022 mower tractor that might have cost only half of what’s now budgeted.  But his purchase attempts fell through, and the failure eroded relations between the Highway Superintendent and this Councilperson.

The new tractor would replace a 2004-2005 tractor that Rollins in September had listed in “good” condition on his equipment inventory. 

“It’s not broken; it’s not hurting; it says maybe it could take $5,000 to fix up,” this Councilperson, Lynch, told Town Board colleagues about of the existing tractor, based on Rollins’ inventory.  “Now maybe in the scheme of things for the Town of Enfield, a 2004 tractor, 2005 tractor is junk.  I’ll tell you, for a good many farmers in Enfield, that tractor, 2004 tractor, would be just nicely broken in.”

“And I think we’ve got to learn that we’re not a rich town,” this Councilperson continued.  “We’re not the Town of Ulysses; we’re not the Town of Dryden; we are not the Town of Ithaca.  We don’t have the tax base.  And our taxpayers are hurting, and they say, where can we cut?”

“I just think we are putting our priorities wrong,” this writer closed his argument, reminding the Board of its earlier refusal to increase Town Justice pay, yet supporting new highway machinery.  “For a board that seems to think it cares about human beings, we are not caring about human beings.  We are not caring about our Town Justice like we should, but we are caring about buying flashy new equipment that is replacing something that we could live with what we’ve got.”

“And that’s why I cannot support this budget,” the statement concluded.

Even had they wanted to, other Town Board members could not have raised Justice Knutsen-King’s salary that night.  Once a spending plan advances to “Preliminary Budget” stage, as it had two weeks earlier, law prohibits further raises for elected officials.

Matters not mentioned at either the Public Hearing or during Board comment Wednesday, yet still significant within Town finances, were that for the first time the 2026 Enfield Town Budget has set aside funds for a quarter-time administrative assistant at the Highway Department. 

From a fiscal perspective, the budget also draws down the projected available General Fund Balance—the Town’s savings account—to no more than $27,183 above the $250,000 threshold that past Town Boards, through policy, have insisted be reserved for emergencies.

To contain the 2026 tax levy, Supervisor Redmond had recommended, and the Board’s majority later agreed, to tap $182,500 from the existing General Fund Balance to cover operations for the year ahead.  Should a similar amount be syphoned off one year from now in the 2027 budget, the available surplus beyond the established policy limit could be more than depleted.

Note: An earlier version of this story had misstated the age of the mower tractor that the new purchase would replace. As stated in various documents, the older tractor was purchased in 2004 or 2005. / RL

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Now to the Other Budget…

Fire Tax Hike Throttled below 3%

Enfield Commissioners approve $638k Fire Budget

by Robert Lynch; October 21, 2025

The Enfield Fire District’s tax will rise next year, but not by as much as first thought.

Following a brief Public Hearing at which the only person who spoke was the same ex-commissioner who’d addressed the board last year, the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners Tuesday further trimmed proposed spending and contained its 2026 budget increase to slightly less than three percent above that for the current year .

As finally adopted, the Enfield Fire District 2026 Budget totals $638,631.50.  The 2025 Budget totaled $620,475.  That’s a 2.93 percent increase.

“It’s not exactly a town that is flush with rich people,” Marcus Gingerich, the hearing’s lone speaker, described Enfield in his hearing comments.  Gingerich, who’d been the sole commenter on the fire budget last year— only at that time in writing—said in-person at this year’s October 21 hearing that he was “a little surprised” that the budget’s total “keeps going up and up.”

When Tuesday’s meeting began and the hearing was held, next year’ proposed budget before Fire Commissioners had called for an approximate 3.8 percent spending increase.

“What would it take to get down to three percent?” Board of Fire Commissioners member Barry Rollins asked a half-hour after the hearing had adjourned and the board had then taken up the budget for adoption.

And with Rollins open-ended question, commissioners began searching for minor ways to cut costs.

What they settled on during their 20-minute review could be seen as a calculated gamble. 

First, commissioners reduced a $47,854 budget line for liability insurance by $5,000.  And secondly, they subtracted $1,000 from a $15,000 line item reserved for accounting services.  Reduction of those two accounts, unglamorous as they are, lowered the annual projected spending increase to just over $18,000 from the 2025 budget, or a hike of 2.93 percent.

Board of Fire Commissioners’ Chair Greg Stevenson declined Tuesday to state the precise impact the modified budget would have on the property tax levy or tax rate without first checking with the Tompkins County Department of Assessment. 

Whatever the final number may be, however, the Enfield Fire Tax the next year will rise by only about half as much as will the projected tax levy for the rest of Enfield government.  A Preliminary Budget the Enfield Town Board will consider the following evening, Wednesday, the 22^nd, proposes a tax levy increase of 6.53 percent over that for 2025 to cover general and Highway Department expenses..

The Town Board has scheduled its own Public Hearing on the Town Budget the night of the 22nd and will likely adopt the budget thereafter, including any final revisions.

The Enfield Fire District budget process of this fall stands in stark contrast with that of a year ago when first-ever bonding for a new, expensive fire engine ballooned the budget’s total by 28.3 percent over the year, making it Enfield’s largest fire budget ever.

For 2026, of course, the budget still sets a record, but the shock of the increase has worn off.  The Enfield Fire District will still spend more than $115,000 toward paying off the expensive pumper, and also nearly $72,500 in continuing loan payments on another truck.  But the newly-heightened debt service has begun to be baked into Enfield’s expectations.

Newly-created, one-time expenses projected within the 2026 Fire Budget stand far more benign.

Still budgeted for the year ahead is the possible repainting of a second tanker truck, an older model, whose red paint has inexplicably begun to peel.  The problem first gained attention as Fire Commissioners pieced together their preliminary budget in early-September.

Commissioners then put an extra $10,000 into the budget toward repainting the entire rear portion of the 2007-vintage tanker.  And while the truck’s manufacturer may have been to blame, there’s been no recall and the vehicle’s warranty expired years ago.

Although no repainting decision’s actually been made, Stevenson reported after Tuesday’s meeting that one estimate’s already come in and places the repainting cost within the budgeted amount.  Stevenson said Board policy requires Commissioners get at least one more quote before deciding whether to authorize the work.

One spending increase that could have drawn attention from the public never did.  And neither did commissioners touch the item when they sought to cut costs.  The Fire District’s budget sets aside additional money to elevate pay for the appointed District Secretary and District Treasurer to $7,500 each, a 50 percent raise in each instance.

No one talked about the staff raises Tuesday.  Stevenson said in September that just because the Fire District budgets the raises doesn’t require it to actually award the increases.

“Firefighter physicals are under-funded,” Stevenson again Tuesday complained.  The Commissioners’ chair has remarked several times this year that the fire district may have to migrate its federally-mandated volunteer physical exams from a family medicine practice in Trumansburg to an occupational medicine provider, a change that would substantially elevate cost.  The new budget reserves $6,000 for those physicals, unchanged from the 2025 budget.

When he spoke at the public hearing, Marcus Gingerich questioned the amount the Enfield Fire District pays the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC), a separate non-profit corporation, for use of the Enfield Fire Station.  Gingerich maintained that the fire district’s lease payments to the EVFC “went up more than double what building expense went up.” 

A restructured, one-year fire station lease, approved by Commissioners in September, raises lease payments to the EVFC from $75,000 to nearly $100,000.  But the agreement also transferred many operational and member-related expenses from the fire district to the EVFC, making it difficult to verify Gingerich’s assertion.

The lone commenter, Gingerich, also questioned why an allocation for the EVFC’s annual “Inspection Dinner,” its catered Christmas party for volunteers and invited guests, grew in cost from $10,000 to $11,000.  At a prior meeting, it was explained that the cost of food had gone up.

Marcus Gingerich was among five people the Enfield Town Board had initially appointed Fire Commissioners when the Town Board separated fire matters from Town Government in 2023.  Gingerich subsequently lost a later election and was voted off the Board after only a few months’ service.

There’s a “layer of separation” between the Board of Fire Commissioners and the community, Gingerich observed as he provided the brief four-minute hearing its only public comment. “And that’s unfortunate,” the onetime commissioner said.

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Money, a Mower, and a Judge

Enfield Board readies its ’26 budget for final passage

by Robert Lynch; October 16, 2025

Barring an outpouring of public discontent at a Public Hearing next week, expect the 2026 Enfield Town Budget to be more or less put to bed.  And if so, Enfield residents will see about a five percent rise in the town portion of their property tax bills next January, providing their assessments haven’t changed.

By a unanimous vote at its meeting October 8, the Enfield Town Board elevated the Town Supervisor’s slightly-adjusted September spending submission to Preliminary Budget status, a move that locks-in certain expenses, such as elected officers’ pay raises. 

Sending the budget on to a hearing October 22, the Town Board that early-October night declined to make any further changes in the spending document, rejecting several amendments that would have done so.

The most notable big-ticket item contained within the $2.67 Million 2026 Budget is a planned $165,000 appropriation to buy of a new mower tractor for the Highway Department.  The tractor would replace a 2004 machine currently in use.  The acquisition, included as part of a ten-year Capital Plan attached to the budget, has in recent months become a hot-button target of controversy.

As for the overall budget, Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond in September revealed that had all departmental requests won the board’s acceptance, the 2026 property tax levy would have jumped by a whopping 19.68 percent. 

But before other Board members had even gotten to see that projection, Redmond had pared figures down to a submitted Tentative Budget that would have hiked the levy by 7.32 percent.  Further, relatively minor adjustments made at a Budget Meeting September 17 narrowed the levy increase to 6.53 percent.  That’s where the Preliminary Budget now stands.

“Can anyone find a silver bullet that’ll get us down below three percent?” Redmond asked, seemingly in futility, at one point during the October 8 discussion. “Where you going to cut?” she questioned.

Dropping the levy increase by that much, by more than half, would have placed it in compliance with the state-calculated 3.26 percent “tax cap” computed this year for Enfield.  The unenforced cap is a penalty- free, but benefit-absent metric that’s largely become an aspirational target for many municipal budget planners.

“You’re not going to stay under the tax cap, not with a budget like this,” Enfield’s Supervisor regretted, “not without cuts to services.”

With most property tax assessments having stayed constant over the past year, the aggregate value of Enfield’s tax base has grown little during that time.  Budget documents reflect a meager 1.69 percent growth in tax base since the 2025 budget’s adoption.  And that slight aggregate increase largely explains why the tax levy can rise by 6.5 percent while the resulting tax rate (the percentage on which bills are calculated) would increase by only 4.76 percent under the budget currently advanced.

During the October 8^th review, only one Board member, this writer/Councilperson, Robert Lynch, proposed any budget revisions.  One of the amendments would have elevated the annual salaries for Town Justice Heather Knutsen-King and her clerk each by a meager $530.  The amendment was rejected, four votes to one.  Only this Councilperson, Lynch, supported it.

Likewise rejected—in these instances without it ever receiving a seconding vote—were Lynch amendments to transfer $125,000 of a Highway Superintendent’s equipment line appropriation to an “Equipment Reserves” account, and the addition of $2,000 in projected Town revenues from proposed planning fees the Town Board may soon impose to process development requests.  The planning fees would have more than paid for the Town Court raises.

The highway equipment funding transfer—effectively a wash item not impacting the tax levy— had it been approved, would have accorded the Town Board greater control over the Highway Superintendent’s future equipment purchases, including that for any new tractor.

Town Board members rejected the proposed revenue enhancement from planning fees as too speculative, noting that proposed development in the town has largely dried up over the past year.

“If we get a solar farm, it’ll be a nice chunk of money,” Planning Board Chair Dan Walker interjected during the discussion.  But, Walker added, “I’m not seeing potential for a lot of development right now with the economy the way it’s been.”

“It’s not reliable,” Redmond evaluated the never-before-budgeted planning board fees.  And with that, the idea of accounting for them got cast aside.

Yet, the judicial salaries received separate discussion.

“I really think that judging from the town-by-town survey that I did of justice salaries, that we are paying too little; it’s almost embarrassingly too little,” this Councilperson, Lynch, advised the Board.

The survey, drawn from among seven municipalities near Enfield and shared with the Town Board in mid-September, revealed that pay rates for justices not shared with an adjacent community ranged from a low of $16,616 (Caroline) to as much as $27,500 (Hector).  The most common salaries fell in the $17,000 to $19,000 range.  Yet those salaries sometimes occurred in towns with two justices, with each jurist paid the stated amount.

“Well, the other judges have been there a bit longer,” Redmond responded, defending her recommendation to keep the judicial raises to the three percent budgeted for other Enfield elected officers.

Heather Knutsen-King has served as Enfield Town Justice since 2024.

As proposed by Redmond and later incorporated within the preliminary budget, pay for Knutsen-King and her clerk would rise from $16,000 to $16,480.  The justice had sought $18,000 for each position.

“I just believe that equity dictates that we raise that salary to $17, 000,” this Councilperson, Lynch, told the Board.  “If you don’t want to make the Planning Board fees cover it, that would not change the tax levy that much.”

Elevating the Enfield budget to preliminary status, however, precludes any further increase in Knutsen-King’s pay until 2027.

In her paring down of departmental requests, Supervisor Redmond had zeroed-out the $75,000 Equipment Reserve that Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy” Rollins has employed during the current year to buy new machinery.  That paper loss is misleading, however, since the preliminary budget also vastly inflates the “Equipment” purchase line—by $135,000—mostly to buy the new tractor.

“I really think it’s a big mistake taking out the Equipment Reserve of $75,000,” Rollins complained.  A pickup truck that cost $46,000 in 2020, now costs $72,000, the Highway Superintendent said.  A 10-wheeler plow truck that cost $250,000, now sells for $385,000.  And Rollins further maintained that earlier plans had called for pumping $130,000 new money into the reserves over the last three years. But little more than half that amount was assigned for this current year, and now nothing for the year ahead.

“It is what it is; the cost has gone up on this stuff,” Rollins said as he sought to bargain for the funding increase he never got. Redmond warned adding the $75,000 would jump the tax levy’s increase to 10.3 percent.

Talk turned to the Highway Department’s big-ticket expected purchase, the mower tractor.

“I think we have to rely on Buddy to do the good work that he did earlier this year that unfortunately didn’t pan out,” this Councilperson, Lynch, said, “and that is to look for a good, used, recent-vintage mower tractor that can be afforded, and we can spend a lot less money on it.  I encourage Buddy to do that, and I think he has the wherewithal and the acumen and the good common sense to find that unit.”

Last July, Rollins, with Town Board endorsement, attempted to purchase a gently-used 2022 tractor at auction. The machine went for slightly more money than the superintendent chose to pay.  Yet, if bought, it would have cost about half of what’s now budgeted for the new tractor.

“And sometimes, as I see it, you have to live with used when you’d like new, but you can’t afford it,” this Councilperson observed.

Rollins noted that he often does buy used equipment, but then it may break and costs money to fix.  A second tractor within the Town inventory, a 2021 machine, awaits up to $10,000 in repairs, he said. 

This Councilperson countered that even with the inconvenience and repair expense, the Town may still be dollars ahead.

“For a poor town like Enfield, and it is a poor town relative to a lot of others, I think you do a pretty good job of finding these bargains,” Lynch commended Rollins.

What Redmond and the Town Board relied on most to keep Enfield’s tax levy from launching into double-digit heights was again—like last year, though this time even more so—drawing down its accumulated savings, Enfield’s “Fund Balance.”  The 2025 Budget had tapped $125,000 from fund balance.  The 2026 Budget would raise that annual draw to $182,500.

Town bookkeeper Blixy Taetzsch comforted the Board a bit at the October meeting, predicting a slightly softened fiscal landing.  Taetzsch forecast some unspent carry-over funds at the end of this year.

“This is not a guarantee, but it is probably within the realm of what will happen,” Taetzsch said of the brightened fiscal forecast.

Nevertheless, Enfield has a long-standing Fund Balance Policy.  It calls for setting aside and never touching $250,000 in each of twin accounts; one for the Highway Department, and another for the General Fund.  Thanks to accumulated equipment reserves, Highway’s doing OK.  But with the latest draw-down the 2026 Budget proposes, the General Fund balance would leave little more than $27,000 freely available to appropriate. A year ago, the calculated cushion was $129,080, nearly five times the new amount.

There’s “not a lot of wiggle there,” Taetzsch conceded of that General Fund’s cash availability.

“What do we do next year?” this Councilperson, Lynch, quizzed Redmond, noting that what’s been freely drawn upon in the past may not exist in the future.

“We’re going to lose 100,000 out of the budget next year because of the debt service,’ Redmond reminded everyone.  The Supervisor clings to the expectation that when 20 years of bonding payments end in 2026 on the Town Highway Garage, the budget can redirect the freed-up $102,000 long-held annual burden to pay for something else.

“But you’re not going to lose 182-five,” this writer reminded Redmond of the windfall’s limited reach.

“Well, hopefully, we’ll have some carry-over at the end of this (upcoming year), and we’ll have some savings, or we’re otherwise going to be in another pickle,” Redmond answered, a carefree chuckle to her voice.

Reassuring words, one may guess.  Enfield’s budget hearing is Wednesday, October 22.

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Standing in Open Government’s Doorway

County Legislature funds meeting mags; building guards

Reporting and commentary by Robert Lynch; October 13, 2025

For years and years, ever since the Tompkins County Legislature left the state-secured County Courthouse and settled into a place of its own two buildings away, any of us could visit a legislative meeting unimpeded, just because we wanted to.  We’d walk through a door off DeWitt Park, climb a right-angled flight of stairs or take the elevator, then open another door leading into our lawmakers’ spacious, cathedral-ceilinged showplace.  We’d find ourselves a seat in the carpeted visitor’s gallery.  Let the public business begin.

Those days of privacy-respecting, suspicion-free access are over for now, and probably forever.

By the narrowest of margins that left not a single vote to spare, the Tompkins County Legislature October 7 ratified an Administration-endorsed security plan along with the the funding to impose it.  Soon a magnetometer will appear just inside that DeWitt Park door.  Uniformed personnel are already wanding down pant legs and searching bags and belongings.

Welcome to the world of the frightened legislator.

“This space is public; you’re welcome to come in.  But I also think we have an obligation to our staff to feel safe,” legislator Greg Mezey counseled others on the night the new security protocols won their approval.  “And if you read an email about getting your head blown off just because you’re a County employee, or being used as a sacrifice in town square, being burned alive, you might think differently about how you feel about safety.”

“I hope that our other members in municipal government never have to experience those concerns,” Mezey assured, “but they’re real.”

Quite transparently, the Tompkins County Legislature’s ruling majority is running scared.  Yet those among us who cherish First Amendment freedoms are frightened as well, but for a different reason.

“I’ve got a question.  Is anybody really feeling unsafe here tonight?” this Enfield Councilperson, Robert Lynch, asked the Legislature during his municipal privilege-of-the-floor opportunity at the start of the October 7 meeting.  “I know I don’t.  But you know what?  I feel a chill in the room.”  That chill was generated by my first-ever security screening at the base of those right-angled stairs.

“I don’t like living in a world of fear,” I stated in my municipal leadership report to the Legislature.  “I guess we can live in a world of fear or we can live in a world of love, and acceptance and trust.  And when it comes to the public who come here to petition their government, I think we should be trusting of them and say they are here under good intentions.”

Of course, this Enfield Councilperson’s deference to trust and good intentions did not prevail that night.  By its eight-to-five vote, the County Legislature embraced an Administration plan to spend more than $138,000 this year and an estimated $628,000 in 2026 for equipment and personnel to implement its “Public Safety Enhancements.”

As stated in its authorization, County Government will spend $7,500 to buy a magnetometer and wands, and the rest of the money on salary and fringe benefits to employ one manager and six security officers.  Tompkins County’s Department of Emergency Response, not the Sheriff, will oversee enforcement.

In addition to legislative chambers, tighter security measures will soon come to the Tompkins County Whole Health Department on Brown Road and also toughened security at the Mental Health Department downtown, a place where some security protocols already exist. 

Tompkins County, beginning in 2022, increased security and stationed guards at the Human Services Building on Ithaca’s State Street.  It did so fearing that visitors might carry-in weapons.  Officials also concluded that crime around the building had increased.

As funded by the Legislature, guards will check bags screen attendees not only outside all County Legislature meetings, but also at all legislative committee sessions.  Unlike at the Main Courthouse, where State Courts’ personnel handle the security, guards at the Legislature’s building will not be deployed throughout the workday or surveil the government workforce.

For the record, those supporting the new security enhancements October 7 were Legislature Chair Dan Klein, Enfield-Ulysses rep. Anne Koreman, and her Democratic colleagues Amanda Champion, Shawna Black, Greg Mezey, Veronica Pillar, and Travis Brooks.  Groton’s Lee Shurtleff cast the only Republican vote in the resolution’s support.

Opposing the security resolution were Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown, his Lansing Republican colleague Mike Sigler, and Democrats Mike Lane, Rich John, and Deborah Dawson. (Democrat Dan Nolan was excused that night; the Legislature needs eight votes to pass anything.)

Mike Lane’s opposition was expected.  Although he spoke not at all about the security measures at the October meeting, Lane did object last December when the Legislature approved more limited safety protocols at the Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins Building, the 1854 landmark where legislators meet.  The only security add-on last year was a buzz-in electronic lock at the DeWitt Park door, one that legislative clerks upstairs can unlock for allowed visitors and disable during and a half-hour before public meetings.

“I don’t think it sends a very good message to the public,” Lane said last December of what was planned at the time.  “I just think we don’t need to be afraid of the public.  That’s the message that it sends,” Lane told fellow legislators.  “I think what we have now is the way we should keep it.”

Of course, what the Tompkins County will have soon, if it doesn’t have it already, will reach far deeper into personal privacy than do the precautions implemented last December about which Lane had complained.

The gallery was packed for the meeting October 7.  In an irony of ironies, of the 21 people who spoke or had statements read during an hour-long privilege-of-the-floor marathon, as many as eleven of them addressed the “Flock” cameras stationed about Tompkins County, cameras that read motorists’ license plates.  Yet among the many who faulted Flock’s invasion of privacy and who worried about its data’s misuse, not one person cited the more immediate intrusions to which they’d just been subjected courtesy of the jovial guards at the downstairs door.

The Flock controversy consumed the bulk of the County Legislature’s unusually long, more than five-hour meeting that night. By contrast, lawmakers dispatched the in-house security matter in just 17 minutes’ time.  Only a few of those we’ve elected even spoke to it.

“People need to feel comfortable coming into work, and they need to feel safe,” Shawna Back, a key security-hardening proponent, told the meeting.  “We know that the staff in this building have not always felt safe,” Black asserted.  “I’ve heard that personally, and we know that people that come here to talk in public also need to feel that,” Black added, referring to safety.

Black related an occasion years ago when one or more persons had entered chambers carrying “big bags that looked like they’re carrying guns.” Black and former legislator Martha Robertson began texting each other across the big, oval, legislative desk.  They speculated about contents.  Black now concedes the bags contained nothing more than photographic gear.

“There was absolutely nothing we could do,” Black recounted of the events at that time.  She and Robertson were emotional.  But now, Black said by contrast, the downstairs entrance is guarded.  “What we have is working right now,” Black assessed the new security plan.  “We know that our staff is fairly comfortable right now, as comfortable as they can with the threats that we’re hearing.”

And indeed it appears to be those latest threats, either phoned or online, still unsubstantiated, that have most rattled local lawmakers. 

In a news release issued October 6, one day before the Legislature convened, Tompkins County Sheriff Derek Osborne announced that his office had “received reports of threatening emails sent to several local schools within the county,” messages also, he said, containing “threats directed toward county employees, elected officials, and local financial institutions.” 

Ten days before that announcement, on September 26, media reports indicated that as many as four local school districts, including Ithaca’s, had “received an email threat indicating the possibility of a school shooting at an unspecified school in the county.”  The September 26 false-alarm threat later prompted the Ithaca City School District to move the location of its future Board of Education Meetings to a room more secure.

Both incidents remain under investigation.  Police have announced no arrests.

Even though the heightened security measures at Tompkins’ legislative chambers were not officially authorized prior to the October 7 session, they found themselves in place before the opening gavel even fell that night.  Asked at the meeting door, a security guard informed this writer that similar procedures had already been applied for two or three meetings previous, presumably those of legislative committees.

What’s more, Tompkins County maintains a security double-standard.  While this municipal lawmaker was being searched and wanded October 7, a County legislator, well-known to those in Enfield, was allowed to walk around the reviewing table with neither a search nor a question.

“This is not meant to limit access.  This is about creating safe access,” legislator Greg Mezey insisted, likely directing his reply most immediately to this Enfield lawmaker.  Mezey noted that those who visit Capitol Hill are routinely screened for weapons.  So are those who visit the New York State Capitol, as well as are visitors to Ithaca’s City Hall.

To some of us, the City Hall application of magnetometers describes a most laughable overreach.  It began decades ago during the Iraq war, when a troubled man in the gallery threw his shoe, an Iraqi insult, at then-Ithaca Mayor Carolyn Peterson during a Common Council meeting.  City Hall promptly installed metal detectors.  Of course, the machines and searches could never have stopped the actions of Peterson’s critic unless everyone attended barefoot.

Ithaca legislator Rich John, a Cornell law professor, doubts that what the County Legislature has now imposed and funded will do much good.  He thinks it’s not the solution.

“I’d like to say as many here have said, well, we need to show that we’re keeping people safe,” John told the meeting.  “I don’t think we can do that.  We can try.  We can try different things.  But I don’t think that (security) necessarily is a guarantee we can make.”

Rich John would prefer society and law enforcement focus less on hardening meeting places and more on “penetrating the anonymity of the Internet” to identify and arrest the threat-makers.  “If somebody’s really serious about this, they just do it somewhere else,” John reasoned.

“For me it’s just a lot of cost,” Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown complained about the security package’s seven-person addition to payroll and its $628,000 expense next year.

“I understand people are nervous and scared, and unfortunately that’s life sometimes,” Brown shared, albeit bluntly.  “Threats come from all angles, and sometimes we’re all politicians,” Brown said. 

One of those “scared” legislators is Amanda Champion.  The Ithaca Town representative asked County Attorney Maury Josephson whether the threat of workplace violence could carve out for her one of those rare “extenuating circumstances” under which state law permits legislators to attend remotely.

“If I feel unsafe and that’s affecting my mental health, can I attend these meetings via Zoom, as if I had COVID or a broken foot?” Champion asked.

The County Attorney paused for ten seconds, a pause that felt like an eternity.  “I think it may very well,” Josephson cautiously answered.

The County Attorney, in answer to Shawna Black’s question, also said that a municipality’s workplace liability for acts of random violence is “very much an evolving area of tort law.”  While court precedent has generally insulated governments from liability, Josephson then cautioned, “It’s only a matter of time before we start seeing cases where employers are sued and potentially held liable for failing to provide adequate security.”

Still, security’s benefit comes at liberty’s expense.  And improved security finds itself selectively applied.

One can argue that the most needed place for weapons screening is at the door of every schoolhouse.  But it’s not done there.  Neither is it imposed at most hospital emergency room entrances, nor at Wegmans, nor Walmart, nor Texas Road House.  It only happens with government; and in Tompkins County’s case, it only impacts those attending public meetings.  It’s a time and a place when and where persons exercise a most protected constitutional right, the right to petition one’s government.  It’s a protected right the height of which not even a school child enjoys.

“I’ll tell you this,” Enfield’s Councilperson informed the Tompkins County Legislature the night he was first screened and then allowed to speak his mind, “If ever we get in the Town of Enfield where somebody says we’re going to surveil the people who walk through our door to petition our government to talk about whatever issue… I think that would be the time I will step off the Town Board, because I will have been driving a wedge as a Town Board member between myself and my constituents…”

Tompkins County can do things its way, and it will.  Enfield may do things differently.  And to many of us, it should.

###

Tompkins Tax Hike cut to 3.3%

Reductions found through sales tax adjustments, savings set-asides

by Robert Lynch; October 9, 2025

Some legislative staffer, safely off-camera, whispered “Abracadabra.” It signaled magic. An idea had been floated.  A vote was readied.  New numbers were typed.  A button was pushed.  And suddenly, on the Legislature Chambers’ big screen, Tompkins County Government’s proposed tax increase found itself sliced about in half. 

Any reporter skilled in Tompkins County budget politics realizes that fiscal catastrophes portended in April or July have a way of suddenly evaporating by mid-October.  And so it will happen again this year.

Near the welcome end of an exhaustive, more than four-hour-long meeting October 8, as clerks battled fatigue and politicians grew amusingly punchy, a committee comprised of all 14 Tompkins County legislators  found a way—as it always does—to trim next year’s tax levy increase to the low single digits.

By a unanimous vote, following those long hours of line-by-line addition and subtraction, the Legislature’s “Expanded Budget Committee,” a 14-person, self-made creation, settled on a 2026 County Budget that would raise next year’s tax levy by a mere 3.31 percent.  For the hypothetical “median-value home,” should one truly exist, the county portion of your January tax bill would rise to $1,458.07, an increase of $20.08 over 2025. (Feel lucky if you own that “median” $300,000 house; most in Enfield don’t.)

Although far below earlier estimates, the 3.31 percent increase would remain above New York State’s, penalty-free 2.75 percent tax cap set for Tompkins County.  Legislators have already voted at a prior meeting to override that cap.

“I just don’t think in this time and this economy we can ask our taxpayers to pay more in their property tax when we have an opportunity to adjust revenues to a reasonable number that even if we’re off by 500 thousand we could still absorb,” Dryden’s Greg Mezey, a perennial fan of lower tax rates and smaller government surpluses, told the Wednesday night session.  “I don’t think it’s too much to ask.”

The Expanded Budget Committee can only recommend action, not pass final judgment.  But when members reconsider the recommendation as an official Legislature, October 21, they’ll likely grant the amended budget official status and forward it to a Public Hearing held near Halloween.  A final legislative vote would follow.

The settled-upon 3.31 percent levy increase wasn’t always seen as attainable.  Following a “budget retreat” in mid-July, one poorly-publicized and likely attended only by legislators and key staff, County Administrator Korsah Akumfi had predicted it might take a 20 percent hike in the levy to maintain current programs.  And it might require a 40 percent increase to add beneficial program “enhancements.”

Then at the start of September, Akumfi’s deputy unveiled a more-refined, restrained, $240 Million recommended budget, one that would raise the tax levy by 4.5 percent. It was that 4.5 percent goal that legislators worked towards as they examined every line item and talked to every department head during a string of meetings that culminated with a trio of long, number-crunching sessions; first, October 2, then, again this past Monday, and finally, Wednesday night, the eighth.

How the once-feared double-digit tax hikes got averted flowed from combined legislative initiatives, each arising near the end of the long Wednesday night meeting.  Newfield-Enfield legislator Randy Brown was one of the revision’s key architects.

Incremental appropriations had already crept in.  At the close of Monday’s meeting, the levy increase stood at 5.34 percent.  Shortly after Wednesday’s start, it had climbed to 5.81 percent.  Nearly three-and-a-half hours later, it stood at 7.77 percent.  Randy Brown stepped in.

Brown cited a late-September report that pointed toward sales tax receipts increasing by as much as seven percent this year over last.  Brown concluded that the County Administrator’s budget had projected next year’s sales tax income as too low.  Brown moved to increase those sales tax revenues by an additional $1.25 Million.  The committee’s majority would later trim that increase to $700,000.  The revised amendment passed.  The projected levy dropped.

Next Lansing’s Deborah Dawson entered with her contribution toward taxpayer frugality.  Dawson turned to an obscure line item called the “Mandate Contingent Account.”  It’s a rainy-day fund of sorts, established a couple of years ago to cover suddenly-imposed local mandates dictated by Albany or Washington.

Dawson proposed to cancel the Administrator’s funding of the Mandate Contingent Account with new tax money and instead support it through “fund balance”—the County’s accumulated savings. 

Dawson’s initiative passed 13 votes to one.  And when it did, the button was pushed and the levy increase dropped precipitously from 6.49 percent to that 3.31 percent final figure.

“My experience tells me that at the end of the process, y’all are going to want to use some fund balance anyway,” Dawson, the Legislature’s most savings-conscious member, told colleagues.  “So if we’re going to use fund balance, let’s use fund balance for something that may or may not have to be spent,” she reasoned.

Administrator Akumfi was wary.  He noted that already this year an outside mandate cost the county treasury $800,000.  Akumfi urged only a fraction of the contingency account be drained, and that $1 Million in taxpayer funds still go into it.  Dawson countered that a partial reduction would still bring a five percent tax increase, a landing point “that’s not going to be acceptable to everybody in this room,” Dawson insisted,

Enfield-Ulysses legislator Anne Koreman found herself the only legislator opposing the tax-cutting Dawson initiative.

“I’m not going to vote for this,” Koreman said.  “I think this puts us back in a place where we’ve been for the last few years where we’re not having enough revenue.”

Koreman maintained that for many years Tompkins County has kept its tax increases artificially low, maybe holding increases to a couple percent, or to no increase at all,  And because it has, the deeper the spending cuts County Government must make. Koreman called the practice “not sustainable.”

“Even the Town of Enfield raised their tax levy by over six percent,” Koreman reported.  “You have costs going up, and if we get down to three percent or something like that, I don’t think that’s enough, and what are we going to do the next year?” she asked.

As the Expanded Budget Committee was putting final touches on the County Budget downtown Wednesday night, the Enfield Town Board, a handful of miles, but perhaps a financial world, away was buttoning-down its own finances, granting Preliminary Budget status to a spending plan that would raise next year’s Enfield tax levy by 6.53 percent.

Randy Brown’s heightened projections of sales tax receipts also got pushback at the Legislature committee’s meeting, including from Administrator Akumfi.

 “I would suggest we take a cautious approach in how we overly estimate our revenue to make sure we have plenty of cushion,” Akumfi cautioned.  “There is some degree of unpredictability with sales tax, especially going into 2026,” the Administrator warned.

Legislator Rich John agreed, and backed reducing Brown’s proposed sales tax revenue increase almost in half.

“I’d be comfortable with the $700,000 figure,” John said, “because I have some real trepidation; what’s going to happen at the federal level and what that’s going to do to the spending power at Cornell University, which will impact our community.”

Anne Koreman shared John’s concern.

“We’re looking at unprecedented challenges in our community,” Koreman warned.  “Just the ‘knowns,’ with housing, food, Medicaid aid and all of the trickle effects… There’s going to be issue after issue, major issues.  I think this is a time to be conservative.  I don’t even call it conservative; realistic.”

By a vote of nine-to-five, the committee amended Brown’s $1.25 Million proposed sales tax revenue increase to $700,000, and then adopted the change, with only Brown opposing the revised adjustment.  With the levy cut to 3.31 percent, the final package secured everyone’s support.

“I know we want to be cautious and conservative,” Greg Mezey counseled.  But being too cautious and pulling in too much money and leaving taxpayers with too little carries a price, he said.

“Otherwise, we’re  going to do what we’ve always done, and we’re going to over-levy, and we’re going to sandbag our budget because we’re so afraid to go over/under by a couple hundred thousand dollars or a million here or there, that we’re going to over-collect unnecessarily so that we can realize revenue that we could have otherwise budgeted for.”

With the cuts that were made, consider the 2026 Tompkins County Budget pretty much settled now.  There’ll be no 20 percent tax increase, nor one of ten percent, nor even the 4.5 percent Administrator Akumfi had recommended.  Maybe some human service agencies denied funding will appeal and complain.  But the big-picture issues were mostly laid to rest that long Wednesday night.

“I just want to acknowledge that this is really hard,” legislator Amanda Champion remarked, torn between leaving the taxpayers their money and providing them what they request.  “We don’t want to increase the taxes on our constituents, and yet we also want to provide them with all the services,” she said, “and in some instances, it’s the same people.”

###

Posted Previously:

Local Airport takes a big budget hit

Lawmakers slash County Administrator’s recommended taxpayer subsidy by more than half

by Robert Lynch; October 4, 2025

It was a long meeting.  And it was a meeting made long in large part this past Thursday because a committee of the Tompkins County Legislature held a protracted debate over funding the local airport.

In what’s emerged as the most controversial plank of Administrator Korsah Akumfi’s recommended $240 Million 2026 Tompkins County Budget, the Legislature’s “Expanded Budget Committee”—in essence, a 14-person committee-of-the-whole—that night slashed Akumfi’s recommended $1.97 Million operational subsidy to the Ithaca-Tompkins International Airport to just $853,200, a mere 43 percent of what the Administrator had recommended.

“Don’t shoot me.  We don’t need the airport.  We don’t need it.  It’s not a life-or-death situation,” the Ithaca Town’s Amanda Champion most memorably stated at the October 2 session.

Champion would have gone farther than would have anyone else.  She would have erased the airport’s subsidy to zero.  But when Champion’s amendment came to a vote, only she supported it.

Thursday’s series of committee votes, with plenty of talk sandwiched in-between them, ate up just 18 minutes short of two hours’ time, roughly half the length of the meeting.

In his budget presentation to the Legislature September 2, County Administrator Akumfi had proposed a new, $1,971 annual operating subsidy to the financially-ailing, passenger-starved airport not only for 2026, but also for the following two years.  Future years’ subsidies won’t be addressed until planning for those later budgets arrives starting next fall.

Pumping a nearly $2 Million subsidy into the airport, Akumfi’s September budget message maintained, would improve the facility’s competitiveness, attract new passenger routes and “immediately lower fares.” 

“ITH (the local airport’s three-letter flight designation) faces rising competitive pressures from nearby airports that subsidize airline routes and from the ongoing challenge of passenger leakage to Syracuse, Rochester, and Elmira,” the Administrator’s message stated.  “Without targeted support, ITH risks losing service, raising costs for residents, and weakening its role as a driver of tourism and economic development,” he stated.

But subsidizing the airport with taxpayer funds takes money away from other priorities.  And although they’ve yet to set a formal number, legislators have tacitly rallied around Administrator Akumfi’s recommendation that would contain next year’s property tax levy increase to 4.5 percent, an increase still higher than it’s been for any recent year.

With far less fanfare, and a lesser consumption of time, legislators during their Thursday meeting addressed one of those other priorities competing with the airport for attention.  By a vote of 12-2, the committee recommended $500,000 increased funding for Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit, the TCAT bus service. 

Newfield-Enfield legislator Randy Brown joined Republican colleague Lee Shurtleff in opposing the half-Million dollar increase to TCAT.  Brown had proposed reducing the amount to $250,000.  No other legislator supported Brown’s proposed compromise.

Some would classify everything the Expanded Budget Committee did this past week as an exhaustive exercise of legal fiction.  The committee’s recommendations carry no finality.  Legislators must still meet as a Legislature, not just as a committee, and make the budget changes official.  But since every one of the 14 we’ve elected sat around the big, oval desk Thursday evening, it would take a giant change in collective opinion to reverse the recommendations the committee made.

When the proposed 2026 Budget exits committee and heads to the floor later this month, at least based on past practice, adjustments will focus on big-picture issues like tax rates and fund balance savings, not on more granular items like airport appropriations.  Such past squabbles are usually considered settled.

“At least from my constituents, I heard very loud that they did not want the funding for the airport to come out of our tax levy,” legislator Shawna Black asserted as she began the multi-amendment process to strip away much of what the airport had requested.

Perhaps overcomplicating an otherwise straightforward analysis in his attempt at salesmanship, Akumfi had recommended tapping the new airport subsidy from three different funding sources.  In reality, it’s more like two.  And any observer needed to keep a scorecard Thursday night to determine from which of those several pots the airport money would be taken and from which it would not.

First, by an eight-to-six vote, the committee removed the $371,000 portion of the subsidy that would have come directly from the property tax.  Then, with 12 votes in favor and just two opposed, it deleted another $500,000 that would have been drawn from projected, newly-increased hotel room tax revenues that are expected to grow by newly-imposing that tax on short-term rentals, like Airbnb availabilities.

The $853,200 subsidy finally agreed-upon, at least in theory, would come from sales tax receipts, also expected to generate from their new imposition on short-term rentals.  But again, that’s a legal fiction.  And even Lansing legislator Deborah Dawson, arguably the most fiscally-astute budget watchdog among the 14, got tripped up as the meeting wore on.

Dawson repeatedly asked whether the airport money was coming from the tax levy or the sales tax.  As Administrator Akumfi tried to explain, but with limited success, it really doesn’t matter.  Sales taxes, however much they might grow, still roll into the budget’s General Fund.  And when those other fiscal sources run dry, the property tax makes up the difference.

Akumfi had proposed $1.1 Million of that projected sales tax money be syphoned off for airport aid.  The amount’s reduction to $853,200—an odd number chosen for a reason—passed by a vote of ten-to-four.  Amanda Champion, Shawna Black, Deborah Dawson, and Legislature Chair Dan Klein opposed the reduced amount, though perhaps for differing reasons. Black had wanted only a half-Million dollars spent.  Champion would have spent no money at all.

Why the airport subsidy is needed in the first place equates to nothing less than a high-stakes competitive gamble.  And local airport officials admit that fact.

“The $1.9 Million that we did ask for will help to make us more competitive;” Roxan Noble, Airport Director, defended her request before lawmakers began chipping it away. “That’s the goal, so that our cost per enplanement is down to something that the airlines are looking for so we can bring in additional service; so we can continue to maintain service we have.”

The Ithaca-Tompkins Airport—truly “International” in name only—has shed much of its service post-pandemic.  American Airlines has left for good.  There were once perhaps a dozen daily commercial flights into this airport, someone said at the meeting.  Now there’s just a fraction of that number.  

And when airports negotiate with airlines, officials advised the committee, the “cost-per-enplanement” (CPE) metric becomes key.  It’s a per-passenger charge the airport assesses upon airlines to cover its costs.  Therefore, the larger the taxpayer subsidy, the lower the imposed CPE.

“CPE is a hypothetical number of all of our cost factors that go through the airport,” Josh Nalley, Airport Deputy Director, advised the committee.  And to Nalley, a $15 CPE is the sweet spot, about half of where the local CPE stands at present.

“If we can’t get to that $15 mark, we’re not getting new service,” Nalley cautioned the committee.  “If  we’re higher than what we are, we have the chance of potentially losing that service.  If we lose airline service, then we are looking for a lot more money to keep the airport open,” Nalley said.

Noble and Nalley estimate it would take the whole $1.97 Million annual subsidy to lower the CPE to that magic $15.  What the committee recommended Thursday would only maintain the CPE at its present $30.41 level (hence the odd, $853,200 number, based on administrative calculations).

But even were the full subsidy granted, nothing’s assured. 

“There’s no guarantee, is there, that if we cut it to 15, you’re going to get added flights?” a skeptical Deborah Dawson asked.

“There’s not a guarantee, unfortunately.  That’s business, right?  There’s never a guarantee when you’re trying to operate a business,” Nalley admitted.  “But we’re not even in the conversation now.”

“So far it’s a definite ‘No,’ but the money doesn’t make it a definite ‘Yes,’” Dawson pressed further.

“Correct,” Nalley conceded.

Anecdotal evidence shared at the meeting suggested that as many as 40  percent of those who could fly out of the local airport bypass it and drive to larger nearby cities like Syracuse, probably because the air fares there are cheaper.

So it begs to be asked, could a subsidy-driven lower CPE cut airline ticket prices?  Legislator Lee Shurtleff had posed that question to Noble at a prior committee meeting, September 18.

“Fares are very tricky,” the Airport Director answered Shurtleff at the time.  “Air fares make no sense.”

“The airport is an economic driver for Tompkins County,” Budget Committee Chair Mike Lane insisted at this most recent session.  “We know we are centrally isolated here.  We have no connection to the interstate highway system,” Lane reminded colleagues.  “We know over the years  when people have been looking to come into Tompkins County,” given the presence of Cornell University and the local colleges, “that they are interested in being able to have air service to get in and out.”

“We have to support the airport,” Newfield’s Randy Brown maintained. “We have no choice.  We have bills to pay.  We have to pay the bills.”

But members more critical of the taxpayer subsidy argued budget night that without any binding promises from the airlines, underwriting airport operations with public moneys effectively places those dollars, albeit indirectly, into the air carriers’ corporate pockets.

Two nights earlier, at a Legislature-sponsored “public forum” on the proposed 2026 Budget, one that drew an abnormally large number of attendees, many speakers targeted the proposed airport appropriation as the first and best place to cut. 

Reducing or removing the subsidy, many then argued, would free up money for social programs and other services, including aid for local arts and cultural organizations, for the County Library, for TCAT, and most often mentioned, for OAR (“Opportunities, Alternatives, and Resources”) an outreach service for the previously-incarcerated.

“You’re trying to fund the airport?  You’re joking, right?” Kirk Rosenfeld, a former eight-year prison inmate and an OAR supporter, asked at the September 30 forum.  “Like, it’s an airport.  We’re talking about people’s lives… not flying planes,” Rosenfeld continued.  “We can’t afford airports.  We can’t afford a plane ticket.  We’re trying to get food.  We’re trying to get warmth, heat.”

Messages like that his were not lost on legislators like Champion, who went the farthest during the committee session with her call for slashing the subsidy to nothing.

“It’s nothing personal.  It’s not about the airport,” Champion insisted before casting her lone vote to zero-out any appropriation.  “I feel like that future money (the projected Airbnb short-term rental windfall) could be used to help people and not the airport,” Champion argued.

“I think we should factor in what it would cost to put a ‘closed’ sign in front of the airport,” Dryden legislator Greg Mezey responded to Champion’s scorched-earth idea, “because that essentially is what that does.”

“I don’t think we’re as broke as people say we are,” Mezey maintained. 

“I’m a believer in either set ‘em up for success,” Mezey said of the airport, “or let’s stop the conversation and move on and realize that we all just put the nail in the coffin of our airport and get what we get.”

“This is a race to be the small regional airport,” Mezey maintained.  “The race is on between us, Elmira, Binghamton, these other places that are not in these major metro areas.”  The committee was told Binghamton had just lately pumped millions into its own facility in hopes of luring a low-cost airline.

And with the County Administrator’s $1.9 Million recommended airport subsidy cut to $853,200, the Expanded Budget Committee moved on.  It will reconvene Monday, October 6, and possibly a third time, Wednesday, the 8^th, before the amended budget is hammered into pretty much final shape… at least, final enough to take it before a formal Legislature session and then to a Public Hearing.

The airport appropriation could be amended yet again, once lawmakers take the weekend to mull it over.  But what stands now is a loss to Roxan Noble and to those, like legislator Mezey, who’d hope Ithaca would overtake places like Elmira and Binghamton.  The net winners from Thursday night’s budget adjusting could be those human service agencies who’d hope to gobble up the money that the airport would have otherwise gotten.

Shortly before the committee’s adjournment, the big screen showed a running tax levy increase of 4.74 percent.  The soft target is 4.5 percent.  Legislators still have a ways to go.

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And posted earlier:

ICSD Security Scare Prompts Meeting Move

by Robert Lynch; October 1, 2025

The fire marshal had set the room’s limit at 49 people.  I counted 48 seated as the Ithaca Board of Education met there Tuesday night.  Had Board President Sean Eversley Bradwell and member Erin Croyle not then been excused, the room would have been over limit.

Ignore the (low-tech, round-faced) clock having been set an hour too fast.  Obviously, the Board of Education’s district office conference room hasn’t been used much lately.  But it was used that night.  And it will likely be used again and again for some time to come.

Prompted implicitly by a September 26 multi-district threat of an imminent school shooting, a short-lived scare that law enforcement later determined to be “non-credible,” the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) this week abruptly and hastily moved its September 30^th meeting and all scheduled future voting sessions away from the board’s customary convening place, the High School’s more spacious York Lecture Hall, and into a somewhat more secure—though definitely more cramped—district office conference room across the lawn.

Meeting attendees at the new venue now must first “buzz-in” at the door to enter the building.  They’ll then find a clerk seated in the hall, serving as a gatekeeper of sorts.  She’ll advise visitors to sign an attendance log.  Once you clear each of those limited obstacles, good luck finding a seat.

“If you look at the long history of Board of Education meetings, my time at York was a bit of a time out,” School Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown tried to explain when his time to speak came up at Tuesday’s session.  In his initial remarks, Brown never directly addressed the previous Friday’s incident.  He didn’t have to.  The inference was clear.  And it was also clear that Dr. Brown and fellow administrators had orchestrated the sudden relocation.

“I learned that the Ithaca City School District was the last school district I was able to find that had open access to its board of education meetings without anyone signing in, without being buzzed in, whatsoever,” Brown told the Board.  The superintendent related conversations he’d had at a regional superintendents meeting.  “So what you’re seeing now is us making some attempts to respond to best practices and frankly to respond to some of the requests we’ve had around accessibility and access to our meetings,” Brown said.

“I was here when all of our buildings had open access,” Brown recalled, “and we had parents and families, including myself, who would just walk through buildings throughout the day.  Things have shifted and changed.”

But one cannot escape the timing of the latest, sudden alteration.  First notification of it came one day before the Tuesday meeting.  It came Monday, September 29, when the session’s agenda got posted online.  It was the Monday following the Friday scare.

“Beginning September 30, 2025, all Board of Education voting meetings and committee work sessions will be held in the ICSD Board Building, 400 Lake Street,” the District’s terse, one-sentence advisory stated.

Asked as to why the new procedures had been so suddenly put in place, the meeting’s hallway monitor Tuesday night directed inquiries to the ICSD’s Communications Department, which as of midday Wednesday, October 1, had yet to issue a formal statement or news release.

For their part, Ithaca Board of Education members said little at the September 30 session about the change in venue.

“I want to commend the Board to being open to the evolution of the best practices and recommendations from folks who advise us on where to meet,” Dr. Brown stated during his report.  “Thank you for your inclusiveness.  Thank you for your responsiveness.  Thank you for your thoughtfulness when it comes to how to conduct a public meeting in a way that can engage a community in the best way.”

That stated, what’s happening now challenges public “engagement” more than just a trifle.  York Lecture Hall had ample stadium seating with desks at every chair.  Now if you go to a board room meeting and plan to write, better bring a clipboard or place your laptop on… well… your lap.  When attendees are many, you’ll be crammed into chairs all-too-tightly or forced to stand in the doorway.  And for video streaming, the board room cameras are ancient and grainy, akin to those still employed for Ithaca Common Council meetings.

That said, security at York was truly minimal.  Building entrances remained unlocked and unmonitored whenever the Board of Education met.  Visitors, if they chose, could roam the halls of “K-Building.”  About the only “accessibility” problem confronting York was that to get to the meeting room, you had to walk down either of two flights of stairs.

Dr. Brown left the meeting place discussion suggesting that even yet another location might later be found, one either on or off the Ithaca High School campus.  “I know this may be temporary,” Brown said of that night’s meeting space.

So much for the move in meetings.  Now to the fallout from the September 26^th fortuitous false-alarm.

“Once again, the absence of timely communication from the ICSD to its educators and parents as this situation unfolded is unacceptable and shows what I feel to be another example of a lack of care ICSD administrators have for their staff and students,” Jeffrey Ames, husband of an Ithaca teacher, told the school board.  Ames was the first of several who exercised their floor privileges that night.

Ames alleged—and ICSD officials never refuted—that when the “non-credible” email threat came in Friday, ICSD administrators communicated only among themselves, not with anyone else.

A same-day report September 26 by 14850 Today indicated that not only Ithaca’s schools, but also districts in Dryden and Lansing, as well as the Tompkins-Seneca-Tioga BOCES had “received an email threat indicating the possibility of a school shooting at an unspecified school in the county,” according to a statement credited to TST BOCES administration.” “Law enforcement agencies have deemed the threat non-credible,” the credited BOCES statement assured.

At least one of those school systems, Dryden’s, had imposed a district-wide lockout.  But Ithaca did not.

“While some of those districts acted out of an abundance of caution,” Ames told the Ithaca Board, “ICSD chose to only communicate information to members of their administration.  Employees and parents received nothing,” he said, “instead learning of the threats through word-of-mouth or the press.”

“Credible or non-credible, ICSD’s failure to communicate with the staff and parents is unacceptable,” Ames insisted.

The Ithaca Board of Education plowed through a weighty agenda, discussing cell phone bans and unsettled teachers’ talks—topics best left here for later reporting—when after more than two hours’ time, Superintendent Brown and Board members circled back to that Friday afternoon close-call, the tragedy that never happened.  What Brown said could leave many confused.  Yet the Superintendent did reveal that authorities purportedly “know the address” from which Friday’s multi-district threat originated, adding that “we’re getting close to determining the source.”

“We do daily threat assessments,” Dr. Brown acknowledged.   Some are credible, others not, he said.  Drawing the line, Brown explained, gets done on a “case-by-case basis,” perhaps with the assistance of law enforcement.   “There’s not a perfect science to it,” Brown admitted.

“We have very tight protocols about how to look at death threats, and we take every one of them seriously,” the Superintendent assured.  That even includes the five-year old warning “I’m going to get you, or I’m going to blow the school up,” Ithaca’s chief administrator stated.

But then came the maddening, seemingly-arbitrary hair-splitting that may anger those like that school teacher’s husband.

“We don’t communicate to the community about non-credible threats,” the Superintendent told the Board. “That can create an environment where it makes people unsafe.  It can feed rumors and misinformation.  And frankly, as I’ve seen even the last week, communicating about a non-credible threat can (lead) some families not sending their babies to school.”

“However,” Dr. Brown quickly added, “there have been times we’re communicating about non-credible threats, particularly when it’s been reported in the media, and social media is a frenzy, and people want to hear about something.”  Last weekend’s unrealized action fell into that latter category, the Superintendent determined.  ICSD reportedly sent out an email that Sunday.

“When they’re not credible, we’re not communicating to folks for the reasons I’ve said,” Brown summarized.  “However, there are cases when we do communicate about non-credible threats for various reasons.” 

That distinction truly takes a while to understand.

Attempting clarity, school board member Garrick Blalock asked whether exercising restraint avoids amplifying the wrongdoer’s voice and otherwise playing into his hand.  The Superintendent agreed.

“Amplifying their voice can lead to more of it happening,” Brown cautioned.  It can also, he said, “create misinformation and rumors in the community.  It can create fears for folks who may have fears already.”

Board colleague Jacob Shiffrin felt equally dismayed.  “It can be a damned if you do and damned if you don’t communication,” Shiffrin acknowledged.

Teaching spouse Jeffrey Ames never got the opportunity to respond publicly to Superintendent Brown’s finely-parsed protocol.  But it’s doubtful he’d have much good to say about it.

“I’m 33, which means I’ve grown up alongside some of the worst school shootings in history,’ the attendee said hours earlier as he addressed the Board.  “A small part of me fears the worst every single time my wife leaves for work in the morning, knowing that if my biggest nightmare comes through, she would do anything in her power to protect her students, which means she might not come home.”

Welcome to the painful reality of post-Columbine 21^st Century America.  Being packed in like sardines to attend a school board meeting becomes the least of our worries.  Even in Ithaca.

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Posted Previously:

Take my Building, Please!

Harold’s Square pitched to County for Center of Government

“Let’s not let our egos determine the trajectory.”

Center of Government critic Amanda Kirchgessner, to the County Legislature.

by Robert Lynch; September 23, 2025

They brought out the heaviest of heavy-hitters; Martha Robertson, former Chair of the Tompkins County Legislature and one-time influencer on the Tompkins County Industrial Development Agency (IDA).  She’d once called public purchase of buildings adjacent to the Courthouse for a new Center of Government the fulfillment of a 20-year dream. 

But on September 16, addressing the County Legislature she once chaired, and speaking this time as a private citizen, Martha Robertson changed her tune.

“Harold’s Square has got almost 58,000 square feet of existing office space that is ready for the County to take possession,” Robertson informed lawmakers.  You “should be able to find what you need there,” she advised colleagues, some of whom she’d once led.

Developers of Harold’s Square want to offload their office space to Tompkins County.  They want to do it badly…. and do it now.

Revealing plans never before made public, Harold’s Square owners approached the County Legislature last Tuesday—with Robertson as their lead-off salesperson.  They urged lawmakers to ditch their plans for a $50-60 Million stand-alone Downtown Center of Government at East Buffalo and North Tioga Streets and put space-starved departments in their own building instead.

“I’m here to propose our property on the Commons as an alternative for the proposed Center of Government for the County,” Sam Lubin, one of the principals behind Harold’s Holding, LLC, told legislators.  “We have space available equaling or exceeding for what is proposed in the plans for the new Center,” Lubin boasted.

“So we’ve got beautiful space.  It would be wonderful to see it utilized in this fashion,” said Jim McGuire, General Manager of MDC Harold’s, LLC, a Buffalo and Florida-based development firm that’s become the project’s prime backer, as he extolled the office building’s attributes.

As anyone who’s ventured to Downtown Ithaca realizes, Harold’s Square is the biggest of the big; the building that stands most prominently among those Commons-centric, tax-abated, reach-to-the sky office and housing hybrids that will forever transform Downtown’s landscape, and probably not for the better.

Harold’s Square stands 12 stories tall.  Its residential tower, discretely tucked away from the pedestrian mall, stacks 78 apartments beside and atop one another, according to promotional literature.  Out front, five floors, with a professed 70,000 square feet in retail and office space, overlook the Commons.

Where Harold’s Square stands at mid-decade gives telling testament to post-pandemic brick-and-mortar pain.  Harold’s Square is hurting.  Maybe its residential side is holding its own.  But plain for everyone to see, its commercial component cannot be doing well.  Hardly anybody rents space there.  Harold’s Square’s ground floor remains a structural skeleton.  Since it was built, the building’s retail offering has never held a permanent tenant.  Supposedly, a restaurant once laid plans to open there, yet never did.

“When I was on the IDA and approved the building, it was a whole different economic climate,” Robertson informed the Tompkins Legislature.  “Since COVID, we know that office space has really gotten vacated, where people are just not using the space that was previously planned,” she said.

In a trio of privilege-of-the-floor presentations September 16 by Harold’s Holding’s principals and by Robertson, financial desperation became clear to spot.  Each speaker bent over backwards to accommodate Tompkins County’s desires in whatever way might gain consent.

“We are more than willing to be flexible to suit the County’s needs, whether that be lease, lease-buy or sale, as well as offer flexibility in terms of buildout,” Lubin said.

“We think it could be very cost-effective,” McGuire advised legislators. “We’re estimating that we could deliver something in the ‘low 20’s’—20-something Million Dollars, versus a current (Center of Government) budget of about 50 Million. And we could do it obviously very quickly because the shell and infrastructure of the building is all up and in place,” McGuire added.

For her part, Martha Robertson held out the prospect that Harold’s Square’s developers could sweeten the deal by buying the three Courthouse-adjacent buildings the County has intended to deconstruct and clear the site to put the Center of Government there.  Two of those buildings taxpayers paid some $3 Million to buy back in 2021.

Robertson even suggested that developers would offer naming rights and place Tompkins County’s name upon the Harold’s Square building.

And yes, Martha Robertson’s surprising endorsement of the Harold’s Square alternative is a very big deal.

For the better part of a year now, it’s often seemed that the Tompkins County’s Center of Government project has found itself the captive of bureaucratic inertia.  It’s become a prisoner seeking to break itself free of close-minded political and administrative expectations and pursue its own path toward creative alternatives.  Still, every time one of those intriguing options surfaces, some consultant, some administrator, or maybe a legislative majority yanks the project back to the route lawmakers planned it to take four years ago, namely to take the shape of a pricey new building at Tioga Street and East Buffalo.

Last spring, possibly the best option of all suddenly came to light as Tompkins Community Bank foreclosed on the mammoth, 18-building Cornell Business Park in Lansing,  It followed  a private developer’s failure to make good on a $68 Million ground lease mortgage. 

Tompkins Bank offered County Government one or more of the buildings.  In a later-disclosed memo, County Administrator Korsah Akumfi recommended against purchasing anything at the Business Park. The Legislature followed suit on June third.  It doubled-down on its original plans and moved ahead with new construction downtown. The Business Park has gotten little mention since.

And despite the full court press given this latest possibility, Harold’s Square, on September 16, the official reaction from officials that night proved decidedly lukewarm. 

For just about every good argument raised to support Harold’s Square, a counter-argument surfaced to confront it.  Cost comparisons could deceive, some would say.  Key departments, quartered just a few short blocks away, might find themselves too far distant from the Courthouse to do their business, another argument went.  And where, for that matter, would all the newly-transported employees park their cars?

The Center of Government’s $50 Million estimate “includes a lot of other things besides just the construction of the building itself.” Legislature Chair Dan Klein cautioned.  “It includes deconstruction of the current buildings; it includes the moving-in and moving-out costs,” the chairman reminded project skeptics.

“It includes rental and/or purchase or sale of other buildings to be used temporarily while construction is going on, Klein continued.  “And it includes renovation to the existing buildings as we shuffle departments around, renovations that have been deferred for many, many years, that we would have had to pay for anyway.”

“And furniture,” a fellow legislator—it sounded like Ulysses-Enfield’s Anne Koreman—chimed in.

Later in the meeting, County Administrator Korsah Akumfi raised the same argument as had Klein.

“So we need to make sure we are quantifying everything in terms of what we’re going to do with the Center of Government project.  It’s not just construction of the new building, but the whole project in itself,” Akumfi said.

In the Administrator’s opinion, offices in the Old Jail, first repurposed from correctional use in the early-1990’s, will need updating as new departments move into them.  Legislative chambers need remodeling, too, even though the Legislature only moved into them in 2013.

Standing by itself, the Center of Government building, Akumfi posited, would only cost “35 or 36 million or so.”

Yet the Klein-Akumfi qualifications and breakouts can deceive as well.  The Center of Government master plan anticipates mass migrations of very many departments.  Were Tompkins County not to “shuffle departments around” as much, fewer renovations would be needed; fewer new desks and chairs purchased; and fewer swing-space buildings bought in different places to quarter staff temporarily.

Moreover, should Martha Robertson prove correct and Harold’s Square owners were to buy the Courthouse block structures, County Government would find no need to deconstruct them at public expense.

Builder Tim Ciaschi attended the Legislature’s September 16 meeting.  And he brought with him props; blocks, 12-inches square. 

With those blocks, Ciaschi compared square-foot construction costs:  a $50 Million, 48,000-square foot Center of Government at $1,041 per square foot, versus the $90 per square foot cost for the Dutch Mill Road building in Lansing that Tompkins County bought in early-August to temporarily house the Assessment Department and the Office for the Aging.

Ciaschi also claimed Cayuga Medical Center recently purchased 61,000 square feet at the financially-flagging Lansing mall at $377 per square foot; “all-inclusive, and it’s gorgeous,” he said.

“It’s not financially responsible” to spend what Tompkins County’s proposing toward its new building,” Ciaschi argued, even though he and Dan Klein might quibble over the comparison’s validity.  “Use what we have and be fiscally responsible,” Ciaschi asserted.  “Spending this kind of money, not a good idea, especially in today’s times,” he said.   “We’ve got to take care of taxpayers in a reasonable way.”

Another speaker—perhaps recruited by the Harold’s Square promoters to attend, or perhaps not—urged the Center of Government project be put to public referendum.  It never will be, of course.  The speaker also demanded a cost-benefit analysis.  “We shouldn’t be spending $55 Million to make government employees feel more comfortable,” he asserted.

Harold’s Square advocates found themselves sandwiched that night amongst a gallery of community activists, most who’d come to speak out against County Government’s continued use of “Flock” surveillance technology that track license plates.  So the Harold’s Square message found itself diffused amidst the competing din.  Amanda Kirchgessner, a one-time candidate for Enfield Town Supervisor, attended for yet another reason.  Still, she offered a passing swipe at the Center of Government plans.

“Please delay breaking ground on the ‘COG’,” Kirchgessner pleaded.  “Delay any decisions for just a little bit more research.  I know that we can do better as an educated community.  Let’s not let our egos determine the trajectory.”

The downtown behemoth that is Harold’s Square cost an estimated $42.9 Million, according to developers’ documents filed with the Tompkins County IDA in 2017.  The project carries a decade-long, graduated tax abatement that commenced in 2021 and runs through 2031.  County legislator Martha Robertson sat on the IDA Board when it granted the abatement. 

Were Tompkins County to buy a portion of the Harold’s Square building now, the County’s purchased portion presumably would fall off the tax rolls permanently.

Several days after the Legislature met, Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown, Chair of the Downtown Facilities Special Committee, the committee granted oversight in Center of Government matters, remained unsure as to whether the long-darkened, high-ceilinged first-floor retail space of Harold’s Square would become part of what Tompkins County might lease or buy, even were it interested.

Brown accepted Robertson’s invitation to tour Harold’s Square September 12, one of the few—perhaps the only—governmental leader to do so.  Brown’s report to colleagues four days later was mixed. 

“It’s a nice, big, beautiful building on the Commons,” Brown reported.  “It would be less expensive for the County to move to a facility that’s already built,” Brown reasoned,” probably about half the cost (maybe a trifle more),” he said.  It’s got a full basement for storage.  But there are limitations, Brown cautioned.  Some ceilings are low.  Departments like the County Clerk might find it too far from the action.  And “parking’s always an issue,” Brown cautioned.

Then, there’s…well… the Ithaca Commons itself.  As Brown walked the Commons for an hour the day of his inspection, he said he was begged for money twice.  People were smoking marijuana “in various places.”  One dog was trying to bite another.  And electric bikes were flying down the center of the walkway at Noon.  Most of those activities violate City rules, but “nobody’s there to change any of that,” Brown lamented.

Again, institutional inertia reigns, at least for now.  Tompkins County’s Center of Government probably will never move into Harold’s Square, even though there are good arguments it should do so.  And if not there, that it should move out to Lansing, to the business park.

“There’s a way to do this,” Martha Robertson counseled the Legislature, as she urged a mental reset toward Harold’s Square.  “I really urge you to take time, take a look, and have an open mind.”  Take a tour, too, she recommended.

“We hope it’s not too late for you to give some thoughtful consideration to this alternative,” Jim McGuire added.  “And we would obviously work in good faith and earnestly to do something that’s very beneficial to the community and would stabilize this asset and create a very nice presence on the Commons.”

“All we ask is for consideration,” Sam Lubin joined in.

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