Board of Elections to Stay Downtown… Someplace

by Robert Lynch; August 6, 2025

It wasn’t exactly on point.  But Newfield-Enfield legislator Randy Brown’s comment may have been the most memorable of any during a 45-minute debate Tuesday that ended with the Tompkins County Legislature voting to buy an out-of-the-way building in a Lansing office park, but deciding against putting the Board of Elections within it.

“I think the Center of Government building is not a strategic plan,” Brown, who chairs the committee tasked with building that $50 Million planned downtown office structure, told colleagues.  “I think it’s a plan for our departments.  We’ve gathered from our parking study that this really isn’t a building being built for the people.  It’s being built for our employees which need a better space.”

The Tompkins County Board of Elections occupies some of that space.  It must vacate its long-occupied quarters close to the County Courthouse later this year so that its Buffalo Street building can be removed to enable the Center of Government’s construction.  

Randy Brown would say more that night about the Center of Government project and how those in his corner of Tompkins County view it.  But first we’d best turn to what actually happened at the Legislature’s meeting of August 5 and explain why.

By a vote of nine-to-five, legislators decided to purchase a vacant, 13,000-square foot building at 31 Dutch Mill Road for $1.2 Million.  It will serve as temporary offices for governmental departments that must relocate to facilitate Center of Government construction.  Both the elections board and Tompkins County’s Department of Assessment must vacate.  Both are quartered in “Building C,” 128 East Buffalo Street, slated for deconstruction. 

Before they’d authorized purchase, lawmakers stripped away sponsor Lee Shurtleff’s original intention to move both Elections and Assessment to the Lansing site.  Randy Brown was one of only two lawmakers who would have stayed with Shurtleff’s original script.

“I just feel that we haven’t looked at strategy of where does Board of Elections belong,” Brown observed.  “Where do these front-facing departments belong, and how are they really to be more accessible to people?  And I don’t think we’ve reached that at all.”

Tuesday’s decisions left unresolved where the Board of Elections should go, temporarily or forever.  The resolution’s only insistence was that Elections would not relocate to Dutch Mill Road.

The Tuesday night vote followed a week of orchestrated, public outcry from people opposing the Board of Elections’ potential exodus to Lansing.  The Tompkins County League of Women Voters weighed-in against the relocation.  Nine of eleven people who addressed the Legislature at the start of Tuesday’s meeting opposed the move as well.

It’s “absolutely essential that the Board of Elections remain in downtown Ithaca to serve the people,” former Lansing Village Trustee and Deputy Mayor Diane Dawson—who acknowledged her relationship to current County legislator Deborah Dawson—insisted.  Diane Dawson described Dutch Mill Road as an “industrial park” and faulted its lack of TCAT bus service.

“Ithaca is the county seat, and the Board of Elections should be at the county seat in Ithaca,” Dawson insisted.

One meeting speaker claimed that moving the Board of Elections, even temporarily, outside of Ithaca would require a referendum.  Lansing legislator Mike Sigler disputed that assertion and maintained the County Attorney has opined otherwise.

“The work of the Board of Elections is not done and cannot be done totally online or by phone or by voter registration events, Sally Grubb, speaking for the League of Women Voters, stated.  “During election seasons, many jobs have to be done in person,” Grubb maintained.  “Satellite split offices” are “not feasible for the Board of Elections,” Grubb said, given the need for security, legal compliance, and teamwork.

Irene Weiser, expected to serve as Caroline and Danby’s legislator next year, opposed the relocation of any heavily-visited departments, not just Elections, to the Lansing building. 

“It is important that the Board of Elections be easily accessible to all voters for all elections,” another commenter, John Hunt, stated.   The Board “should remain within walking distance from Ithaca’s public transportation hub,” Hunt said.

Andreas Champlin, Statewide Systems Advocate for the Finger Lakes Independence Center, a disability rights group, questioned how those compromised would ever reach the relocated office.  “There are no sidewalks.  There are no curb cuts.  I don’t know if I would be able to push a mobility device through that as an able-bodied human,” Champlin assessed of the Dutch Mill Road location’s drawbacks.

“The Board of Elections must be accessible, public-facing.  Make it visible, have a big sign out front,” Connie Sterling Engman advocated.

In an odd and uncharacteristic act of pre-meeting preemption, County Administration officials had issued a news release earlier Tuesday stating emphatically that a Board of Elections relocation from downtown would not happen, Lee Shurtleff’s resolution notwithstanding.

“After listening to these (resident) concerns and reflecting on the importance of the BOE’s central role in upholding our democracy, the county has made the decision not to relocate the Board of Elections outside the city limits of Ithaca,” a Communications Department midday news release made clear (emphasis provided in the original).

“Keeping the BOE within the seat of government is not only a logistical necessity but a symbolic commitment to the values of transparency, accessibility, and civic trust,” the release continued.

The news release quoted Legislature Chair Dan Klein and Vice-Chair Greg Mezey, but notably not Groton Republican Shurtleff, the resolution’s author. 

What’s more, before inviting public comments at the Legislature meeting’s start, Chairman Klein thrust onto the floor a heavily-revised version of the Shurtleff resolution.  Klein’s became the version eventually adopted.  The Chair’s action gave a public impression that the revised script, and only the revised script, would receive consideration.

As it turned out, Lee Shurtleff later moved his original version, only to see it amended to conform to the modification Klein had presented. 

Leadership’s seldom-used preemptive move prompted this writer, Enfield Councilperson Robert Lynch, during his own three-minute speaking privileges, to observe that the press release’s unexpected, advance issuance “smacks of an insult to Legislator Shurtleff,” who should have remained unimpeded to advance his own initiative.  Those in Tompkins County “have a Legislature that decides these things,” and do not operate under an “elected County Executive” form of government, the admonition continued.

As it was adopted, the amended Shurtleff resolution emphasized that “the Tompkins County Board of Elections will NOT be one of the county departments considered for relocation to 31 Dutch Mill Road,” further stating that, “It is the expressed intent of the Legislature to keep the Board of Elections primary location within the City of Ithaca.”

As to which remaining County offices find their temporary home at Dutch Mill Road, the resolution fails to specify.  Some legislators expressed concern about that uncertainty.  Ithaca’s Rich John signaled it explained his present opposition to the final resolution.

Joining John in opposing the purchase were legislators Shawna Black, Travis Brooks, Veronica Pillar, and Mike Sigler.

Shawna Black opposed the purchase, in part, because she saw the resolution “very vague.”

“I equally have a problem with us putting our County departments so far out, off of Warren Road.  It’s way past the airport, it’s down a dead end,” Black complained.  “We’re County Government; we have the center of government here in the City of Ithaca because for the most part it’s central to where we all live.”

Randy Brown raised the counter-argument, his words worth remembering.

“I represent Newfield and Enfield,” Brown reminded fellow legislators, “and not one person that I’ve spoken to likes to come down to Ithaca.  They just don’t like it for whatever reason,” Brown stated.

“So for me,” Brown added, referencing the envisioned, pricey Center of Government, “as I represent people, and they voted for me, they’re just not excited.”

Legislator Brown cited the recently-completed Center of Government parking study.  It predicted that only about 21 members of the public would visit downtown offices daily, and that includes visitors to the Board of Elections.  Those people visit there now, he said.  Brown also mentioned the Enfield Town Board’s July ninth resolution urging Tompkins County “seriously and thoughtfully” consider City of Government alternative sites outside of downtown.

Back in the 1990’s, Lee Shurtleff served for nearly a decade as an Elections Commissioner himself.  He recalled parking challenges, even back then.  “I struggled to find a parking spot for much of that time,” Shurtleff remembered.  He also recalled having to “commandeer Gadabout buses” to “round up our elections inspectors” and bring them in for training.

“I think it’s a good place,” this writer, Lynch, told the Legislature Tuesday, standing alone in the gallery as the only one to defend the Dutch Mill Road choice for the Board of Elections. “I think it would be a good location, especially for us in the rural communities that don’t like having to… park four blocks from the Board of Elections in all kinds of inclement weather and sluff our way to the board to do our business.”

But in Downtown—somewhere in Downtown—the Tompkins County Board of Elections will stay.  Tuesday’s purchase resolution makes no commitments as to which government departments will move to Dutch Mill Road.  Expect County Administrator Korsah Akumfi to forward a recommended list of relocation candidates as soon as the second full week of August.  Legislators could review, revise, and adopt the list as soon as their next meeting, August 19.

Meanwhile, expect officials to keep looking diligently for the Board of Elections’ next home, confining their search to downtown, as they must.  Board of Elections must vacate its current place by October or November.  Writing the Board of Elections next chapter may prove far from easy.

###

The Previous story; since updated:

Lansing Bound: Board of Elections, Assessment

by Robert Lynch; July 31, 2025; revised and updated, August 6, 2025

[Note: Subsequent to the July 31 posting of this story, Tompkins County Government, by an announcement Tuesday, August 5, stated its intent not to relocate the Board of Elections out of Downtown Ithaca.  Expected an updated report to be posted. / RL]

Despite the objections of some, the Tompkins County Board of Elections may soon move out of Downtown Ithaca and into an office park in Lansing, relocating to a spacious, low-slung building that Tompkins County would buy for $1.2 Million.

Tompkins County’s Assessment Office would join it there.  Both departments face eviction from their current location at 128 East Buffalo Street—so-called “Building C”—a building County Government will “deconstruct” later this year to make way for a new $50 Million Center of Government.

Groton legislator Lee Shurtleff, Chair of the County Legislature’s Facilities and Infrastructure Committee, has placed a resolution onto the Legislature’s August fifth meeting agenda that would buy the Lansing building.  It’s located in an office park at 31 Dutch Mill Road, not far from the UPS terminal and a mile and a half from the Ithaca-Tompkins Airport.

Indeed, real estate will dominate the Legislature’s August 5 meeting.  A second, unrelated resolution, member-filed by legislator Greg Mezey, would authorize Tompkins County to execute a multi-year lease with the Maguire car dealership’s parent company for the Commercial Avenue building Maguire owns to become a temporary home for the state-mandated Code Blue emergency homeless shelter.

The prospective Code Blue Shelter, as stated in the resolution, is at 100 Commercial Avenue.  100 Commercial Avenue currently houses the Harbor Freight equipment supply store. 

(The exact street address appears to have been stated with inadequate specificity.  Later discussion at the Tompkins County Legislature’s August fifth meeting, during which the resolution was adopted, indicated that the building is actually the vacant Burger King restaurant at 340 the Elmira Road.  Contacted this date, resolution author Greg Mezey clarified that both the Burger King and Harbor Freight buildings stand on a common tax parcel, consolidated and co-owned by Maguire and assigned the Commercial Avenue address.)

But it’s the Board of Elections relocation out of Downtown Ithaca that may prompt the most controversy.  Elections advocates have already said they’d prefer the office to remain in Tompkins County’s population center so as to facilitate and encourage voter registration.

“It’s incredibly important” to keep the Board of Elections downtown,” voting registration volunteer Nancy Skipper told a Legislature-sponsored “Community Engagement Town Hall” July 28^th, a meeting held to explore design options for the Center of Government.  “A lot of our newer voters, new citizens, don’t have cars.”

“I have often told people how to walk to the Board of Elections, and they look very, very happy,” Skipper said.  “So I hope you can continue to make the Board of Elections accessible and easy to find.”

Indeed, of the nine members of the public who addressed the Town Hall that night, calls for the Board of Elections to remain downtown became a dominant theme.  At least three speakers referenced it.

“I think that service that the County provides for free, fair elections is more important than ever,” Michelle Wright commented.  Wright urged County leaders to ensure that the Elections Office “stays in the fold and really visible to everybody and not outside of downtown somewhere.”

At that point, Legislature Chair Dan Klein entered the Monday night discussion.  Klein assured attendees that any rural relocation would only be temporary, a necessary move to enable the Buffalo Street building to come down and the new building to go up.

“The relocation of the Board of Elections is temporary, just during construction,” Klein told critics of any outward migration.  “The plan is to bring it right back here; there, or there, or within a block.”

Seated in Legislative Chambers adjacent to DeWitt Park, Klein pointed randomly in the air as he spoke.  And there lies a problem.  Neither legislators nor architects plan to quarter the Board of Elections in the Center of Government once the new building’s opened in late-2028.  They argue that the Board of Elections would need ground floor space, and that the first level has already been set aside for other services like the County Clerk and the Office for the Aging.

While an initial relocation study proposed the Board of Elections eventually transition to the Human Services Annex at State and Albany Streets downtown, some legislators have balked at that scenario, suggesting it would be better for Tompkins County to offload the Human Services Annex for private development, perhaps housing.

Quite frankly, at this point, the Board of Elections is an office orphan.  Nobody’s quite sure where it’ll go permanently.

The now-likely Dutch Mill Road building purchase was never mentioned during the July 28 meeting, although the resolution supporting its purchase was placed onto the Legislature’s August 5 agenda within the next two days.  Governmental property purchase plans seldom reach meeting agendas before they’re resolved behind closed doors.  So one can pretty much assume the Lansing building’s buy is a done deal.

“We haven’t agreed on a location yet,” County Administrator Korsah Akumfi advised the Monday meeting, an amazing statement for him to make in that the purchase resolution got posted so shortly thereafter.

Akumfi claimed that as many as 25 alternate, interim sites had been considered for the Board of Elections.  “We’re looking at multiple locations,” the Administrator told attendees, but acknowledged, “We couldn’t find a reasonable place in the city.”

Tuesday’s legislative resolution would amend Tompkins County’s Budget and 2025 Capital Plan “to include the acquisition and associated closing costs” for the 31 Dutch Mill Road property “at a total cost not to exceed $1,200,000, plus any associated closing costs.”

Shurtleff’s resolution would draw the purchase funds from Capital Reserve funds set aside for the Center of Government project.  It claims a Department of Assessment financial analysis concluded that buying the Lansing building would be cheaper than leasing comparable space elsewhere at market rates.

Signs outside the Dutch Mill Road building identify its most recent tenant as TIAA, the education-focused retirement management company.  TIAA’s current Ithaca offices are on Green Street, downtown.

An online posting by Howard Hanna realty states the office building’s size as 13,294 square feet, and quotes an asking price of $1.1 Million.  It states a sale is pending.

****

Neither the Dutch Mill Road nor Commercial Avenue undertakings became known prior to the early-August meeting agenda’s posting.  And the proposed long-term lease of the Commercial Avenue property involves not one municipality, but two.  The City of Ithaca would also be drawn into the venture.

According to legislator Greg Mezey’s member-filed resolution, the County would lease space within the Commercial Avenue building with its landlord, the Maguire Family Limited Partnership, and then execute a sublease agreement with the City for the Ithaca for operation of its “Navigation Hub for unhoused individuals” within the rented space.

According to Mezey’s Resolution, terms of the sublease “are anticipated to include 50 percent (City) reimbursement of rent and other charges associated with the lease.”

Further lease terms, including monthly or yearly rental amounts, were not provided in the resolution.

State mandates require municipalities to provide a wintertime heated facility, a so-called “Code Blue” shelter, for the unhoused whenever nighttime temperatures drop below freezing.  Last winter, Tompkins County retrofitted the former Key Bank building at Buffalo and Tioga Streets downtown to meet Code Blue requirements. 

The former bank can’t be used next winter because the building’s scheduled to be torn down, “deconstructed,” to clear its site for the Center of Government.  It’s the same reason the Board of Elections and Assessment must relocate.

“[T]he County sought an alternate appropriate location to develop a Code Blue emergency shelter, and was approached by the City of Ithaca to collaborate on their proposed Navigation Hub for unhoused individuals currently living in or near encampments in the City of Ithaca,” the Mezey resolution states, in part.

In May of this year, the City of Ithaca updated its Pilot Administrative Policy to Manage Homeless Encampments on City Property.  The revision temporarily permits camping on City-owned land generally behind the Big Box stores off Meadow Street and the Elmira Road.

In conjunction with that action, Common Council authorized the City to proceed toward establishing a “Navigation Hub” to serve the homeless population’s needs. 

As described in an April 17 Ithaca Times article, “the navigation hub is envisioned as a temporary facility offering basic services and support for people experiencing homelessness, including those not currently living in encampments, until Tompkins County opens its permanent emergency shelter.”

The Times article continues:  “According to the city’s updated administrative policy, the navigation hub will serve as a physical space near the encampment to provide outreach, hygiene facilities, access to housing navigators, and connections to mental health and substance use services.”

Under terms outlined in legislator Mezey’s resolution, Tompkins County, the City of Ithaca, and Maguire  have negotiated a minimum three-year lease for the Commercial Avenue space, with an option to extend that lease for an additional two years, if necessary, should the County’s  construction of a permanent shelter encounter further delays.  The resolution states that the option for extension would assure “stability in the use of the space.”

Late last November, Tompkins County announced plans, since ratified, to purchase a dilapidated, out-of-the-way antique and collectables warehouse on Cherry Street.  It stands close to the so-called “Jungle” homeless encampments.  The building would be transformed into a permanent shelter for the unhoused.  Whether what’s bought would be razed or repurposed remained unanswered at the time. 

The purchase announcement never established a project completion date.  A consultant’s been brought in. Designs were predicted to commence by late this year.  Once built, a nonprofit agency would run the shelter. Just buying what’s already there cost County Government $1.1 Million.  Legislators approved the purchase in December.

Greg Mezey chairs the Tompkins County Legislature’s Housing and Economic Development Committee, the committee holding project oversight on homelessness issues, and the shelter.

In support of the Navigation Hub, the text of his resolution claims, “the City has committed to making significant livability and safety improvements at the Southwest Parcel including working toward obtaining a permit to operate a campground in consultation with Tompkins County Environmental Health, requiring certain health and safety standards to be met.”

How the entire body of 14 legislators will receive this resolution and its “collaborative” relationship with another governmental body, one that some of its members are known to discredit, remains to be seen when Mezey’s resolution reaches the Legislature’s floor Tuesday.  Just as with moving the Board of Elections to Lansing, buying-in with City Hall on the hot-button issue of homeless assistance has its share of skeptics.

###

Bad News Budget

Raw ’26 numbers portend 20-40% T.C. tax hike

Reporting and Analysis by Robert Lynch; July 29, 2025

Reporters should have been there.  They weren’t.  They would have had to dig deep to find the date, time, and place.  But had a scribe learned of the meeting and then attended, he or she would have gotten a scoop.

Tompkins County has a budgeting problem, a big one; in more ways than one  And it’ll likely impact every taxpayer. 

Quietly huddling with administrators and key staff Wednesday night, July 23, holding a so-called “Budget Retreat,” members of the Tompkins County Legislature learned the grimmest of fiscal predictions, warnings that didn’t leak out until another meeting the next day.  Though summarized five days later in a press release, the budget’s challenges remain misunderstood by many, and the session’s political jousting may forever be kept a secret. 

The Retreat’s key take-away is this:  If department heads have their way and next year’s spending rises by as much as they’d like, Tompkins County’s 2026 Tax Levy could catapult by a whopping 40.3 percent.

And even if those department heads were to contain their appetites and maintain only the programs that they now have, next year’s levy would still climb by more than 20 percent.

Those kinds of tax increases will never happen, of course.  Nobody could stomach them.  But still, a property tax increase approaching or reaching the double-digits remains possible.

“Thank you, Korsah; pretty stark;” those  the only words a stunned Dryden Town Deputy Supervisor Dan Lamb could fumble forth after County Administrator Korsah Akumfi revealed his revised budget forecast  to the Tompkins County Council of Governments (TCCOG) the next day, July 24, a meeting that Lamb chaired.  Not only was the Dryden rep first learning of the double-digit danger; so, too, was just about anyone else who chose to listen.

On Monday, July 28, Tompkins County’s Communications Department summarized leadership’s challenge:

“Initial departmental and agency requests… could result in an estimated deficit of over $11 million,” its summary news release stated.  Quoting Akumfi, the release blamed the eight-figure claimed deficit on “inflationary pressures, increased demand for critical services, and reduced state and federal funding.”

The release’s facts may be true, but the inferences they invite can mislead.  The statement failed to analyze why administrators predict such a mammoth shortfall this time around, departing from projections of years past.  Nor did it reference the worst-instance 20-40 per cent tax hikes.  They may be too painful to talk about.

So let’s stay with the TCCOG meeting, and not with the sanitized news release, the one every lazy reporter will parrot.

“For us to provide the maintenance-of-effort… and also accept new requests that have come in, we’re looking at the deficit of 22.1 Million.  That’s about (a) 40.3 percent… increase on our tax levy,” Administrator Akumfi advised TCCOG of the worst-case alternative.

“And also for maintenance-of-effort alone, if we do not approve any new requests that have come in as of now, we’re looking at a deficit of 11.1 Million,” the Administrator cautioned.  “That puts us around about 20.3 percent tax levy increase.” (Akumfi, African-born, sometimes struggles with grammar.)

There’s a good reason an eight-figure deficit is forecast now, and not in recent years past.  You can call it the “Akumfi Method,” the recently-hired County Administrator’s new (though perhaps, in truth, retro) way of crafting annual budgets and then presenting them to the elected legislators who hold final authority.  Akumfi’s only been on the job for the past seven months.  He’s already exerting his influence.

Gone is the long-standing practice of legislators setting a future year’s “target” tax increase in the spring and then asking Administration to match, but not exceed it by September.  Typically, legislators hold the target increase at a percentage point or two—or maybe no increase at all.  But Akumfi, during last April’s initial budget retreat, persuaded lawmakers to jettison prior habit and set no target whatsoever.

Instead, the Akumfi Method calls on the Administrator to go to department heads, ask them to be frugal, bundle their combined requests, and then leave it to the Legislature to pare them down come the fall.  That’s apparently what the Administrator has done.

Yes, instead of taking the role of a demanding, no-nonsense accountant who never smiles, Korsah Akumfi invites departmental budget requests like a jolly, throned Santa at Macy’s.  Our 14 legislators must later impose some reasonable discipline as Mom and Dad.

“They’ve dismantled the entire budget process that’s been in place since at least 2005,” one seasoned hand at Tompkins County Government, a person familiar with budgeting, reacted when told of the newly-revealed numbers over the weekend.   The retiree recalls that during the early-2000’s, before legislators set targets, initial budget proposals would similarly project double-digit tax increases, only to be followed by tax-paring budget meetings that stretched past Midnight.

So expect the Midnight oil to burn brightly again this fall.

Why the change?  Korsah Akumfi, at TCCOG last Thursday, blamed Albany.

“Earlier in the year, we had a budget training session with the state, and the state basically inform us that we usually need to work the budget the other way around,” the Administrator explained.  “Look at expense. Look at revenue. Look at where we land; and then based on that, determine which will be a comfortable tax levy to decide on.”

To the best of knowledge, Tompkins County’s target-centered, taxpayer-respectful past practice has never violated any law.  And one can safely argue that New York State should be the last place to look for fiscal guidance, given how the Empire State keeps its own house.  Better one ask the Town of Enfield’s bookkeeper.

One year ago, Lisa Holmes, Akumfi’s predecessor, was Tompkins County Administrator.  At an April 2024 Budget Retreat, Holmes had identified a so-called “Maintenance of Effort” (MOE) budget that kept current programs intact, but added nothing more.  Her MOE Budget would have hiked the tax levy by 5.9 percent.  Legislators shot it down.

Through a series of non-binding straw polls cast on that April 2024 night, legislators settled on no more than a two percent levy increase.  Six of them asked for no tax increase at all.  Five would have even rolled back the prior year’s increase.

Over the following summer, Holmes labored to make her legislative marching orders work.  She initially requested five percent departmental cutbacks.  Her persuasion never succeeded.  Following fall fiscal finagling, the Legislature adopted a nearly $265 Million budget in November that raised the tax levy by 2.72 percent.

But that was then; this is now.

A keen observer can detect what’s changed.  Korsah Akumfi’s budgeting makes maintenance-of-effort a floor and not a ceiling.  True, Lisa Holmes did reference a beyond-MOE budget briefly last year.  But the idea went nowhere, and Holmes quickly discarded it.  She focused on paring spending down, not building it up.  This year, the new Administrator has to date made no attempt to ask that we live with less.

Instead, Akumfi places more than $12 Million in new spending into a category called “Enhancement Requests.” Combined with maintenance of effort, Enhancement Requests would inflate the tax levy by $22.1 Million, raising it from this year’s $57.3 Million to about $79 Million.  Just maintaining present programs would add $11.1 million to the levy, the Administration’s budget slides, presented at the retreat, predict.

Though not shared with TCCOG last week, those “Enhancement Requests,” summarized later, though never stated with precision, would spend $2.9 Million more toward capital programs, assign $2.3 Million to the ailing Airport, allocate $1.9 Million toward agency program expenses, and put $3.7 Million into higher salaries and fringe benefits.  Those latter increases could reflect granting employees the new, recently-recalculated “living wage,” higher here than just about anyplace else upstate.

In terms of homeowner impact, based on the county-wide median home value of $300,000, keeping current programs intact would raise a 2025  $1,437 tax bill by $267. Adding in those “enhancements” would hike it by $552.

Even the newly-arrived County Administrator acknowledges that a 20-40 percent tax increase reaches beyond reason.  One of the 20 PowerPoint slides Akumfi presented the retreat—and later, TCCOG, without explanation—provided five “scenarios” that carry hypothetical, alternative tax levy increases of four, five, six, seven, or ten percent.

“These are scenario numbers that we discussed with the Legislature in terms of tax levy increases that particularly will need to be considered for us to be able to bridge the gap,” Akumfi advised TCCOG’s intermunicipal leaders.

“None of them make up the deficit amount of $11.2 Million,” the Administrator conceded.  “So our job in the review process is how do we make changes in terms of increasing revenue projections and also decreasing some of the expenditure projections that have come in.  We have the next three weeks to figure that out,” he said.

The Administration’s proposed 2026 Budget could arrive on legislators’ desks as soon as the Tuesday after Labor Day.  As things look now, legislators will be left to figure many things out.

What the Fourth Estate’s absence from the Health Department’s Rice Conference Room Budget Retreat cost us was analytical context and political perspective:  How did our 14 elected legislators react that night?  Korsah Akumfi preferences notwithstanding, were any targets set? 

“Was there any direction from the Legislature given at that time?” this writer, Enfield’s TCCOG representative, asked.

“So the legislators did not give us a specific target levy at our meeting yesterday,” Akumfi answered at TCCOG.  “But there was a significant discussion around their comfort level and what they will be able to support as part of the proposed budget.”

The Administrator continued, again reaffirming his rebranded budgeting style:  “We’re just going to plan the budget based on what the realities are, and hopefully we’ll be able to present a proposed—recommended budget that is reasonable and can be considered.”

This writer pressed the point:  “What was the comfort level?  Does anybody have an idea of what that was?”

“I would say (of) the number of the legislators in the room, each one mentioned the number they’ll be comfortable with.  So there was no consensus on the number.  The direction was do your absolute best to recommend the lowest possible levy rate,” the Administrator responded.

Legislature Chair Dan Klein, County Government’s delegate to TCCOG, offered his more telling perspective.

“Some legislators were very nervous and just feel we haven’t got a lot of money in the bank, and others feel like now we need to give it back to the taxpayers,” Klein assessed his reading of the retreat.

And that’s the only assessment we may ever get of a most consequential and newsworthy meeting, one where reporters stayed away, cameras never rolled, and no one took notes.

For those of us on the outside—those of us who pay the taxes—the falling-tree-in-the-forest rule applies.  Inside the Rice Conference Room last Wednesday night, fourteen legislative limbs may have tumbled.  Yet not one of us heard them crash.  The Akumfi Method marches forth.

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Posted Previously:

T.C. Legislature doubles-down on DEI

Reporting and analysis by Robert Lynch; July 19, 2025

It was a fine line Tompkins County lawmakers walked this past Tuesday night.  One false step and they could be sticking their political thumb into President Donald Trump’s eye.  A half-dozen of their convened flock would have taken that chance; stood their ground and picked a fight,.  They might have riled Trump up and prompted his retaliation.  But those more daring souls didn’t prevail that night.  Moderation did… sort of. 

By a vote of 11-to-2, the Tompkins County Legislature July 15 endorsed a linguistically-lengthened and rhetorically-strengthened “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) policy for the bureaucracy it oversees.  Analyzed objectively, it’s only an aspirational document, its script heavy-laden with procedural process, mitigative assurances, and a grandiloquent, 3,300-word construction that could easily have been pared to half its length and said the same.

The adopted changes revise a “Diversity and Inclusion” policy that a prior County Legislature had passed in 2013.  The policy’s recommendations and commands apply only to Tompkins County’s own administrative and personnel decisions, not to the wider Tompkins County community or workforce.

“Essentially, this is stuff that we’re already doing,” Government Operations Committee Chair Amanda Champion assured those convened with her, including the more hesitant or gun-shy at the oval table.  She saw the revisions as no big deal.

Nice try.  That’s because words convey power.  Words intended to command power convey that power commandingly.  And a string of those power-words (even though labyrinthian) linked one to another only amplify the perceived power.  To those in far-flung places itching for a battle over DEI, what Champion’s committee brought to the floor Tuesday night provided a capacious cache of ammunition.

President Donald Trump has declared war on DEI.  His executive orders issued the day of his Inauguration, January 20, and then, again, one day later, January 21, would “terminate” all “equity actions, initiatives or programs,” first in the federal workforce, and then, to whatever extent possible, in the private sector.  The “grantees” to which the President extended his DEI orders could reach county governments, the recipients of federal aid.

“I think the Executive order is illegal,” Ulysses-Enfield legislator Anne Koreman asserted in floor debate, urging adoption of the strongest possible equity language.  “It’s totally illegal and unconstitutional for the federal government to be telling us which words we can use, which words we can’t, and to change our local policy.”

“So I’m not going to follow that Executive Order,” Koreman stated.  “We’re going to stay the course. This is our policy.  We’re just updating it.”

“Now more than ever, we have to stand up for what’s right,” Champion had advised her committee in June when it recommended the revisions to the Legislature.

Perhaps the most significant additive legislators placed into this freshened Tompkins County document was for the first time to incorporate “Equity”—the dreaded “E-Word,” as some conservatives perceive it—into its title.

“Equity” is“Fair treatment, access and advancement for each person in an organization… It reflects processes and practices that both acknowledge that we live in a world where everyone has not been afforded the same resources and treatment while also working to remedy this fact,” the revised document defines, in part.

The new policy imports “equity” into its lofty aspirational guidance document dozens of times.

Never before had Tompkins County’s diversity policy recognized “transgender status” as a classification warranting a shield against discrimination.  Now it does.  The words “his” and “her” have been replaced by “their” on occasion.  The policy references the word “merit” only twice; once in a paragraph held over from the 2013 policy statement, and again as it quotes the New York State Constitution’s Civil Service mandate.

And nowhere in its many pages does the policy resolve what happens when the competing goals of merit and equity collide, as they inevitably will.  

The revised policy neither requires nor requests minority or female preferences in hiring or promotion.  Still, a reader may find the policy’s fleeting one-sentence prohibition of preferential treatment weak and awkwardly out of place with everything else written around it. 

There’s a reason for that.   The “disclaimer,” as it’s called, was inserted last-minute during the June 5^th committee meeting as an attempt at compromise.  And last Tuesday, as the full Legislature readied to take final action on the policy, the moderating sentence almost got yanked back out.

“What we have here is a policy that a broad swath of the people who live in Tompkins County despise this language,” legislator Rich John, a law professor, told committee members back in June.  “I’m not saying it’s right that they do.  But if we have any hope or intent… to persuade, we’re not doing that.  We are just… saying we’re doubling down on this is the language that must be used.”

Rich John suggested words from the Declaration of Independence be used instead.  Legislator Koreman countered that day that in her opinion, the Declaration’s writers assigned their scripted “truths” predominantly to “white men,” and to “certain white men; a small minority.”

Charlene Holmes, Tompkins County’s Chief Equity and Diversity Officer (CEDO) gets credit for many of the policy’s compositional calisthenics.  Holmes scripted the text in recent months aided by a couple of employee- and community-based committees, groups tasked with rooting out systemic race- and gender-bias within Tompkins’ governance.  The CEDO’s recent Institutionalizing Equity Report inspired many of the changes. When the Legislature embraced the report back in February, Institutionalizing Equity generated a legislative workout of its own.  

The rewritten DEI Policy’s introductory paragraph provides that Tompkins County’s goal is “to create, promote and sustain a workplace environment that is inclusive, equity-minded, and fosters a sense of belonging…”

A “Legislative Policy Statement,” a couple of paragraphs later, states:

“The Tompkins County Legislature is committed to the empowerment of employees and residents to dismantle systemic barriers that inhibit inclusive governance and the provision of government services to all.”

New bullet point add-ons to the policy statement would implement the Legislature’s equity vision by:

• “Establishing legislative frameworks that embed DEI principles into all county policies and decision-making processes, ensuring that diversity, equity, and inclusion are integral to governance rather than isolated initiatives,” and by

• “Overseeing the creation and implementation of strategic policies that ensure a diverse workforce… [and to] support the development of recruitment and retention practices that are aligned with the County’s broader DEI goals and strategic plan, fostering a workforce that reflects the diversity of the community.”

Addressing the Legislature, Rich John begged for a “plain language” rewrite. 

 “You shouldn’t be able to read it and determine which political party wrote it, and that’s the case here,” John, a Democrat, said observantly.  “Our county is divided on this,” John cautioned colleagues.  “There are many people who really, really dislike this style of language.”

The PC-sanitized, handbook-hackneyed academic jargon that’s infected this document is clearly Charlene Holmes’ preferred style, and perhaps also the style of the progressives who populated her assisting committees.  Yes, words like Holmes’ can enthrall DEI true believers.  But they can also poke a cattle prod into MAGA-base loyalists and march their nimble fingers to Truth Social and advise their chosen leader of what naughty little Ithaca has just done.

“I’m sorry, I know you all want to move forward and double-down on this, and I have no problem with that,” Democrat Deborah Dawson remarked early in Tuesday’s debate.  “But having read the Executive Order, I think it would be prudent for us… to make it clear that nothing in this violates the Executive Order.  I can’t vote for something that could potentially make a situation worse than it already is, sorry.”

Dawson’s comment directed itself to a failed attempt by Governmental Operations Committee Chair Amanda Champion to strip away that “disclaimer,” inserted last month in the committee she chairs.  County Attorney Maury Josephson assisted in its crafting.  Josephson reasoned it would inoculate the DEI policy from a Trump Administration challenge.  The disclaimer stipulated that:

“Nothing contained in this policy shall be deemed, directly or indirectly, to encourage or implement terms and conditions that favor individuals based on protected characteristics unless specifically allowed by law. (E.g. Reasonable Accommodations of individuals with disabilities).”

Inserting that sentence proves a point:  Without the disclaimer, the remaining directives could easily give rise, explicitly or implicitly, to outright favoritism toward persons of color, women, or gays in hiring and promotion in pursuit of affirmative action.  No other policy prohibition would have blocked it.

Debate over the removal amendment divided Democrats ideologically. Republicans remained opposed.

Center-Left Democrats chose to keep the disclaimer in.  Progressives, on the other hand, stood emboldened to call the President’s bluff.

“The reality is that there’s a massive target on Tompkins County’s back, and at this point we have to stand on our laurels,” former Legislature Chair Shawna Black insisted.  “The reality is the majority of our constituents live here because we do what we do.  We stand up for our community.  We talk the talk.  We walk the walk.  And they know that our citizens are going to be protected.”

Of any who spoke, Black was most committed to fight.

“Let’s call ‘em on it,” Black pronounced.  “We are who we are.  We’re all voted in office to represent the people of Tompkins County, and personally I know that my constituents would be pissed if it didn’t have those words in it.”  (Black may have misunderstood or misspoken; she’d wanted the disclaimer stripped out, not kept in.)

“I recognize that this is a hot topic, yes, but do we have disclaimers in all of our policies?” Holmes asked.  Though deferential to those who employ her, the CEDO implied she’d prefer the disclaimer be gone.

Shawna Black, Amanda Champion, Anne Koreman, Travis Brooks, Veronica Pillar, and Greg Mezey each voted to extract the disclaimer.  They fell two votes short of the majority needed.

The debate over wordsmithing continued. 

 “I think it’s okay if not every single person likes all the words in the policy.” Veronica Pillar, perhaps the Legislature’s most progressive voice, advised critics including Rich John.  “I also think that to just swap out words dismisses the professionalism of the practitioners in the space of equity and diversity institutions.”

“You can’t have fairness before you have equity,” Travis Brooks, African-American, said in defense of discursive density.  “So to me when you swap out a word, you take away what you’re trying to do.”

“It’s just simple to me,” Brooks continued.  “We have this policy.  Our county has led with love.  It has led with equity.  And I don’t want to change that.”

Republican Mike Sigler took a different tack:  What’s simple and has stood the test of time for a dozen years commands stature and strength by its textual tenure.

“This county did lead on this issue, and I think there’s something to be said for leaving it alone, Sigler said of the policy from 2013.  “I think by leaving it alone, you’re actually making it a stronger statement than by changing it.”

Sigler also equated its rambling replacement to the “Apple terms-of-service.”

The new DEI policy—disclaimer included—passed with only Sigler and Democrat Rich John dissenting.  Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown supported the final resolution, but opposed its earlier-suggested amendment.  Groton’s Lee Shurtleff was away for the night.

The policy document prepared under CEDO Charlene Holmes’ meticulous oversight would play much better in an Equity Studies seminar than in a county, albeit liberal-leaning, yet still politically blended.  One of its numerous new dictates requires each County department to “identify and incorporate 1-2 equity indicators annually into their departmental work plans.”  How exactly would compliance be established and enforced?  And if not followed, what consequences would follow?

“We need to meet people where they’re at, and that means speaking in a way that they understand and can listen to us,” Rich John emphasized to fellow legislators Tuesday night.  If he’d had his way, John would have first sent what got voted on that night back to committee to recraft it in a way the average man or woman can understand and accept.

“The core principles are strong, good principles,” law professor John, soon to retire from the Legislature, acknowledged.  “Why we have to speak in a way that alienates a good percentage of the population that we absolutely need to be allies with us, I don’t understand.”

###

Posted Previously:

“Broaden our Perspectives,” Tompkins County

Enfield Board urges widened siting search for Center of Government

by Robert Lynch; July 12, 2025

Tompkins County Legislator Randy Brown, a man experienced in real estate and banking, has an opinion about governmental construction:  “I don’t like building buildings when there’s empty buildings,” Brown told the Enfield Town Board this week.

Legislator Brown points out Tompkins County currently has empty office space.  And there’s a lot of additional space available near the airport; most notably at the expansive, 17-building Cornell Business Park, recently foreclosed upon by a local bank. 

And because of that availability, the Enfield Town Board July 9th—with Brown seated in the room’s visitor’s gallery—urged Tompkins County to look at the Business Park and at other possible locations as an alternative to building a brand-new, $50 Million, 48,000-square foot Center of Government in the shadow of DeWitt Park in Downtown Ithaca.

“I’m not expert enough, my pay grade isn’t high enough, to tell the County what to do on this,” Enfield Councilperson Robert Lynch—this writer and the author of last Wednesday’s resolution—told Town Board colleagues that night.  “But it’s just: let’s stop; let’s look at this; let’s look at these other options and see if maybe one of them is a better fit for us.  I don’t know.”

Enfield’s recommendation to Tompkins County came less than a week after Tompkins Community Bank officially closed on its acquisition of the 17-building office park complex.  And it did so at a bargain price approaching that of a fire sale.

Foreclosing on a mortgage lien of $75,454,000, Tompkins Bank bought the modern, low-slung properties for an even $50 Million, according to documents filed July third with the Tompkins County Clerk.  The buildings, each built on land leased from Cornell University, had been held by a string of limited liability companies and other legal entities controlled by noted local developer Philip Proujansky.

County Clerk’s records show that the sale was completed on June 25th, with attorney Carl J. DePalma serving as the Referee.  New York State and Tompkins County gained a whopping $300,000 in transfer taxes by the sale.

As officially known now, the 17, land-leased, bank-owned properties are owned by “Ithaca Tech Park LLC.”

Quoting DePalma, The Ithaca Voice July 11 reported that at the foreclosure auction, first scheduled for April 29, “the bank set the opening bid at $50 million and while other bidder pools were present, the bank ultimately won the auction.” DePalma declined to provide The Voice  further details.

The Tompkins County Legislature, by a nine-to-four vote June third, made its firmest commitment yet toward building a Downtown Center of Government.  Legislators resolved to approve “funding of up to $50 Million—through a combination of cash, debt and potential grant sources—for development of the Center of Government project to be located on the 300 block of North Tioga Street,” its resolution stated.

Both at that June Legislature meeting and at times thereafter, officials have differed as to how firm of a commitment the Legislature actually made when it adopted its resolution   But Randy Brown was among the legislative quartet who dissented on the vote.  And since the June resolution’s adoption, he’s become an increasingly outspoken critic of the downtown undertaking, that despite the fact that he chairs a special committee that would oversee a Center of Government’s construction.

“Our employees are important.  But I think constituents are more important,” Brown told the Enfield Board this past Wednesday, “because they pay the bill.”

Only after Tompkins County had hosted a series of five “Community Engagement” meetings around the county in June—one of them June 12 in Enfield—sessions to explain the downtown project and take input, did information surface that County officials had conferred with the foreclosing financier, Tompkins Community Bank, about possible County purchase of one or more of the Cornell Business Park structures.

In a May 19th memorandum to legislators and key staff, County Administrator Korsah Akumfi had advised that the then-pending foreclosure had “prompted renewed discussion about potential alternatives to the downtown center.”

In what he described as an effort to seek “clear direction from the Legislature to ensure focused progress” on what he termed the “long-standing priority” of a consolidated office building, Akumfi in a three-page memo outlined the relative advantages and drawbacks of the airport-area office park location versus keeping with earlier plans to build downtown.  On point after point, the administrator concluded that building downtown was better.

One Enfield Town Board member July 9th pointed to that conclusion.

“In this review, they obviously thought about it and they concluded in this memo that it didn’t make sense,” Enfield Councilperson Jude Lemke critiqued the Business Park option after having reviewed what Akumfi had written.

Legislator Brown’s opinion when asked for a reply:  “I think the memo was quickly written to shut it down.” 

Brown concluded that the County Administrator had drafted his memo with a purpose in mind; with intent to tip the scales in downtown’s favor, a position preferred by the Legislature’s majority.

“I think it’s because seven of these people, these legislators (most of them long-serving incumbents set to depart the Legislature at year’s end), they’ve been doing this for eight years, and they’ve had enough,” Brown concluded.  “This is the third property they’ve looked at.”

When the Center of Government concept regained momentum in 2018, legislators first considered a site on the 400 block of North Tioga Street, a partially-vacant lot bounded by residences and a block away from the County Courthouse. 

The Legislature bought that initial land—it still owns most of it—but later moved its collective attention away from it and saw commercial properties in Tioga’s 300 block as a better place for the building.  That, too, Tompkins County purchased.  And current plans call for deconstructing three mid-20th Century buildings on this latter location to make way for the Center of Government.  Officials plan to break ground in early 2027.

Although some Enfield Town Board members expressed initial hesitancy on meeting night, the resolution “in support of expanded siting options for a Tompkins County Center of Government” passed unanimously.

 “Resolved, that the Enfield Town Board hereby encourages the Tompkins County Legislature and Tompkins County Administration to consider seriously and thoughtfully various alternative siting locations for a Tompkins County Center of Government, alternatives including, but not necessarily limited to, buildings made available at the Cornell Business Park….” Enfield’s July 9th resolution states.

“I’m not sure myself whether they’re right for Tompkins County,” this Councilperson said of the business park buildings.  “I don’t think that anybody right now knows if they would be a good, alternative fit for Tompkins County.  But I personally believe they should be considered, and I didn’t know what other board members thought about that. ”

Opinions varied.

Supervisor Stephanie Redmond, somewhat reluctantly, gave the resolution her support.  She’d attended the June engagement meeting in Enfield.

“There are a lot of benefits to not being downtown,” Redmond acknowledged.  But “there are also understandable reasons why they want to have it all together for their own efficiency of their offices and their employees,” she added.

Initially during the Enfield Community Engagement meeting, Supervisor Redmond had strongly supported locating Center of Government offices in vacant one-time stores at the Shops at Ithaca Mall.  But as the engagement session progressed, Redmond’s enthusiasm waned.  Tompkins County representatives, including architects and engineers, steered the Supervisor toward keeping and consolidating Courthouse-reliant departments, including the District Attorney, downtown.

“From what I gathered at the meeting… it was a little of a ‘domino effect,’” Redmond said July 9th, “where you need to have the court where it is, you had to have the DA where the court is, and you need to have another office where the DA is, and then you need to have their office near a different office, because they all interact so much.  That’s why they have this whole thing with the Center of Government being right at that spot downtown,” the Supervisor concluded.

Redmond’s—and many County officials’—logic holds value, yet only to a point. 

True, the District Attorney and the County Clerk face state orders to vacate the Courthouse to give judicial staff more room.  But there’s “The Old Jail” next door, and it could house the DA.  And one of the current buildings slated for deconstruction—perhaps “Building C,” where the Board of Elections now resides— could accommodate the County Clerk.

That row of tumbling dominoes could, indeed, be interrupted, providing, of course, that those in charge have the will to halt the tumble.  The County Administrator, the Finance Office, and Assessment could easily relocate uphill.  And as Randy Brown has said, the Office for the Aging has no business being in the downtown building.  The office’s visitors are older, and downtown parking is hard to find.

Councilperson Cassandra Hinkle, nonetheless, wondered whether an out-of-the-way rural location could actually impede elder access.

“The biggest problem with elderly is lack of transportation,” Hinkle commented, “to take them to their appointments, and that’s a huge problem.”

But unless a county office remains within true 70-something walking distance, providing the older adult remains ambulatory, riding a TCAT or Gadabout bus to a business park or a mall-based location should become as handy as taking that same bus to downtown.

“There may be disadvantages there,” this Councilperson, Lynch, acknowledged regarding the Business Park option, “but I don’t like the idea that it’s just being arbitrarily dismissed and tossed off the table, just like I don’t like the idea that the Shops at Ithaca Mall is being tossed off the table.”

Enfield’s resolution urging a deepened look at Center of Government site selection next goes to the County Administrator and to each elected legislator.  Randy Brown was handed his copy after Wednesday’s meeting. Again stated, Brown would prefer we use what’s already been built.

“Environmentally, it’s not a good thing, in my mind,” Brown said of starting fresh with a new, four-story downtown behemoth, “not to mention it costs $50 Million.”

It’s “worth looking at,” Supervisor Redmond said of what Ithaca Tech Park LLC has for sale.

“We need to broaden our perspectives,” this Councilperson concurred.

###

Free-phone policy faulted as ICSD Board reorganizes

by Robert Lynch; July 13, 2025

“I can think of a lot, lot, lot better ways to spend 80,000 a year that would directly impact kids.”

Ithaca Board of Education member Jacob Shiffrin, July 8th

Attempting to pick apart a $169 Million Ithaca City School District Budget can overwhelm the brain to the point of mental exhaustion.  Buying a school principal’s cell phone with taxpayer money becomes a whole lot easier to wrap one’s mind around.

The Ithaca Board of Education at its organizational meeting July 8th revisited its current policy—and it will return to the policy again next month—of providing certain “select district employees” free cell phones as a benefit of their employment.

“Who do we provide cell phones to, why, and how much does it cost?” newly-elected Board of Education member Jacob Shiffrin asked fellow Ithaca City School District (ICSD) board members and staff that Tuesday.   It was Shiffrin’s first question after taking his oath of office.

Zach Lind, Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources and Technology, was quickly summoned to the head table.  Lind said he couldn’t provide exact numbers, but estimated “off the top of my head,” that Verizon charges about $60 per month for each employee’s “zero-cost phone,” and imposes a total annual bill to the district of about $80,000.

“I can think of a lot, lot, lot better ways to spend 80,000 a year that would directly impact kids,” Shiffrin reacted to the long-standing purchasing practice. “I’m shocked that we did this.”

Shiffrin, the only candidate from a three-person slate of reform-minded insurgents to win an ICSD board seat last May, said he’d talked with parents, principals, and teachers and “could list out right now 500 things” that  would better support students than providing free cell phones to school personnel.

“I think we should not do this,” Shiffrin said of providing free cell phones to upper-level staff.

A resolution to continue the selective employee mobile phone benefit was sandwiched among nearly 40 mostly-routine organizational resolutions addressed by the Ithaca School Board during it’s three-hour Tuesday morning session.  Of those many matters, the cell-phone resolution was among only one or two that grabbed significant attention.

Halted in its otherwise hasty parliamentary pace, the board first tabled its vote on the cell phone matter until after a more than hour-long executive session, one during which the issue was predicted to come up.  Yet when board members emerged from the closed conclave, they further tabled the cell phone resolution until their next session, August 12.  

Questioned after adjournment to enumerate how many employees carry district-paid cell phones, HR and IT administrator Lind hedged.  He declined to give a firm number until August.  But working the math, based on the administrator’s estimated monthly rates and total cost, one arrives at an employee headcount of about 110.

“We’re providing cell phones to folks usually in leadership roles or really active service roles where they’re needed to be on call as part of their job, but they’re not always in a specific location,” Lind explained Tuesday to Shiffrin and to other board members.  He used the Director of Facilities as one example, an administrator whose job takes him from building to building.

I’d “love to get out of the business of providing cell phones to employees,” School Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown acknowledged.  But Brown admitted that “it gets rather complicated and challenging” to actually cancel the employee benefit.

This year was not the first time that employee cell phones gained scrutiny at the start of the official school year.  It did last July as well.

“This has been kind of an annoyance for me for a while,” former Board of Education member Jill Tripp stated when the board reorganized on July first of 2024. ”I believe that the cell phone expenditure in the district is unwarranted and redundant, and I would like a further convincing explanation as to why we need to be providing cell phones to people.”

Dr. Tripp lost her bid for reelection last May, replaced, as fate would have it, by Jacob Shiffrin.  And during her final year of office, Tripp never received the answer she’d sought.

“We really haven’t had conversations about it,” Board member Adam Krantweiss said of the cell phone policy at this more recent reorganization.  “It is very expensive, and it seems like there are a lot of other options because everybody has a cell phone that they’re carrying around 24 hours a day,” Krantweiss pointed out.  “We could purchase second lines.  We’ve talked about all these different options before.”

“We have to take into consideration that our district employees may not want to use their personal cell phones for business purposes,” board member Karen Yearwood interjected.

And then there’s the argument of wanting to untether yourself from your job when off-the-clock.

“When we talk about mental health, being able to turn off your work phone on a vacation or whatever is critical,” board member Erin Croyle remarked.

“It keeps coming up; it’s been coming up; it will continue to come up,” Board President Sean Eversley Bradwell acknowledged.  “But I don’t want us to think that just because we’re taking away cell phones that there will not be an additional cost,” he cautioned.

Eversley Bradwell said the cell phone benefit may be “a negotiated item,” with some employees. Yet when Shiffrin asked whether it’s a contractual obligation, the board president declined to say.

If cell phones aren’t provided, “stipends” might be needed to compensate key staff for the business use of their personal devices, Shiffrin was told.  And there’s a legal argument.  If one’s job-related duties result in a lawsuit, could the individual’s phone and of all of its contents—business and personal—be subpoenaed as evidence? 

“Personal phones could be “foilable,” Eversley Bradwell warned.  Some board members thought the district’s legal counsel should weigh in.

Superintendent Brown claimed that ICSD taxpayers shoulder only about $20,000 of the $80,000 cell phone expense.  Federal rebates pick up the remaining cost, he said.  The discussion never ventured into what would happen if Trump-era austerity cancels those reimbursements.

But the recurring question of cell phones as an educational perk demonstrates once again that when it comes to governmental spending, it’s the little things that count the most.  The cell phone expense totals less than five-one hundredths of one percent of this year’s ICSD budget.  But it’s like last year when the district’s rental of high-tech “clocks” for all school buildings—admittedly more costly an  investment—raised heightened taxpayer concern.

Expect the cell phone issue to rear its head again August 12,  when the Ithaca Board of Education next meets.

****

Picking the Ithaca Board of Education’s new leadership for the twelve months ahead proved smoother this year than last.  Whereas last year’s election for Board President and Vice President went through multiple rounds, this year’s elections resolved themselves on the first ballot.

Without opposition, Sean Eversley Bradwell was reelected Board President.  Employing a new secret ballot procedure adopted quietly during the past year, Garrick Blalock succeeded Adam Krantweiss as Vice President, beating fellow board member Emily Workman, five votes to four.

Prior to the vice presidential ballot, neither Blalock nor Workman drew ideological lines between each other.  Blalock stressed that he’d attempt to avail himself of Eversley Bradwell’s “expertise” and “absorb the knowledge he’s acquired over the years” in the expectation that Eversley Bradwell’s current term as Board President may be his last.

What mattered most for Enfield parents and students that day might never have gotten reported had not a keen reporter kept an eye to last-minute agenda changes with full knowledge of the vacancy list.

Inserted as an “addendum” to its Personnel Report following its one-hour, 20-minute executive session, the board promoted Stephen Anderson to become Principal of Enfield Elementary School.  It also elevated Tara Caiza to become Principal at Fall Creek Elementary.

Anderson joins Enfield having served this past year as an “Educator of Inclusion” at Boynton and DeWitt Middle Schools.  Caiza served as the Associate Principal at Boynton.

For reasons unknown, each promotion got exceedingly low-profile treatment.  Neither appointee’s name was ever mentioned at the meeting.

Stephen Anderson succeeds Enfield Principal Keith Harrington, whom the district recently transferred to become Principal at the Lehman Alternative Community School.

Later Tuesday, in an open letter to Enfield parents, Anderson wrote:

“Enfield Elementary is a joyful and vibrant learning community, surrounded by fields, orchards, and outdoor spaces that invite wonder and exploration.” 

Enfield’s newly-appointed Principal continued, “I look forward to learning from the amazing work already happening here, especially the integration of equity, sustainability, and community partnerships that define Enfield’s identity as an edible, equitable, farm school.”

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Posted Previously:

Sudden Storm Socks Enfield

by Robert Lynch; July 4, 2025; updated 2:20 PM

A firefighter whose name you’d know stood alone in the Enfield Fire Station when the National Weather Service sounded the alarm July third: “Tornado Warning for Southwest Tompkins County in central New York…. TAKE COVER NOW!  Move to a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building….”

“What was I to do?” the seasoned firefighter asked herself.  The fire station may be sturdy, but it has no basement.  A whirlwind could quickly peel off the metal roof and leave her and everything else exposed. Then what?  “Maybe I should crawl into that fire engine behind me,” she later recalled she’d asked herself.  Perhaps the safest place at that moment was inside that rugged, spanking-new Truck 602?

Shelter-in-pumper never proved necessary.  As best anyone knows, there never was a tornado.  But there was a bad storm; the worst so far this Enfield summer.  It came up from seemingly nowhere.  It was gone within an hour.  But when it raged it was fierce, downing trees, snapping power lines, damaging a handful of homes, and in its aftermath forcing the  re-routing of busy highway traffic onto narrow country roads well into the night.

“It was pretty intense,” Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) First Assistant Chief Kevin Morse Jr, the company’s Chief-in-Charge at the time, said of the calls that came in and the responses needed.  The toughest time came in the first 90 minutes after the 2 PM storm hit, he said. Crews needed to lend support to different sides of Enfield simultaneously, Morse explained.

Enfield responded to 14 calls during that period, Fire Chief Jamie Stevens reported.  Twenty-six additional calls came for storm-related emergencies in other parts of Tompkins County, Stevens indicated.

No injuries or fires occurred, the fire chief said.  The EVFC responded to two instances of trees falling on houses.  In one instance a fallen tree briefly trapped an elderly Applegate Road woman in her home.

Buildings may have sustained damage, yet none were apparently destroyed.

A giant locust fell upon the roof of John and Paula Meeker’s home at 576 Van Dorn Road South, causing roof damage, but not forcing the Meekers to flee.

At the southern edge of Enfield’s Christian Cemetery, the storm tore off a big maple limb.  It fell into an adjacent field, causing no damage to the cemetery.

Power remained out for many into the evening.  A trio of tree-related power line breaks along Mecklenburg Road (NY Route 79) near the intersection with Rothermich and Podunk Roads left that highway closed until nearly nightfall.  All of Enfield Center and Miller’s Corners lost power for hours.  The Dandy Mart closed.  The Enfield Fire Station was forced to run on back-up generator power.

Kevin did “an outstanding job,” Chief Stevens told a television interviewer at the fire station Thursday evening as to Morse’s coordination of rescue efforts. 

Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners member Robyn Wishna also took pains to commend the many Enfield residents who’d pitched in during the hours after Thursday’s storm to clear debris, direct traffic, and otherwise assist emergency crews.

“One man took his skid loader to push limbs out of the way,” Wishna reported.

The National Weather Service’s initial report, issued at 1:45 PM July third, indicated that the storm that later caused Enfield’s damage was located in Mecklenburg and was moving southwest at 40 miles-per-hour.  That initial report warned of a “Tornado and half-dollar size hail.”

The weather service’s prediction of a possible tornado based its conclusion on the observation that “radar indicated rotation.”

After tearing up Enfield, the storm moved east into the Town of Ithaca.  There it produced the biggest traffic snarl.

Downed trees and power lines north of the Eddydale Farms produce stand prompted the mid-afternoon closure of all Route 13 traffic between NY Route 327 and Five Mile Drive.

Emergency crews redirected the heavy, pre-holiday Route 13 traffic along a circuitous, poorly-equipped, country road detour.  It employed Town-maintained Gray and Colegrove roads, the latter currently undergoing reconstruction.  The detour continued until past Midnight.

Homes and businesses in the City of Ithaca by and large escaped damage equivalent to that sustained in Enfield.  But inconveniences occurred, nonetheless.  Power outages forced some businesses, including the Ithaca Wegmans, to operate on back-up generator power.  The store cut electrical usage, leaving eerie, dimly-lit aisles for shoppers to navigate.

While Thursday’s storm proved destructive, it did not rise to the severity of the July 15^th storm last year that left some customers without power for up to two days, prompted Enfield’s Supervisor to spearhead the distribution of dry ice, and spawned as many as 455 emergency calls to the Tompkins County 911 Center, reportedly its highest single-day volume of calls in a decade.

The 2024 storm also prompted the EVFC to update its emergency dispatch procedures, inadequacies that led to confusion, redundancies, and delayed responses that day.  In the days and weeks that followed, Chief Stevens took the lead in correcting the deficiencies.

The magnitude of power outages from this year’s Thursday storm varied.  NYSEG reported as many as 3,610 customers in the county lacked power as of 4:30 PM Thursday.  The utility initially predicted power to most would be restored by 5 PM that day.  It wasn’t.

As of Noon on Friday, July 4, NYSEG reported 294 Enfield-area customers still without power, the outages scattered among nine locations.  The largest outage, affecting 135 customers, was along western Bostwick Road, with restoration scheduled for early Friday evening.  The second largest outage, affecting 87 customers, ran along Applegate Road North near the Ulysses town line.

The same storm that walloped Enfield also produced destruction to the East, including in the Binghamton area and on to the Delaware River valley.

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Posted Previously:

Tompkins’ “Thornwood Option”

Foreclosed buildings near airport could house Center of Government… but probably won’t.

Reporting and Analysis by Robert Lynch; June 27, 2025

“[It’s] a high-risk and potentially more expensive alternative.”

Tompkins County Administrator Korsah Akumfi; May 19

“It just feels different than downtown… There’s room to breathe.  Compare that to being crammed all-too-tightly into a four-story, downtown box.”

This writer; just now

View it, if you will, as an opportunity too good to pass up.  That said, Tompkins County will likely toss it aside.

A cluster of office buildings near Tompkins County Airport, modern, low-rise structures comprising what one expert calls the largest real estate foreclosure in Ithaca history, fleetingly grabbed attention from Tompkins County leaders this spring as an alternative to building a $50 Million Center of Government in Downtown Ithaca, newly-released documents reveal. 

But after a quiet, shrouded review, officials recommended lawmakers give the option a pass.

In his previously-undisclosed May 19 memorandum to local legislators and key personnel, Tompkins County Administrator Korsah Akumfi reported that his office’s officials had talked with banking representatives about buying the multi-building, airport-adjacent complex.  Akumfi made public his three-page memo June 25 after a Tompkins County legislator had alluded to the acquisition inquiry during a public meeting the night before.

Tompkins Community Bank, which had foreclosed on a private developer holding ground leases for the properties, had offered to sell County Government all of the 18 foreclosed buildings for an eight-figure amount.

“The bank is seeking to sell all 18 properties in a single sale, at an estimated cost of approximately $55 million,” Akumfi advised legislators. “The land acquisition is unclear at this point,” the County Administrator reported.

Cornell University owns the ground on which the buildings sit. The land forms part of the Cornell Business Park, located along Brown Road, Thornwood Drive, Brentwood Drive, and Arrowwood Drive in the Town of Lansing.

Ultimately, however, after performing a cost and feasibility study, Akumfi recommended against the building purchases, either collectively or a la carte.

“While the Cornell Business Park option presents intriguing elements, current occupancy levels, acquisition costs, lack of long-term control over the land (ground lease), uncertain rehabilitation requirements of 2-3 buildings, and potential operational disruptions make it a high-risk and potentially more expensive alternative,” Akumfi concluded.  Instead, the administrator steered lawmakers back to their original plans to build the Center of Government in downtown Ithaca.

“The downtown Center of Government project remains a viable, strategically sound, and carefully planned investment in the future of Tompkins County,” Akumfi counseled.

Korsah Akumfi, Tompkins County’s Administrator since only January, has since his hiring become vocal and impatient about moving ahead with the downtown project.  He’d prepared the downtown-versus-Business Park comparison, in part, to prod legislators to act.  Lawmakers followed the administrator’s advice earlier this month and provided the Courthouse-adjacent building site a heightened commitment. 

By a nine-to-four vote June third, the Legislature adopted a resolution that “approves funding up to $50 Million… for the development of the Center of Government.”  The resolution further directs that the office building is “to be located on the 300 block of North Tioga Street,” downtown.

Never during any discussions prior to the early-June decision did administrators or legislators publicly reference the Cornell Business Park’s properties or their availability.  Should Administrator Akumfi’s analysis have received legislative attention, the discussions would have occurred in closed session.

In the opinions of some, the Legislature’s vote June third firmly commits Tompkins County to build the Center of Government downtown, and that there’s no turning back.  On the other hand, Newfield-Enfield legislator Randy Brown, chair of a special committee that’ll oversee the construction, advised the Enfield Town Board June 11 that in his view the Legislature’s decision is not “irreversible.”

No one might have learned that Tompkins County had seriously—albeit briefly—searched for an alternative Center of Government site had not Lansing legislator Mike Sigler referenced it during an otherwise-uneventful Community Engagement meeting Tuesday, June 24.  Tuesday’s was the final of five governmentally-sponsored sessions convened about the county to explain the Center of Government project and to take public comment concerning the building’s potential design and downtown desirability.

“We looked at other locations as recently as, I think, two months ago,” Sigler advised attendees Tuesday, referencing in only vague terms an inquiry that had never before been stated publicly.

“There was a big foreclosure up at the airport,” the Lansing legislator stated. 

“There were a bunch of buildings that are coming up for sale,” Sigler continued.  “Korsah did what I felt was a pretty in-depth investigation of how—if we could do that.  We already have a footprint up there, so it does make a lot of sense.  We have the Health Department up there.”

But then, Sigler conceded, opportunity yielded to (presumed) financial reality.

“But when he ran through the numbers,” Sigler said of Akumfi’s analysis, “the numbers, they were what they were, and they were relatively close to what this building seems to be costing us downtown.”

The cost of a Downtown Ithaca Center of Government has become a nagging irritant; a source of public concern, if not derision.  The longer the project’s been considered, the steeper its price has climbed.

In some way, shape or form, a Center of Government, a common structure to house under one roof as many of Tompkins County’s widely-scattered departments as possible, has incubated in legislative minds for two decades or more.  When the concept gained new life in 2018-19, the center’s construction was priced at about $20 Million.  As that momentum has grown this decade, the cost estimates have climbed as well; first to $32 Million, then to $40 Million, and just recently to $50 Million.

“I’ve heard estimates for a Center of Government building between 45 Million up to 70, and that just seems like… entirely too much money to pay when you have buildings you can use as they are now,” Zach Winn, a former Ithaca mayoral candidate and current Republican candidate for Ithaca Common Council, told Tuesday’s Community Engagement meeting. 

When Winn referred to “buildings you can use as they are now,” one presumes he referred to those Tompkins County already occupies, not those clustered near the airport that government might later buy.

“Is this really the best use of like $50 Million?” Winn further asked about the planned downtown investment.  “There’s commercial property all over the place.”

Surprising as it may seem, the mammoth foreclosure on what amounts to an entire office park near the airport has found a knack for evading media scrutiny this spring.

“I believe this is the largest real estate foreclosure in Ithaca’s history,” Costa Lambrou, general manager of Ithaca-based Lambrou Real Estate, told The Cornell Daily Sun in April.

Indeed, the Cornell student newspaper’s April 16 story was one of the few reports to document the mammoth bank foreclosure that’s thrust the Cornell Business Park properties onto the market.

The foreclosure impacts only the privately-owned buildings atop the university-owned land, not the land itself.  The defaulting developer holds long-term ground leases. 

According to the Cornell Sun’s report—confirmed by court records—Tompkins Community Bank initiated a foreclosure action in January 2024 against a group of limited liability companies associated with private developer Phil Proujansky.

According to the paper’s report, Tompkins Bank’s law firm, Harris Beach Murtha Cullina, stated that the bank initiated foreclosure after “the borrowers, real estate LLCs linked to Proujansky defaulted on a $68 million mortgage by failing to make payments since September 2023.”

A marketing and communications manager for Tompkins Community Bank declined further comment to the Cornell Daily Sun in April regarding the foreclosures.

With the bank apparently having taken control of Proujansky’s building assets at the April 29 foreclosure auction—no further documents are on file with the Tompkins County Clerk—Korsah Akumfi in his May 19 memo stated that his office had held “recent discussions” with “representatives of the bank holding bonds tied to the Cornell Business Park.”

During those private discussions, Akumfi said he’d learned that among the 18 involved properties (some court records list the number as 17), 80 percent are currently occupied.  One building, a sprawling one-story structure at 33 Thornwood Drive (pictured above), is fully vacant, the memo stated.

“The bank has expressed a willingness to sell the buildings individually,” the County Administrator’s memo reported.  ‘[H]owever, the County would need to either share space and assume the role of landlord for the existing tenants or negotiate their relocation,” he cautioned

As for the renovation expense to adapt the Proujansky structures to County use, “Rehabilitation costs are currently unquantified, presenting significant unknowns in terms of required investment,” the Administrator qualified.

Although some may cite it as a “worst case” example, Administrator Akumfi drew upon Tompkins County’s history with its Health Department Building—also resting atop Cornell-owned land within the Business Park—to caution of financial pitfalls that could lie ahead.

Tompkins County had purchased the Health Department building for Three Million dollars, negotiated a 100-year ground lease with the University, but then had to pump $10 Million more into renovations to make the property suitable, the Administrator stated.

“These factors raise concerns about the feasibility, timeline, cost certainty, and operational impacts of relocating or expanding into Cornell Business Park,” Akumfi concluded.  

The Administrator’s side-by side comparison of costs-versus benefits gave downtown siting the benefit of the doubt, as Akumfi saw it.  Nonetheless, the analysis, viewed critically, stretched objectivity at times.

Akumfi contrasted a Downtown Center of Government’s projected construction cost ($42-50 Million) with the $55 Million Tompkins Bank is asking for all of its the foreclosed buildings, not just the few that County Government may need. 

A Downtown Center of Government would provide 48,000 square feet of space for departments.  The 18 Business Park buildings would offer an area far greater.  And five of the bank’s 18 structures, those on Brentwood and Arrowwood Drives, are separated far from the rest.  They’re on the opposite side of Route 13.  Many lease to medical providers.

The comparison skews other realities.  The administrator identifies downtown’s timeline as “Ready to Proceed,” but warns that occupancy of buildings in the business park would be “delayed by tenant relocation and negotiation.”  The latter observation stands true.  But the comparison also ignores the fact that three existing structures on the downtown site will need to be razed, “deconstructed” before any new building can break ground..

A final criterion applied by the Administrator describes a new building downtown as in “complete alignment” with Tompkins County goals, whereas any repurposed facilities would achieve only “partial alignment.”  How administrators reached their subjective conclusion the memo fails to explain.

But nowhere does the administrator’s memo address what stands as the Business Park’s prime attribute; its supply of ample, free parking spaces for both employees and visitors.  

Parking spaces downtown are scarce. And feeding Ithaca’s parking machines costs money.  A downtown-sited Center of Government may in the future—like Tompkins County’ downtown offices have in the recent past—require employees to pay to park most of the workday, presuming, that is, they can find a parking space.  Visitor parking could become an even greater challenge. 

Public commenters at this month’s Community Engagement meetings have repeatedly raised the parking issue.  Project consultants have so far lamely attempted to blunt that criticism with their excuse that a parking study remains underway, but is not yet done.

More importantly, however, Akumfi’s side-by-side comparison ignores a subjective criterion that may override all others. You may not be able to grasp the difference unless you actually drive and walk the Cornell Business Park (as this writer did).  It just feels different than downtown.  There are trees. There is grass.  There’s open space.  There’s room to roam freely within a modern, well-manicured office campus.  There’s room to breathe.  Compare that to being crammed all-too-tightly into a four-story, downtown box.

Thinking expansively—and creatively—Administrator Korsah Akumfi and the Tompkins County Legislature could make their campus-like, open-air Center of Government in Lansing the envy of  leaders in many other places.

“I’ve also heard from some of our staff,” Shawna Black, County legislator, told the engagement session. “They believe that we’re building this building too small, and that we’re already outgrowing the 40,000 square feet that you guys (the architects) are proposing.”

Legislator Black was among the nine lawmakers who’d backed proceeding with the Center of Government June third and keeping it downtown.  She raised a second warning flag about the downtown location this more recent Tuesday night.  It addressed that parking question: 

“If we don’t have places for our own employees to park, for people that are going to visit us to come and park, then I’m not sure I would actually be in favor of this project,” Black warned, thereby qualifying her previously-made downtown choice.  Black’s newfound caution underscores the fragility any legislative commitment to downtown may hold.

Nevertheless, even to Mike Sigler, the inevitability of a Downtown Center of Government appears to have sunk in, even though he’d declined to lend his vote to the project just three weeks earlier.

“We have a Legislature of 14 people,” Sigler reminded those at the June 24 Engagement Session.  “Whether I agree that it should be downtown or not is not irrelevant,” he said. “But the votes are that most people want to see this downtown.”

“I would really like us all to just be committed to the downtown location because I think we already voted on that,” legislator Veronica Pillar, an Ithaca City resident, said with a degree of impatience.  “It’s a little late to stop that train.”

Administrator Akumfi thinks the way Dr. Pillar does.

“It is important to note that continued indecision incurs cost, diverts staff capacity, and delays necessary improvements in government services and infrastructure,” Korsah Akumfi wrote in his May 19 memo. 

“I’m pleased that we’re moving ahead,” Dryden’s Mike Lane, a big supporter of the Center of Government and its planned downtown footprint, said as the engagement session wound to a close.  Lane related tales from a century earlier about how Tompkins County’s Main Courthouse got built. 

“There’s probably no good time to spend $50 Million at the county level,” Lane conceded.  “But I think when they look back in the future, they’re going to be glad that we built the building because it will be a building that’s going to be there for 100 years, or more, and it’s going to service the people of the whole county.”

Public turnout for Tompkins County’s five Community Engagement sessions to discuss and dissect the Center of Government has not been great.  Community attendees at each meeting numbered only in the handful.   Tuesday’s session in Legislative Chambers ran just 52 minutes, whereas an hour and a half had been set aside.  Tompkins County’s Communications Director pleaded for comments that often never came. The June 24^th forum drew only four spectators, this Enfield Councilperson included.  Among the public, only Zach Winn and I chose to speak.

“There are people who do not find downtown very inviting,” Winn warned legislators. “And I think that is a justified perspective,” he observed.

“We’ve got to realize there are options still on the table, and I would like to see those options pursued,” this writer advised the dozen or so  elected and appointed officials who’d assembled that night to hear what the public had to say. 

Just three minutes later Mike Sigler would reveal what some may call the “Thornwood Option,” the once-considered fallback alternative pondered by leaders in recent weeks, but only in the shadows.  After Sigler spoke, how much more meaningful—albeit, unknowingly on point—this speaker’s earlier admonition had suddenly become.

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Posted Previously:

From T-Burg kid to Health Commissioner

Jennie Sutcliffe appointed; vows to guard against Trump-Kennedy cuts

by Robert Lynch; June 18, 2025

You’ll never accuse Jennie Sutcliffe of backing down in a fight.  At least that’s the lasting impression one got from hearing the Trumansburg native’s acceptance speech June 17 after the Tompkins County Legislature unanimously appointed the animated, highly-credentialed policy advocate as its newest Commissioner of Whole Health.

“(It’s) what I’ve sort of been calling meeting the political moment,” Sutcliffe told the Legislature as she embraced her appointment Tuesday.  “We need to be playing defense to really defend the work that we’re doing and prove why it is important, but also to play offense,” Sutcliffe said.

The new administrative hire explained why a defensive posture requires offense as well..

“It feels a little bit silly to think that it’s important to be forward-looking right now,” Sutcliffe acknowledged.  “But if there are systems that are dismantled and if we lose funding, and programs have to stop someday, we will have the chance to rebuild those again, and we don’t want to be caught flat-footed when that happens,” she explained.  “So I think it’s important to be thinking defensively, but also a little bit offensively in this moment as well.”

Jennie Sutcliffe was one, but not the only Tompkins County department head the Legislature appointed Tuesday. 

With much less fanfare, and relegated to the end of a four-hour meeting—which included an hour-long Executive Session—legislators promoted Deputy Finance Director Darrel Tuttle to become Director of Finance.  Tuttle succeeds Lorrie Scarrott in leading the funding-focused department.  Scarrott is retiring following two years as Finance Director.

Both Jennie Sutcliffe and Darrel Tuttle will assume their new positions July 7.

In her three-minute address to the Legislature, during which she showcased her administrative priorities, Jennie Sutcliffe never mentioned the two federal officials whose take-no-prisoners policies  hold the greatest impact over local health services delivery, namely President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  Though not named, the collective shadows of Trump and Kennedy loomed over Sutcliffe’s words.  Change must be expected became the appointee’s overarching message.  Ill-advised reforms should be resisted when possible; but then services once lost can be restored and enhanced when political skies brighten.

Two other goals the newly-hired commissioner has set for herself, she said, are “building trust” among staff, decision-makers, and the larger community; and “supporting our resilient workforce,” people within her department.

“You know, I understand that this is a time where being in government isn’t the same as it used to be,” Sutcliffe admitted to the Legislature.  “So we really need to do a really good job and continue to do a good job of demonstrating our value and what we bring to our community, both here in Ithaca and in Tompkins County as a whole.”

Jennie Sutcliffe is no stranger here.  But like many who claim Tompkins County as their anchor, the woman who grew up as a girl in Trumansburg, left for a while to pursue her career in larger places.  And then she returned.

“I can say without a shadow of a doubt that we chose an incredible candidate,” legislator Shawna Black proclaimed as she put Sutcliffe’s name into nomination to become Commissioner of Whole Health.

Giving prominence to their collective pride in choosing a person with such impressive credentials, legislators elevated Sutcliffe’s appointment to near the top of Tuesday’s agenda.

“Ms. Sutcliffe brings over a decade of robust experience in public health leadership, emergency preparedness, health policy, and cross-sector collaboration,” a news release posted the following morning by Tompkins County’s Communications Director stated. 

“Since 2018, she has served as a Senior Advisor in the Office of Emergency Preparedness and Response at the New York City Health Department,” the release said of Sutcliffe’s credentials.  “In that role, she led the strategic planning and implementation of the department’s Response Ready initiative and served in leadership positions during multiple public health emergencies, including directing quarantine and isolation operations during the Mpox response and leading COVID-19 incident command initiatives such as vaccine operations and personal protective equipment distribution,” the release stated.

Jennie Sutcliffe’s resume also includes her serving as a Senior Policy Analyst in the New York City Health Department’s First Deputy Commissioner’s Office.  In that position, the news release touted, Sutcliffe “influenced Medicaid and healthcare policy and led multimillion-dollar pilot projects focused on social determinants of health.”

A former Fulbright Research Scholar who studied in Italy, Sutcliffe holds a Master of Science in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.  Before taking the position in New York City, the newly-hired Whole Health Commissioner held positions in Chicago, including serving as a Health Justice Policy Specialist under Illinois’ then-Governor, her task “focusing on Affordable Care Act and Medicaid implementation for justice-impacted populations,” Tompkins County’s news release stated.

Maybe that last-stated effort stood out more than anything else in getting Jennie Sutcliffe her job.

“The one thing that was very clear during her speech to us was that she has a real vision for our department, and her focus on health equity was something that I think is going to be really important for our community,” legislator Shawna Black said in moving Sutcliffe’s appointment.

Jennie Sutcliffe steps into a hybrid administrative structure that may look better in theory than it works in practice.

In 2023, after four years of study that began pre-pandemic, the Tompkins County Legislature merged the Tompkins County Health and Mental Health departments into the Department of Whole Health.   The Public Health Department deals with physical illnesses, dog bites, vaccinations, and tasks as mundane as septic system approvals.  Mental Health addresses, as its name implies, mental illnesses. 

The 2023 merger saved hiring a separate administrator.  But Health and Mental Health occupy different buildings, their locations widely-separated.  And New York State administers the divisions separately, such that their combination required special consent.  In some respects, as the state views it, Whole Health is an administrative oddity.

Even though Tompkins County’s Board of Health and the (Mental Health) Community Services Board had each affirmed the appointment prior to Tuesday’s legislative vote, Sutcliffe’s confirmation “is currently pending final approval from the New York State Department of Health for her designation as Director of Public Health,” the Communications Director’s release states. 

Expect Albany’s ratification to stand as a formality.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Health Department side of the subsequently-merged administration, gained stature—lots of it—as the County Legislature reserved former Health Commissioner Frank Kruppa ample speaking time at each, twice-monthly Legislature meeting to update lawmakers on COVID case numbers, testing protocols, and vaccination opportunities.

In mid-January of this year, Frank Kruppa resigned as Commissioner of Whole Health. He assumed a position with Cayuga Health Systems, the local hospital corporation, as its Assistant Vice President for Community Program Development and Partner Integration.

In accepting her own appointment, Jennie Sutcliffe, noticeably animated and outgoing, expressed excitement about her incoming role in Tompkins County Government.

“I grew up in Tompkins County.  I grew up in Trumansburg,” Sutcliffe said.  “And although I moved back to the area a couple of years ago, my work has remained elsewhere, and so I’m really thrilled  to be able to work in my own community again, and this feels like a real homecoming,” Sutcliffe gushed.

****

Much more subdued was the end-of-meeting appointment of Darrel Tuttle as Tompkins County’s new Director of Finance.

Finance directors lack the public visibility of health commissioners.  They don’t fight disease, but they do keep governments humming—and solvent.  Finance directors monitor sales tax receipts.  They assess budget balances.  And particularly in departing director Lorrie Scarrott’s case, they initiate investment strategies that earn the county cash.

“I want to thank you for the opportunity,” Darrel Tuttle told legislators, after Chairman Dan Klein invited him to speak at meeting’s end.  “This marks my third year working for Tompkins County in a couple of different roles, the appointee, now Deputy Finance Director, said. 

“I look forward to better serving the Legislature, the County, and serving with my staff as I go into the new role as Director of Finance,” Tuttle concluded.

Tompkins County took strides Tuesday to close its longer-than-usual list of administrative vacancies.  But the gap-closing remains far from finished. 

Shortly after Health Commissioner Kruppa tendered his resignation, Kit Kephart in January revealed her plans to retire this July as Commissioner of Social Services.  Then in early-May, County Highway Director Jeff Smith announced his retirement plans.  The selection process for those pending vacancies continues.

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Down by DeWitt, or Out at the Mall?

Enfield weighs Tompkins’ leaders pitch for a Center of Government

Reporting and Analysis by Robert Lynch; June 16, 2025

Turnout wasn’t great.  County legislators and staff outnumbered attendees.  And as many as half of those who did accept the open invitation were local municipal leaders.  One woman brought her toddler. 

At the Enfield Community Center Thursday, June 12, Tompkins County convened the second of its five, first-round “Community Engagement” sessions to describe and gauge public support for a $50 Million proposed Center of Government, the four-story office building Tompkins County wants to build in Downtown Ithaca, overshadowing DeWitt Park..

That said, perhaps the most telling question asked—and then answered—came not at Thursday’s engagement session, but rather one night earlier.  That’s when Randy Brown, one of Enfield’s two county representatives and chair of the committee that oversees the project, got tossed a question at the Enfield Town Board’s meeting concerning a purported commitment given the pricey building by the County Legislature eight days earlier:

“Do you see the decision made last week as basically irreversible; that we’re going ahead with the building regardless?” this writer/Town Councilperson, Robert Lynch, asked Brown during his legislative update.

“No,” Randy Brown replied quietly, yet firmly.

“That’s reassuring to hear,” this Councilperson responded.  The Center of Government’s cost, its placement, and fiscal worthiness has given this Town Board member jitters since the day it was conceived.

That said, those who promoted the Center of Government at the Enfield Community Center’s session the next night would have preferred us to regard their big, pricey, downtown brick building as a done-deal.  Yet reminded of Brown’s appraisal, and pressed to put facts behind their positive spin, leaders from County Administrator Korsah Akumfi on down acknowledged Thursday that political promises so far have fallen short of the assurances needed to break ground with confidence.

“I’m excited about this project,” Akumfi exclaimed at the engagement session.  Akumfi’s office would be on the building’s third floor.

“We haven’t pulled the trigger yet, but we’re moving in that direction,” Dryden’s Mike Lane, the County Legislature’s longest-tenured member, said of a project.  “We’ve been looking at it for at least 25 years,” 

Arel LeMaro, Tompkins County’s Director of Facilities, equated the Center of Government’s design to a “slow-cooker crock pot.”  How is that analogy drawn? “It smells nice, but it needs that time to simmer,” LeMaro said. “This is the time.”

Maybe… or maybe not.

The Tompkins County Center of Government sometimes resembles a lost commuter that’s passed through too any turnstiles.  It’s done so for two-decades.  

First conceived at the start of the millennium, and then, again, in about 2009, the Center of Government was once judged too expensive to build. 

When former County Administrator Jason Molino and legislators revived the building project from dormancy a couple years pre-pandemic, plans then called for placing the structure a half-block down Tioga Street from the Courthouse.   The building would stand where an orthodontist’s office was removed and a gravel parking lot now blemishes the neighborhood.

In 2021, after two years of Molino-supervised secrecy, Tompkins County walked the building’s footprint closer to the Courthouse.  The County purchased both the former Key Bank at the Buffalo-Tioga Street corner, and the multi-attorney “Professional Building,” best known as Walter Wiggins’ former law office next door.

Since the combined $3 Million purchase, legislators have fixated on putting the Center of Government at the Buffalo-Tioga corner.  The County-owned Board of Elections and Assessment offices—so-called “Building C”—would also be razed to accommodate the new edifice.

Infrequently, though not often—and indeed, less often as time goes by—some lawmakers have mentioned the prospect of siting the Center of Government “in a cornfield, ”as they quip;  that is, on cheaper, vacant land far away from downtown.  Alternatively, they might place it in surplus commercial space, like within Lansing’s increasingly-vacant Shops at Ithaca Mall.  Many who lead us, however, greet that kind of rural-focused fallback option with derision.  They consider it a non-starter.

But Enfield may look at choices differently.  At least it seemed that way this past week.  It could be that the farther one ventures from the courthouse block to Tompkins County’ rural reaches, the more one’s mind expands to embrace the ideas that others would discard.

“Go with the mall,” Supervisor Stephanie Redmond exclaimed, as the Enfield Town Board discussed Center of Government siting at the end of its monthly meeting June 11.  “Everybody show up.  Tell them you want them at the mall,” Redmond encouraged those who’d listen.   In this instance, the Supervisor might be new to the issue, yet quick to direct action.

“I agree with you; I’ve been pushing this for a year,” this Councilperson, Robert Lynch, informed the Supervisor.  “Unfortunately, it falls on a lot of deaf ears.”

One night later, at the community engagement session, Redmond reiterated her position; though later backed away from it a bit.

“I don’t want to be a wet blanket here,” Redmond cautioned meeting organizers, those who clearly favor a downtown location.  But “we have a mall that is dying and falling apart,” Redmond observed of the Ithaca Mall’s ghost town persona.  “What’s going to happen there?’ the Supervisor asked.  “I hate to see excess space.”

“From my point of view, downtown property is very high value,” Redmond appraised real estate reality.  It makes more sense, she argued, to locate at the mall “and give a life to a space that is dying.”

And to that comment, Tompkins County officials regrouped.  They countered with an argument that holds some weight, yet only when taken no farther than it deserves to go.

Criminal prosecutors, defense attorneys, and all sorts of legal staff need to locate close to the Courthouse, County officials reminded Redmond.  The District Attorney’s Office should remain only a brisk walk from the courtroom, they said.  So should the office for Assigned Counsel.  The County Clerk’s Office benefits from being handy to those accessing records or filing papers, the argument continued.  Close proximity supports the case for downtown co-location, they maintained,

Upon hearing the counter-argument, Redmond altered course.

“You made a good case about why it has to be down by the Courthouse,” Enfield’s Supervisor acknowledged.  She confined her remaining inquiries to topics more restricted, such as whether Tompkins County should reserve some visitor parking spaces for expectant mothers or those with young children, or whether building construction would demand a “local labor component.”

Given that the Ithaca Commons was reconstructed largely by out-of-area workers, Redmond said, “It makes it almost a mandate to use local labor.”

“We can look at that,” Enfield’s second Tompkins County legislator, Anne Koreman, told the Supervisor.

While Supervisor Redmond may have retreated from her out-from-downtown preference, this writer, Councilperson Lynch, the only other Enfield Town Board member in attendance that night, held firm.

The state may have served Courthouse eviction notices to the District Attorney and County Clerk, this Councilperson acknowledged, but nearby alternatives exist for them to relocate.  There’s the Old Jail next door.  There’s Building C, or maybe one of the structures Tompkins County purchased four years ago and would otherwise “deconstruct” to accommodate the new building.

As many as 13 Tompkins County offices would relocate to the Center of Government.  Most require no Courthouse proximity.

For example, Human Resources would relocate in the new building.  That sounds like a wise move.  Yet remember that many employees will remain scattered elsewhere.  A Highway laborer headquartered off Bostwick Road or a Health Department nurse based near the airport may find a personnel office quartered downtown a pain to visit, not more convenient.

And some Center of Government relocations may be downright inappropriate.

Tompkins County’s Office for the Aging would move from its storefront location at State and Albany Streets to the Center of Government.   Legislator Brown singles out that relocation as particularly inapt, unsuited for older adults challenged in their pursuit for downtown parking.

“My biggest concern is access for constituents, how it impacts rural people,” Randy Brown told the Enfield Town Board.  “How important it is for the residents in Newfield and Enfield to park there,” to have access, especially to “front-facing” services like the Office for the Aging.

In evaluating opinions among the 13 people who now represent Tompkins County in our Legislature, Randy Brown’s objections stand out.  Here’s why. 

Brown chairs the Downtown Facilities Special Committee, the committee that oversees the Center of Government project.  On the morning of June third, Brown joined all other committee members in recommending County Government “commit” to the project and also, presumably, to fund it.  But that evening, only a few hours later, Brown joined other legislative Republicans and Ithaca Democrat Travis Brooks to oppose a similarly-worded Resolution on the Legislature’s floor.

It wasn’t a flip-flop, Brown explained to the Enfield Town Board eight nights later.  It was only that he believed the full Legislature needed to decide the matter.  His committee support took it there.

“I don’t feel comfortable with our capital plan,” Brown told the Enfield Board June 11.  And as to the building, he said, “It’s going to raise taxes.  It’s going to happen.”

“I think it should be smaller,” Brown said of the downtown building’s footprint.  “There are all these unknowns.”

“Size of the building is still up in the air,” Brown told the community engagement session one night later. The legislator then quietly left early to give his monthly report to the Newfield Town Board.  (Because of the schedule conflict, Newfield government proved under-represented at the ECC event, even though the meeting was intended to serve all three of our county’s western-most towns.)

“It’s not a done deal yet,” County Administrator Akumfi qualified Thursday as to the project’s status.

Legislative math may back up the administrator’s equivocation.  The “Approval of Funding” commitment resolution cleared the Legislature by a nine-to-four vote June third.  All legislative seats come up for election this November.  A recent resignation has left one current seat vacant.  And the Legislature will expand to 16 members come January.

Randy Brown, Lee Shurtleff, and Travis Brooks, each who voted against the commitment resolution, stand unopposed for reelection.  The fourth objector, Republican Mike Sigler, faces an opponent in the fall, yet still holds the edge to win another term.  They’ll each likely remain onboard into next year.

Meanwhile, among those who voted in the commitment resolution’s favor—all Democrats—only three (legislators Black, Mezey, and Pillar) will likely return.  The remaining six plan to retire.  Nine fresh faces could prompt deference next year to hesitant critics like Brown, Brooks, and Shurtleff.

Back some 16 years ago, when Tompkins County briefly flirted with building a Center of Government on the Old Library site, Joe Mareane served as Tompkins County Administrator.  Mareane famously scuttled talk of a Center of Government with the words “I can’t make a business case for it.”

This Councilperson resurrected the Mareane bottom-line reality check argument at the Enfield Board June 11.

“There’s a good question whether we should build it at all,” I told Town Board members.  “Nobody’s made a business case for it that I can tell.  Nobody’s said, ‘This is how much we save; this is how much it’s going to cost; we would save more than it costs.’”

“Joe was right,” legislator Mike Lane acknowledged the next night at the engagement session. “But things have changed a lot,” Lane insisted.  He sought to blunt the “business case” argument.

“The Great Recession was happening then,” Lane explained.  And since 2009, there is more staff; more programs, he said.  “Joe Mareane had one deputy.  We now have two.  They have to have desks,” Lane countered the fiscal argument of cold-hearted calculation.

Bernard Best, Holt Architects’ Project Manager for the Center of Government, fielded questions about design specifics at the ECC meeting.  Public-facing offices like the County Clerk would be on the ground floor, he said. 

Assessment, the District Attorney, and the Grand Jury room would be one flight above.  The Administrator, the Finance Office, and Human Relations would occupy floor three.  The Planning Department and Information Technology would occupy the top floor.

The project manager emphasized design economies within the 48,000-square foot building, touting the “synergies of shared space.”

Somewhat startling, Bernard Best said there are no plans right now to dig a basement.  He mentioned flood plain concerns.

“All of these have heavy security,” Bernard Best referenced to the floors of offices, citing the District Attorney’s floor in particular. 

But what does “heavy security” actually mean, this Councilperson quizzed the project manager?  Will it be a “buzz-in” system, like several county buildings already have?  Or will there be more intrusive magnetometers and bag searches?   How “user-friendly” will this new building be, Best was asked?  He couldn’t say.  The level of security is under a consultant’s study, was all he cared to state.

At past legislative and committee meetings, Groton’s Lee Shurtleff had warned of a Center of Government finding itself strained for space as soon as it’s built.  With that worry in mind, would the building be built strong enough to hold up a fifth floor, if added later?  The project engineer said it would be.

And what about connecting the new building to the Courthouse, a thought no one’s considered to date?  “There is a thing called winter,” this Councilperson reminded everyone. 

Bernard Best cautioned that historic preservation concerns at the landmark Courthouse argue against an above-ground causeway.  But he then acknowledged that a subsurface tunnel to the Courthouse might work.

Newfield’s Liane DeLong was among the few unelected local residents who attended the engagement session at the ECC.  DeLong raised parking and traffic concerns that continually challenge a downtown location.  She also argued against adding that someday-fifth floor.

“It feels claustrophobic,” DeLong said of Ithaca’s newly-obscured downtown skyline.  “It upsets me now.  I hate it.  So many are taller and taller and taller.  Pretty soon we won’t be able to see the sky.”

Tompkins County has three more Community Engagement meetings scheduled this month to solicit comment on a proposed Center of Government.  A meeting June 16 at the Dryden Village Hall will be followed by a session in Caroline one week later, and then a final forum at County Legislative Chambers June 24.  Only the one in Chambers will be live-streamed.

Two further community meetings—but only to be held downtown—are planned for July and September as project plans advance.  We may see a design sketch by late-summer.

That is, unless plans change abruptly by then, and we all simply head to the mall. But don’t count on it.  Cooks hate to turn off the slow cooker when the soup’s so close to done.

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Postscript (June 16): Tompkins County held the third of its five Community Engagement meetings on the Center of Government project Monday night, June 16, this time in Dryden.  

As with the earlier session in Enfield, resident turnout was sparse.  County officials again outnumbered public attendees.  But unlike in Enfield, no one in Dryden questioned whether Tompkins County should actually build the $50 Million office complex.   Nor did anyone suggest an alternate site location, such as at the Shops at Ithaca Mall.

Questions posed during the 90-minute Dryden meeting—many from County staff and lawmakers—instead centered on space allocation within in the new building; provisions like bathroom facilities , lactation rooms, and even whether the new building’s windows would open to let in fresh air.

Dryden’s Mike Lane and Greg Mezey represented the County Legislature Monday, the only two from the body to attend.  Both members June third had voted to support the Center of Government.

Mike Lane said he wants a building that “complements, but does not overpower” its neighborhood; “something the whole community can be proud of,” he said.

Project Manager Bernard Best confirmed that architects plan to present three different building design options to the public, thereby giving people the opportunity to pick which one they prefer. / RL

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Two Enfield roads eyed for slower speeds

Town Board also moves Subdivision Regulations off the dime

by Robert Lynch; June 13, 2025

Question:  What’s the quickest route to Newfield or Elmira from Trumansburg—or for that matter, even from Waterloo?  It’s not through traffic-clogged Ithaca. Instead, think Halseyville Road.

Most locals have known that time-saving secret for decades.  And in a way, Halseyville Road knows it too.  The all-so-convenient bypass has suffered the wear and tear of traffic.  This year, the Tompkins County Highway Department will patch the route’s imperfections and give much of Halseyville Road, County Route 170, a new coat of asphalt.  That’s good news.

But what’s not so good news is that better pavement brings higher speeds.  Halseyville Road may masquerade as a state highway, but it’s still a country road.  There are hills, blind spots, and plentiful cross-traffic.  Moreover, the road serves as a favorite nighttime crosswalk for all too many deer. 

Now, the Enfield Town Board has taken notice.

Guided, quite frankly, by an erroneous quirk on Google maps, the Town Board June 11th requested the New York State Department of Transportation conduct a traffic study of Halseyville Road to determine whether its speed limit should be cut from 55 Miles per Hour to 45 or lower.

“I’ve seen children crossing the road to school buses, and hoping to God that (they don’t get hit),” Councilperson Cassandra Hinkle said of Halseyville Road’s dangers Wednesday.

In a second Resolution, the Town Board asked for a similar traffic study on the little-traveled Tucker Road, the gravel-surfaced Town crossway that bisects the Breezy Meadows subdivision, likely soon to see new homes built.

As for Halseyville Road, “The posted speed limit is 55, but if you’re looking at your little phone or at your Google maps, it says 45, so we have some residents that want some clarification there,” Town Supervisor Stephanie Redmond said in bringing the speed limit reduction to the Town Board’s attention.

Enfield Planning Board Chair Dan Walker offered an explanation Wednesday of the computer-versus-real world anomaly.  Put simply, it’s because Artificial Intelligence is dumb.

Think about it:  Route 96 at Halseyville Road’s north end is reduced to 45 MPH.  Enfield Main Road, NY Route 327, to which Halseyville becomes at its southern terminus, is also 45.  There’s no speed limit sign anywhere in-between.  So AI assumes Halseyville Road holds the speed restriction as well.

The Town of Enfield lacks authority to set speed limits on its own.  Protocol dictates the Town first go to the Tompkins County Highway Department; and then, if approved locally, on to New York State.

Albany’s resistance has frustrated Enfield in the past.  Following a fatal car-pedestrian accident in 2018, the Town Board asked the Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) for a lowered speed on Hayts Road at a blind hill near the Van Dorn Road intersection.  New York rejected the request.

“NYSDOT professionals determined that lowering the speed limit would not be appropriate at this time,” Scott Bates, Regional Traffic Engineer for the Department of Transportation, wrote the Town in December 2022. 

“Setting the speed limit at the prevailing free-flow speed (55 MPH) decreases conflicts, minimizes crashes, and makes it easier for vehicles and pedestrians to judge the speed of approaching vehicles,” Bates continued.  He never mentioned the limited sight distance that likely caused the pedestrian’s death.

“They were counter-intuitive,” this writer, Councilperson Robert Lynch, said Wednesday of the Hayts Road decision.  “It said it’s safer when people go faster, if you can believe what they said.”

Planning Board Chair Walker explained DOT’s logic differently.  “They do speed monitoring.  If the prevailing speed is over 50-55, they’re not going to reduce it down.  People feel safe traveling at that speed,” Walker stated.

Dan Walker lives on Halseyville Road.  He knows its propensity for deer hits. When it comes to the speed study, the planner quipped, “Make sure they do it during deer activity, because that’s what controls the speed.”

“I have never been too encouraged by the New York State Department of Transportation’s response to us,” Councilperson Lynch remarked, “but certainly it’s worth pursuing.  I hope they grant it.  It would be good because the road deserves to have a slower speed limit.”

Seeking a lowered speed limit on Tucker Road involves more of a leap of faith.  Tucker Road may have some increased traffic now that the adjoining Breezy Meadows residential lots have been sold and buyers prepare to build.  But travel’s still light, and the road’s only gravel-surfaced. 

And when Enfield attempted in 2023 to cut speeds for the arguably better-surfaced Van Ostrand Road, also gravel, located on the Enfield-Newfield Town Line, NYDOT cited standing policy for its rejection.

“NYSDOT follows a practice of not posting speed limits on unpaved roadways,” Regional Engineer Bates wrote the Town that November. “Studies have shown that lowered posted speed limits on gravel roads have negligible impact on improving speeds and operations,” Bates wrote.

“It’s a dirt road, so they’re not going to do anything about it,” Supervisor Redmond lamented about Tucker Road after being reminded of the state policy.  “But let’s submit it and see what they say.”

When the Breezy Meadows subdivision underwent Town Planning Board review in 2023, Enfield Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy” Rollins determined that Tucker Road stood in adequate shape.  He dismissed calls for having Tucker’s condition improved, perhaps at developer expense.  Rollins similarly this past January resisted prioritizing Tucker Road’s paving, arguing that future home construction would only tear up whatever pavement Rollins’ crew laid down.

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Amazingly, it was a full 21 months ago that the Enfield Town Planning Board handed up its draft revised Subdivision regulations for Town Board review and adoption.  Wednesday, June 11, the Town Board finally finished its review and forwarded the nearly 30-page document to its attorney.  A public hearing and adoption could occur by late-summer.

For meeting after meeting, perusal of the Subdivision Regulations got relegated to the bottom of long agendas, often postponed by board members either too fatigued or short-handed to wade through them.

As it’s turned out, the Town Board’s current document stands little different from what the Planning Board had initially recommended in September 2023.

Over the course of those many months, ideas got briefly raised and later discarded.  A “right to water” clause, suggested after the Breezy Meadows development controversy, was offered as an amendment, but then rejected, early-on.

Later, the Town Board proposed asserting itself more actively in the approval of larger-scale subdivisions.  But planners then pushed back on the idea and the attorney questioned whether dual-oversight was legal.  The Town Board’s current draft would only empower the Town Board to “recommend approval or denial.” of a subdivision during preliminary review.  It’s a recommendation that the Planning Board would consider as “advisory only.”

The Town Board had also once considered raising minimum lot sizes, but then opted to keep them at one-acre, subject to Health Department approval.  

Most recently, last December, Supervisor Stephanie Redmond had raised the prospect of adding a control of outdoor lighting.  But as its final decision on the regulations this past Wednesday, the Town Board agreed to defer any lighting regulations and consider them only later as a stand-alone law.

“If we want to do something like a Noise Ordnance, or a Light Ordinance, or a Junk Ordinance… we should do it separately,” this writer, Councilperson Lynch, advised the Town Board.  Otherwise, he said, “it could make an otherwise non-controversial set of regulations very controversial.”

In other Town Business June 11:

• The Town Board formally recognized and commended long-time Enfield Food Pantry volunteer Maryanne Berlew on her 80^th birthday.  Berlew’s recognition followed a celebratory gathering hosted by the pantry’s parent organization, Enfield Food Distribution, the previous Sunday.

• The Town Board set a Public Hearing for its July ninth meeting to consider a local law that would opt back into a New York State statute and thus enable the Town of Enfield to directly negotiate, at least in theory, tax abatement agreements with solar farm developers.  Enfield had opted-out of the law during the Black Oak Wind Farm controversy more than a decade ago, but now considers that move a bad idea.  Enfield actually thought it had opted back into the law two years ago, but did so by resolution.  State taxing authorities advised that a local law was instead required.

• The Board set second Public Hearing, this one for August, on what’s become an annual ritual; the override of New York’s penalty-free “tax cap” affecting next year’s Enfield budget.  The state-calculated cap—not yet known for 2026—often restricts tax levy increases to no more than two per cent.  Enfield’s levy  increases in recent years have climbed far above that percentage.  Councilperson Lynch urged the Town Board delay the hearing until the fall, until both Town budget projections and the tax cap are known.  Wait until “necessity dictates an override,” Lynch said.  Supervisor Redmond opposed delay.  “I think necessity dictates an override, no matter what,” Redmond responded.  She cautioned that even despite best efforts to keep tax increases under the cap, “if you go over it, you’re out of compliance.”

• And with little discussion, the Town Board declined Councilperson Lynch’s annual effort to have the Town reclaim for its own purposes the local share of sales tax revenue that Enfield has for more than a decade allowed Tompkins County to keep to reduce its own county tax.  The practice leads to a county tax calculated disproportionately low on residents’ tax bills and a town tax that’s disproportionately high.  But it also inflates the abated tax revenues solar farms pay.  “I’m not going to support that,” Supervisor Redmond said of the sales tax reassignment.  “Make those solar farms pay.”

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