Biggest-ever Enfield Fire Budget OK’d

by Robert Lynch; October 17, 2024

Yes, what a difference a year makes. 

In October 2023, about a score of people attended a Public Hearing on the newly-formed Enfield Fire District’s first-ever budget.  That night, seven of them spoke to the budget (this Enfield Councilperson among them).  The atmosphere was charged.  The fledgling Board of Fire Commissioners—appointed by the Town Board only two months earlier—was desperately in search of its sea legs, unsure of itself more than otherwise.  The Enfield electorate, meanwhile, was sharply divided on both fire service spending, and most particularly, on whether to buy and bond a more than $800,000 fire truck or else send it back to its Iowa factory.

This past Tuesday night, by contrast, at this year’s Fire District Public Hearing, the relative silence proved deafening.  Aside from the four or five regulars who attend the current Board of Fire Commissioners twice-monthly meetings, the massive room was empty.  Just one hearing attendee appeared and spoke. (She requested that her picture not be shared here.) This lone speaker read a budget-critical statement written by her husband.  Coincidence or not, her husband is a former member of the previously-appointed Board of Fire Commissioners.

The budget hearing was open and closed within five minutes.

About an hour later, after trudging through some routine business, the Board of Fire Commissioners approved its 2025 budget, the largest fire budget Enfield has ever seen.  It totals just over $620,000, up 28.3 per cent from the 2024 Budget its predecessor Board had adopted last year.

“We’re all under the same tax crunch,” Board Chair Greg Stevenson said after the vote was taken.  “I don’t think the commissioners are tone-deaf” to taxpayer concerns.

But that big, pricey fire truck’s cost still looms over the Enfield Fire District and its taxpayers.  Its decade-long bond financing kicks in next fiscal year.  Its $126,576 in first-time charges for principal and interest are what make the 2025 Enfield Fire District Budget so weighty.  In addition, continuing charges loading down the budget include more than $72,000 in financing for another fire truck still under a bank loan, and $75,000 to lease its fire house from Enfield’s volunteer fire company.

“Commissioners went through the budget with a fine-tooth comb,” Stevenson insisted.  “There’s not a lot of fat in this budget,” he informed the meeting.

And as for the past controversy over the $825,000 pumper engine’s purchase and payment, Stevenson insisted the matter’s been “put to bed.”

“Approval to bond 602 (the pumper) was on the ballot in 2023,” the chairman reminded everyone. Voters approved the truck’s bonding.  “It’s behind us,” Stevenson reiterated.

Marcus Gingerich’s wife had left by the time Tuesday’s vote was called.  Gingerich had been appointed to the Board of Fire Commissioners by the Enfield Town Board in August of last year. He was one of five Commissioners the Town Board had to appoint to get the fire service’s new governance structure operational.  He was not a firefighter, but rather just a private resident some on the Town Board seemed to trust to cast a critical eye to Fire District spending.

But when the Fire District held its first elections for all five seats that December, Gingerich did poorly.  He finished ninth among ten candidates running.  He was the only appointed board member who’d chosen to compete for election, but then lost.

“As someone involved last year in projecting the budget for years to come while taking into consideration future capital needs, I don’t understand why such a dramatic increase is actually necessary,” Gingerich wrote in his hearing statement read into the record.  “I didn’t think it was necessary to break $600,000 until at least 2032,” Gingerich continued. “Yes, it would require making tough decisions.”

Never stated outright within Gingerich’s complaint, yet implied nonetheless, was that the former Board Commissioner may fault the current Board for paying off the pumper truck too quickly.  Gingerich’s appointed Board had envisioned 20-year bonding for the truck.  Last March, at both Stevenson’s and a new attorney’s urging, the elected Board opted for shorter, ten-year bonding.  Shorter-term bonds lessen the truck’s overall, long-term cost, yet heighten the immediate payments due each year.

“We kept payments down as much as we could,” Stevenson told the largely-empty hearing room Tuesday.  “I’d like to have gone for seven or five (year financing), he reminded everyone.  But that fast a payback, the Chairman acknowledged, would have led to “consternation at our public hearing.”

Tuesday’s Board of Fire Commissioners’ decision constitutes final action on the Enfield Fire District’s 2025 Budget.  Enfield voters get to elect one member of the Board of Fire Commissioners this December, but they get no vote on the budget.

The adopted budget would impose an Enfield fire tax rate of just under $1.90 per $1,000 of assessed valuation.

In his statement, former Commissioner Gingerich chose to go back four years and compare the proposed—and now established—2025 tax levy to that of 2021.  He  maintained that the levies for 2022 and 2023 “are possibly somewhat anomalous and thus may not be a good benchmark.”

“If one looks carefully at the budget, it represents a 58 per cent increase over 2021,” Gingerich said of the 2025 spending plan.  “This makes me question whether this Board truly has the best interest of the residents of Enfield in mind.” 

Gingerich reflected on the budget before him, “Does it concern you at all as to the amount of financial strain this may put on some residents?  I certainly doubt whether any residents have seen or will be seeing these kinds of increases in their personal incomes.”

“I hope you are carefully considering all sides of this,” Gingerich concluded.

Marcus Gingerich’s spouse prefaced her reading by saying that her husband was ailing that night and could not attend the Public Hearing in person.  She’d left the meeting before she could be asked whether Marcus might run again in the December Fire District election and seek to regain his position as a commissioner.

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Posted Previously:

Committee targets 3.29% TC levy hike

by Robert Lynch; October 11, 2024

Tompkins County’s annual budgeting process always begs for the exclamation, “Cut to the chase!”  And if you feel like shouting those words, just be glad you’re not on the Tompkins County Legislature.

During three exhausting, mind-numbing, eye-glazing marathon sessions within the past week, our county’s 14 legislators massaged, subtracted from—but mostly added to—County Administrator Lisa Holmes’ recommended $252 Million 2025 County Budget. 

Tompkins County budgeting is never an easy exercise.  Too many departments and agencies want to hang added ornaments onto an already-overloaded financial Christmas tree.  Too many legislators simply want to talk.  Combined, the three meetings ran a total of nearly 12 hours.

Now, eleven days into this October, the legislative committee-of-the-whole that engineers the budget process has handed forth a proposal that would raise just over $55 Million through property taxes.  It would hike the tax levy by 3.29 per cent from that of the current year.  For those fortunate enough to own a $300,000 home—the median value in Tompkins County, we’re told—the budget would add $123.66 to your County tax bill, raising it to $1,446.

“Essentially we’re hitting the people with a 9.3 per cent increase in their property tax bill if we pass this,” Groton Republican Lee Shurtleff pointed out shortly before he voted against the budget this past Tuesday.  Shurtleff compared median homeowner assessments this year to last.  Home assessments have inflated much faster than have those for other properties.

Tuesday’s committee vote on the recommended budget was 7-6. (Legislator Travis Brooks was excused that day.)  Each of the Legislature’s three Republicans opposed the recommendation, along with Democrats Greg Mezey and Rich John.  At the last minute, Legislature Chair Dan Klein, another Democrat, switched his vote and joined the opposition.

What emerged from the meeting is a mere recommendation, odd as that is since all legislators participate in the so-called Expanded Budget Committee.  Its recommendation requires ratification at a regular Legislature meeting to become an official “tentative budget” and to earn the right to a Public Hearing near Halloween.  The Legislature next meets Tuesday, the 15th.

Before taking their final vote, the committee debated for almost an hour, and then defeated legislator Greg Mezey’s last-minute amendment.  Mezey would have drawn nearly $1.5 Million from Tompkins County’s massive fund balance, applied $409,715 of it to back “one-time funding” for add-on appropriations, and used its just over $1 Million remainder to decrease the tax levy by two per cent from that otherwise imposed.  Mezey’s motion lost five votes to eight.

Of those representing Enfield, Democrat Anne Koreman opposed the amendment, yet supported the budget.  Republican Randy Brown did just the opposite.

The drive-by reader may question how the proposed tax increases now under discussion got so small. There’s a reason.

When she first presented her recommended budget to the Legislature September third, Administrator Holmes had proposed a 4.34 per cent levy increase, just below the state’s specified—and largely symbolic—4.5 per cent “tax cap,” as that cap’s computed this year for Tompkins County.  What’s changed since then is a pair of under-reported corrections and adjustments that Holmes briefly outlined to the Legislature October first.  The County Communications Department’s initial reports on committee deliberations failed to acknowledge either.

“This is kind of a ‘could’a, would’a, should’a,” Holmes described to the Legislature October first as she revealed that budget planners had suddenly found an extra $950,000 to play with.

First, there’s a “market adjustment” affecting salary reimbursements, Holmes said.  “The amount we receive from New York State for eligible reimbursement… we did come under budget for what we projected by about $450,000,” the Administrator explained.

Holmes said the administration and finance staff had also “detected a discrepancy in the debt service schedule” for a “Green Facilities” project.  Essentially, somebody accidentally had counted some obligations twice.  “We caught it before it happened,” Holmes explained.

“It’s kind of nice to have an October Surprise that’s good news from our own administrative staff and Finance,” Budget Committee Chair Mike Lane reacted that night.

So with newfound money in hand, the trio of arduous, bean-counting committee caucuses began.  Holmes’ mini-windfall had cut the projected levy increase to 2.56 per cent.  But then, bit-by-bit, stuff—lots of stuff—got added in.  The levy increase crept up to 2.63 per cent by the end of meeting one; then jumped to 3.40 per cent by meeting two; then fell back to 3.29 per cent by the final session.  All the adjustments become too numerous to mention.  Here are a few of them.

Sunflower House is a post-incarceration transitional residence run in part by OAR (now bearing the cumbersome, nondescript name “Opportunities, Alternatives and Resources”).  Sunflower House advocates fought hard for continued funding at a Tompkins County Budget Forum September 30^th.  They’d sought $77,680 from the budget for the home’s operations.

“I think it would be good for us to have this program continue, legislator Veronica Pillar said in Sunflower House’s support October 3^rd.  “If Sunflower House is closed, then we’re just going to see the same folks (former inmates) in our shelter or on the street and really struggling and being less healthy.”

Pillar proposed budgeting the full $77,680.  But then Pillar’s colleague, Travis Brooks, urged amending the appropriation to three-year funding of $45,000.  Pillar accepted the change as a friendly amendment.  The amended appropriation quickly passed.  No one complained at the time.  But Sunflower House’s supporters complain now.

“This will have devastating consequences for our most vulnerable populations, especially for those reentering society after incarceration,” Dr. Paula Ioanide, a local professor and reentry services advocate, told The Ithaca Times, as it reported October 10^th.  “Sunflower Houses is facing a funding shortfall, and without securing additional resources, the program may not be able to continue.” 

Security staffing at County facilities got heightened, perhaps controversial attention.  By a 7-6 plurality vote (with Mike Sigler excused), the Legislature recommended $227,139 be spent to hire a Security Manager, a full-time security officer, and another officer to work part-time. 

The manager, to be stationed at the Department of Emergency Response in Lansing, would be “monitoring cameras across the county for all locations,” Holmes said.  The full-time officer would be stationed primarily at the Mental Health facility on Green Street, the scene of recent problems.  But the part-timer, Holmes said, could be deployed “if there needed to be coverage for a Legislature meeting, for instance.”  A guard at Legislature meetings would make news.

 “Having someone monitor cameras, I don’t understand how that moves us that much closer to being safe,” Travis Brooks said.

Brooks missed the next meeting.  But Sigler attended it, and said he may later resurrect the security spending, likely to help scuttle the idea.

Commuter pay for legislators will apparently end in the face of austerity.  With six voting support and seven in opposition, the committee rejected Anne Koreman’s motion to continue paying lawmakers when they travel to and from home.

“We don’t get a lot of pay,” Koreman complained, citing her current $22,000 part-time salary.  “I don’t have an office.  My office is at home.”

Others, including Greg Mezey, worried aloud that legislative commuter pay sets a double-standard.

“We don’t offer reimbursement for any of our staff who may make a little bit more than we do in some situations that are maybe driving from Candor or Spencer or other places,” Mezey countered.  “So why we would put ourselves in a different position, I don’t understand.”

“I don’t see the equity in treating ourselves differently from how we treat our regular employees,” Deborah Dawson concurred.  “I just don’t think we’re more special animals than everybody else.”

Time for an ounce of levity: “If we built the Center of Government at the mall, it would considerably shorten my commute,” Lansing’s Mike Sigler quipped.  A $40 Million new office building was, quite frankly, an argument left for another day.  But Sigler, too, opposed commuter compensation.

About 400,000 additional dollars got tucked into the Tompkins County Budget over those three meetings.  Mezey’s futile, final Resolution made on that last day of deliberations would have paid for all of the extras from fund balance savings and have drawn nearly $1.07 million additional to give taxpayers what he said was a needed break.  It would have cut the tax levy’s increase to 1.29 per cent, lower than inflation.

“Just because inflation is one number doesn’t mean we have to run up and try to catch it,” Mezey argued, as he defended his amendment on that final day.  “We are going to over-collect.  We are going to underspend. We are going to add additional fund balance.  So why, why pass the burden back to the taxpayer when we don’t have to?”

It’s not just County Government that’s tugging at taxpayers’ sleeves, Groton’s Shurtleff reminded everyone.

“I hear it every day in my community about the property taxes,” Shurtleff said.  A levy increase of $136 may seem benign to some, he acknowledged.  But “if we do $136, and my Town Board does $136, and my Village Board does $136, and God forbid, the School District does $272, twice that, I’ve just taken one of my constituent’s Social Security checks for the next year.”

“If you don’t want to tax your constituents, then you’re probably in the wrong job,” the Town of Ithaca’s Amanda Champion pointedly shot back.  Champion was among the eight who opposed the amendment.

So did Lansing’s Deborah Dawson.  Dawson argued that tapping fund balance to reduce taxes sends a deceptive message.  It hides reckless spending while dissuading taxpayers from getting angry, coming to meetings, and spouting off.

 “I don’t think it’s transparent; I don’t think it’s honest; and I don’t think it’s sustainable in the long run,” Dawson said of Mezey’s proposal.  “But you all will do what you will do, and I will vote against the budget.”

Dawson didn’t need to vote against the budget that day because Mezey’s amendment failed.  Former Legislature Chair Shawna Black called the fund balance tapping ploy “a dangerous shell game.”  Enfield-Ulysses’ Anne Koreman insisted it’s “artificially lowering the tax rate.”

“I think we’ve done a really bad job if we’re going to be doing this at the end,” Koreman said of tapping savings last-minute to tamp down taxes.  “It costs a lot to run government.”

Some, like Ithaca’s Rich John, sought compromise.  He’d have accepted a three per cent levy increase, but not one as low as Mezey had proposed.  “It cuts a little too much,” John said of the Mezey reduction.  John’s compromise never got to the floor—not yet.

Compare the Mezey 1.29 per cent tax increase with the two per cent hike adopted one year ago and the zero per cent increases in each of the two prior years.

Budget Committee Chair Mike Lane, like Dawson, a budget hawk, joined the majority chorus for making tax increases a little higher this year.

“You can’t be all things to all people,” Lane lamented near the close of the final day’s discussion.  “The fund balance is something we must protect,” he insisted.  “You don’t raise employees’ salaries to try to meet inflation without having to raise the revenues and pay for them.  Or we don’t pay for everything we buy from pencils to police cars, which are more expensive, without having to raise the revenues to pay them.”

Lane prevailed; Mezey did not.  Five-to-eight.  Amendment failed.  The fund balance would not be touched, at least not in theory.

****

Cut to the chase? We haven’t gotten there yet.  Remember that what transpired these first two weeks in October yielded only a recommendation.  Legislators will cast their first, binding budget votes come Tuesday, the 15^th.  They’ll then send the budget to a hearing.  And post-hearing, they could still amend it further in November.

History teaches us that Tompkins’ legislators have an uncanny knack for upending their committee’s exhausting labors impulsively, just as though what they’d worked so hard at had never happened.  Spending could still tick up, and the tax figure could wobble up or down—likely down toward what was offered, yet not embraced, that final committee day.  Tompkins County’s annual budget ritual, messy as it is, has just taken a pause in the drama.  It isn’t over yet.

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Posted Previously:

Schoharie Administrator tapped to succeed Lisa Holmes

Korsah Akumfi may have eyed job before

by Robert Lynch; October 4, 2024; expanded reporting at 6:55 PM

In an announcement surprising by its speed, Tompkins County announced Friday morning the appointment of its next County Administrator.  Korsah Akumfi will assume the position currently held by the retiring Lisa Holmes.  He’ll take over the job December 9^th, according to a news release from the Tompkins County Department of Communications.

Nonetheless, if media reports are to be trusted, they suggest the Administrator-designee has been offered the job before.

Akumfi, African-American, comes to the position from Schoharie County, where he currently serves as County Administrator and Budget Officer.  He’d previously served as assistant to that county’s administrator.

In Friday’s statement, Dan Klein, Chair of the County Legislature, praised Akumfi’s background in budget development and as administrator of a New York State county.

“Korsah comes to Tompkins County with recent experience in local government in New York,” Klein stated.  “Tompkins County is excited to have his experience at Schoharie and his background in customer service and financial management.”

The Friday statement indicated that the Tompkins County Legislature will likely vote on Akumfi’s appointment at its next meeting, October 15.

Lisa Holmes, who’d served in the top administrative position since 2021—initially on an interim basis—announced her impending retirement on April 10^th.  At the time, Holmes planned to serve through year’s end.  Friday’s announcement would slightly speed up Holmes’ planned departure.

“I am honored to have been selected to serve as the County Administrator for Tompkins County,” Akumfi said in Friday’s statement. “Tompkins County is a vibrant, progressive community, and I look forward to working with the County Legislature, county staff, and community partners to build upon the county’s many strengths and to address key priorities.”

Akumfi added, “My goal is to hit the ground listening, to gain a deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing the county, and to develop collaborative solutions that will have a positive impact on both current and future generations of Tompkins County residents.”

As Lisa Holmes was named Tompkins’ first female County Administrator two years ago, Akumfi would become its first County Administrator of color.

If one is to rely upon the printed record, Korsah Akumfi has sought the Administrator’s job in Tompkins County previously.  Indeed, one report indicates he was offered it.

The Cobleskill Times Journal reported in late-October 2022 that the Schoharie County Board of Supervisors had voted on a Friday to offer Akumfi its own County’s Administrator’s job.  The paper stated that “Mr. Akumfi said after the meeting that he needed the weekend to consider the offer—and weigh it against one from Tompkins County for the administrator’s position there.”  Akumfi eventually accepted the Schoharie County appointment.

Lisa Holmes had been named Tompkins County Administrator that previous March, elevated from her prior Deputy Administrator’s post.  Technically, Holmes remained on probationary status.  Yet no one on the County Legislature outwardly expressed any disapproval with her performance.  Therefore, the timing of Akumfi’s purported statement to the Schoharie press about a Tompkins County job offer, quite plainly, seems odd.

Of course, the paper may have misinterpreted Akumfi’s message, or Akumfi may have embellished it.  To that point, at least one, if not two Deputy Administrator positions within Tompkins County remained open at the time. And Holmes had admitted she was having a hard time filling them, given the high cost of housing in Tompkins County.

Whatever the circumstances, quite likely our newest County Administrator has at least shopped for a governmental job here before.

Although not stated explicitly, Tompkins County’s administrator-designate may be foreign-born.

The Department of Communications’ statement cites Akumfi’s previous finance-related roles in Ghana and in the United Kingdom.  It also stated that Akumfi has served in several workforce and employment-related positions at the New York State Department of Labor.

Korsah Kofi Akumfi’s resume includes his holding a Master of Public Administration degree from Binghamton University with a stated emphasis on economic development, local government management, and public policy and finance, according to the Tompkins County news release.

In June, the Tompkins County Legislature, upon the advice of the County’s Commissioner of Human Resources, elevated the starting pay of any new Administrator it would hire to a “high-end limit” of $180,000.  By contrast, when Lisa Holmes was officially promoted to her current position in April 2022, the Administrator’s “red-lined” salary—higher than scale— stood at $160,000. 

The County Legislature in June also provided its future new hire a $10,000 relocation bonus.  Rules require a County Administrator to reside within Tompkins County.

Akumfi’s current pay is lower.  The Mountain Eagle and Schoharie News places the salary for Schoharie County Administrator at $137,000, set to rise to $139,740 next January.

The Mountain Eagle also reports that Akumfi was just re-appointed to his current job, albeit by a less-than-unanimous majority.  Several Schoharie County Supervisors reportedly opposed the incumbent’s two-year reappointment, for reasons the paper did not state.

Conciliatory, Akumfi acknowledged he can’t please everybody.

“In my role, it’s something you expect,” the reappointed Administrator said of the divided vote during his brief post-meeting interview with The Mountain Eagle. “My job now is to reach out to those individuals (who voted no) and find out what their concerns are and make sure I address them,” he said.  “I’m excited. There is a lot of work to do in the county. There are a lot of ongoing projects, so I’m excited about what lies ahead.”

That was then.  Quite simply, plans have now changed.  The “work” and “ongoing projects” that generated Korsah Akumfi’s excitement will need to relocate—along with him—some 120 miles to the west.

Why some of those on the Schoharie County Board of Supervisors chose not to embrace their African-American Administrator remains unstated by the Albany-centered media.  When they originally elevated him from Assistant to the Administrator in 2022, reports say two Supervisors opposed his promotion, while another dozen on the board supported it.

The closest thing to a controversy arising during Akumfi’s brief tenure was a 2023 dust-up with Schoharie County’s Health Director which wedged the Administrator between that director and the Board of Supervisors over COVID-19 guidelines.  It was Akumfi who in January of that year had to sign Health Director Amy Gildemeister’s separation letter and lock her out of her office, according to the Albany Times Union.

The State Health Commissioner insisted that the Supervisors lacked the authority to do what they did.  But Akumfi, acting at lawmakers’ behest, terminated Gildemeister anyway.

Tompkins County legislators, in the weeks prior to Friday’s announcement, conducted interviews with several candidates to fill the job of the retiring Administrator Lisa Holmes.  At an Enfield Town Board meeting in September, legislator Randy Brown stated that only one of the three finalists—apparently Akumfi—came from within New York State.  Brown’s statement implied that no one employed from within Tompkins County Government had made the final cut.

According to his current posting on LinkedIn, Korsah Akumfi states, “My expertise includes project design and management, data analysis and interpretation, sales, exceptional customer service, and development of research mechanisms, from design to implantation.  I enjoy conceptualizing ideas motivated by a utilitarian mindset.” 

Akumfi continues, “My associates identify me as a driven, enthusiastic individual with a positive mindset, and a proactive attitude when dealing with issues and facing difficult decisions.”

The posting states that Akumfi has served as Schoharie County Administrator from October 2022 until the present.  He began as Assistant to the Administrator 13 months before that.

In serving through early-December, Lisa Holmes will guide the 2025 Tompkins County Budget through its scheduled final adoption.  Her successor will take over shortly thereafter.

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Budget Message to Tompkins: Prioritize People

by Robert Lynch; October 3, 2024

Young people handed out cut sunflowers; corny, colorful props, perhaps, yet still symbols of a human service agency that bore the flower’s name.  And those sunflower activists weren’t alone.  Monday was the people’s night in Tompkins County Legislative Chambers.  The 2025 County Budget was up for an informal dissection.  And for the most part, those who filled seats in the legislative gallery wanted to make sure that their chosen cause got its sufficient slice.

“Foster a budget that puts people first,” Sasha Raffloer, a worker at the Tompkins County Library, said in support of retaining five or more library positions poised to be cut in the face of austerity.

This was the Tompkins County Budget Forum; an annual, less-than-formal ritual that legislators aren’t required to hold, but do so anyway.  The budget’s official Public Hearing comes later.  Hardly anyone attends the Public Hearing.  Most of the budget slicing has already occurred by then.  Agency advocacy after-the-fact serves little useful purpose.

But the Budget Forum is different.  The County Budget right now remains very much a live ball.  A persuasive pitch by the right person can win an agency a supplemental appropriation—an “Over-Target Request (OTR)” in budget-speak.  In the least, it can keep an existing OTR from being stripped away.

Such was the meeting’s context.  And 2025 will be a tight budget year.  Last April, the Legislature told County Administrator Lisa Holmes to contain her next year’s tax levy increase to two percent.  She didn’t.  She blew past the directive big-time.  She recommended to the Legislature in early-September a more than quarter-Billion spending plan that would hike the tax levy 4.34 per cent. 

So far, nobody’s much complained that the Legislature’s April directive was largely ignored.  Budget Committee Chair Mike Lane has made it clear that his starting point is Holmes’ “recommended” budget, not that leaner alternative that she dutifully prepared to comply with her order, but now conveniently sets to the side. The alternative “Two Percent Budget” would have required many departments to cut their spending by five per cent.  Some department heads balked.

Yet if tradition holds, the recommended budget will grow even fatter by the time it’s adopted.  And that’s where Monday’s advocates stepped in. 

Twenty-one people spoke to the Legislature Monday night; some in chambers, some on Zoom.   Legislators, themselves, sat in silence.  Only the Budget Committee Chair, Mike Lane, spoke as moderator.

Administrator Holmes began the forum with an abbreviated summary of the 2025 budget she’s recommended.  Holmes largely repeated the message she’d first given to the Legislature September third.  No add-ins; no turn-arounds; no surprises.

Of those who addressed the budget, only former Ithaca Mayoral candidate Zach Winn urged that spending be cut.  Winn would prefer the legislature adhere to its earlier-proposed—though now largely-tossed aside—directive to keep the tax levy increase at just two per cent.  “The current fiscal mess of the County is unsustainable,” Winn said on Zoom.

But Republican Winn was the outlier.  A score of others who joined him in chambers or online carried a different message: reach out to us with a more generous helping hand.

Remember those sunflowers?  Sunflower House, a transitional living program for the previously-incarcerated, drew the most frequent and passionate support. Dave Sanders, Executive Director of the former Offender Aid and Restoration (now bearing the more PC, yet painfully nondescript and contrived name, “Opportunities, Alternatives and Resources” or “OAR”) spoke in its behalf. 

Sanders protested a prospective $40,000 (five per cent) cut in in the OAR budget.  Together with reduced Sunflower House assistance, it would cut 16 per cent of his total budget, Sanders said.  That’s despite the fact that demand for OAR’s services has risen by 68 per cent in the past 20 months.

“I would like the county administration to think about funding Sunflower House,” Sanders pleaded.  “I hope the Legislature will look beyond costs and recognize the humanity of the most vulnerable people in our community.” 

As far as cutting costs, the Executive Director would have Tompkins County look inward on itself.  He claimed Administration Department expenses have risen 213 per cent since 2017.

Michael Rhymes spoke.  Rhymes said he’d spent 39 years in prison, purportedly for a crime he didn’t commit.  He spoke to Sunflower House funding.

“I know you’re talking about money and you’re talking about budget, but what’s the cost of a human life?” Rhymes asked.

“People in prison: when they get out, so much pressure.  And if they’re not cared for or treated humanely, they tend to revert back to what they did,” Rhymes, the ex-inmate, continued.  “Believe me, I’m an expert on prisons.  I’ve been around every kind of person you can think of.  And the majority of them want to come home, they want to do right, but who’s supporting ‘em?”

Speakers spoke in support of the police-monitoring Community Justice Center, the “Unbroken Promise” minority advocacy agency, the County Library, and Tompkins Learning Partners.  Most talked not of dollars, but of programmatic passion.   One woman urged funding for a program to teach constitutional rights literacy.

And on the flip side, the money-draining Ithaca Tompkins Airport took a hit.

Former Enfield Supervisor aspirant Amanda Kirchgessner urged the Legislature to close the airport’s customs facility.

“Cut it out.  Get rid of it.  Do what you have to do,” Kirchgessner said.  “Are you ready to listen to us?  Five years ago we said don’t do it.  How much have we paid?  It’s superfluous and we’re subsidizing the feds.”

Whether they listened to Kirchgessner or not—more likely, they listened to the bean counters—the County Legislature voted Tuesday, one night later, to close the customs facility.  It cost Tompkins County $273,000 last year to run it, but returned to the County a mere pittance.

Nonetheless, airport grievances drove deeper.  Administrator Holmes’ recommended budget would shovel $642,000 into airport accounts to shore-up its flight-starved operations and pay its debt.  To several at the Budget Forum, airport money is money ill-spent.

“The airport has been failing for several years to meet its operational costs,” Bethany Ojalehto Mays told lawmakers.  “It is economically unviable,” she insisted.  Moreover, “Flying is one of the primary ways that affluent people pollute the world,” she said.

The idea caught on.  Amanda Kirchgessner and her mother, Marnie, also a former Enfield political leader, supported airport operational cuts.  So did Sophia Finn.

“If we are going to meet our goals as a community, we really need to focus on the human services and the good work of the employees of the County and of the programs to lift up the most vulnerable in our community,” Finn maintained.  “You prioritize the people as opposed to the airport or other not-as-crucial capital expenditures.”

That most costly, looming capital expenditure, a $40-60 Million Downtown Center of Government office building, never came up in Monday’s discussions.  It’ll be paid for in pieces.  According to budget documents, 2025 will be sort of a “bye” year for the building.  Architects and engineers must first do what’s needed.  Eight-figure spending, nevertheless, could commence in 2026.

****

Yes, legislators sat in silence to hear what the passionate had to say Monday night.  This Thursday, October third, they begin that slice-and-dice exercise; voting on what to add, along with what, if anything, to subtract. 

Whether any lawmaker truly listened to what was said by the score of speakers at the Budget Forum remains to be judged by later actions.  Those sunflowers may stick in a few memories or maybe in many of them as budget meetings move forward.  Then, again, they may already have been tossed into the legislative trash can.

###.

Updated: CMC Seals Recovery Fund Deal

$1.5 Million grant secures deadline-driven state OK

by Robert Lynch; Posted October 1, 2024; additional reporting October 2, 2024

The final piece has been put in place to secure Cayuga Medical Center’s access to the largest dollar award from Tompkins County’s $6.5 Million Community Recovery Fund, County and CMC officials confirmed late Tuesday.  And the crucially-needed, long-delayed state approval for CMC’s Crisis Stabilization Center effectively shuts down the local program’s funding opportunities for others and leaves Enfield and its community agencies with nothing more from the program than a few Highway Department radios.

Despite the optimism that Tuesday’s disclosure prompted amongst lawmakers seated at the Tompkins County Legislature’s oval desks that night, a cloud of uncertainty hung over the room. What had Albany actually approved?  What hadn’t it?  And does the project still rest on the knife’s edge of bureaucratic review by not one state agency, but two? 

“It seems everyone that’s involved in the project is saying that this is going to happen in the time frame that was laid out,” Tompkins County Legislature Chair Dan Klein, somewhat hesitantly, proclaimed near the end of the Legislature’s Tuesday night meeting, a session at which legislators also supported a separate CMC-sponsored “Withdrawal” Detox facility which may co-locate with the Stabilization Center. 

Because of the tie-in, both clinics may quarter in a building across from the Lansing McDonald’s, rather than siting the Stabilization Center at the Shops at Ithaca Mall, as was earlier planned.

Awarded the Recovery Fund’s largest grant, $1.5 Million, in December 2022, the hospital-sponsored Crisis Stabilization Center has struggled to secure required state approvals by a year-end deadline that funding rules under the Recovery Fund’s federal money source had demanded.

Had CMC forfeited the cash, other applicants—including two from Enfield—might have become eligible to receive a portion of the proceeds.

County lawmakers had recently extended CMC’s deadline until September 30^th to receive a yes-or-no answer.  After Tuesday’s discussions, Dott Donnelly, CMC’s Chief of Staff, said the previously-undisclosed state approval came in within the past two weeks.

The Crisis Stabilization Center, geared toward mental health emergencies, “we will have open by the end of 2026,” Donnelly predicted. “We have to.”

Meanwhile, a much smaller, but similarly late-to finalize Recovery Fund award—this one to Khuba International, which proposed to establish a teaching farm in Danby—will apparently not meet funding deadlines.  Yet no one else will catch the money it forfeits.

Khuba’s Danby approval “does not seem like it will be able to be accomplished in the time frame that we established,” Klein told the County Legislature Tuesday.  “And so that money will be reallocated to an internal project from the County,” Klein said of the earlier-awarded Khuba grant, $74,086.

True, the County could seek new recipients for the Khuba funds.  Yet given the federal American Rescue Plan’s fast-approaching year-end deadline, no one downtown seems eager to make the effort.  The money may go, instead, to highway equipment.

Over the objection of  Newfield-Enfield legislator Randy Brown and those (including this writer) who’d insisted Cayuga Medical had sufficient funds to build the Crisis Stabilization Center without public subsidy, the County Legislature authorized the $1.5 Million Recovery Fund grant to the hospital corporation nearly two years ago.  Documents this writer received in July through a Tompkins County FOIL request confirmed a signed contract between in Tompkins County and CMC, one dated October 2^nd of last year.

Yet at about the time of that contract’s signing, regulatory impediments arose, barriers that neither hospital officials nor legislators found themselves eager to detail publicly. The July FOIL packet provided little insight. About the only clue was that which Cayuga Health’s CEO, Martin Stallone, provided at a legislative committee meeting in September 2023.

Neither an “intensive crisis stabilization model” nor a “supportive-level model” were “successful with the State,” Stallone told the committee at that 2023 session.  What regulators wanted instead, he said, was “a stand-alone psychiatric emergency room.”

Nothing stated by County or CMC officials this Tuesday addressed why the regulatory sands have so apparently shifted.

What has shifted, however, is the Crisis Stabilization Center’s preferred venue. 

No longer would the mental health clinic occupy CMC’s set-aside space in the ever-shrinking Shops at Ithaca shopping mall.  Rather, it would likely pair-up with a newly-vitalized “Open-Access Medically-Supervised Withdrawal and Stabilization Center,” a detox facility, also to be run by a Cayuga Medical appendage, at 2353 North Triphammer Road; its co-location pending state approval.

Yes, both CMC-run clinics have “Stabilization” in their names.  But Dott Donnelly said that’s where the similarity ends.

“They are separate programs,” Donnelly told legislators.  “Intensive crisis stabilization is the mental health portion of it.  And withdrawal and stabilization is all related to addiction services,” she clarified. 

What’s sought—and what Donnelly believes is likely to win state approval—“is to have a dual licensure in the same building so that we can run the mental health crisis stabilization center on the first floor of that Triphammer building, and alcohol and addiction on the second floor,” the administrator stated.  “Ideally, we’d like to be in the Triphammer building because it’s a fantastic place to serve the clients.”

Yes, it’s easy to get confused about all this.  One easily finds oneself at the peril of state bureaucracy, especially when dealing with a hospital corporation that keeps many interactions close to the vest.

If regulators reject the “dual licensure” CMC proposes, Donnelly indicated that CMC could segregate the two services, most likely quartering the Crisis Stabilization Service in the shopping mall, as first planned.

Although Albany’s authorization still sounds a touch tentative, Tompkins County Whole Health Commissioner Frank Kruppa, in a message relayed to the Legislature by Chairman Klein Tuesday, provided the firmest assurance that regulators sufficiently back the project to allow the Recovery Fund to offer its support.

“The New York State Office of Mental Health and the New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports (OASAS) have Authorized Cayuga Medical Center to apply for an Intensive Crisis Stabilization ICS license that would allow them to operate and bill for a Crisis Stabilization Center,” Kruppa wrote Klein.  “CMC has two potential locations for ICS… Either way, CMC should be able to provide us with a plan to use the $1.5 Million for the Crisis Stabilization Center,” the commissioner concluded.

Most legislative discussion Tuesday centered not about the Stabilization Center nor its Recovery Fund award, but about the detox facility.  Legislators unanimously authorized administrators to execute a contract for pass-through state funding and followed their vote with applause.  New York will provide the center $600,000 over each of the next five years.

“I thought it important that we note the moment,” legislator Rich John told colleagues, speaking after he’d pulled the detox center’s authorization from a laundry-list consent agenda and showcased it for a separate vote.  “This has been such a long time coming,” John said.   I think this is one of the most significant things the Legislature will do this year, if not more than this year.  This has been a missing element for us for a very, very long time.”

“Hopefully in a very short time period they will have that building and those services up and running,” legislator Shawna Black said in applauding the CMC affiliate, Cayuga Health Partners, for its initiative.  “I’m very confident in saying that I’m very thankful that there’s a local operation that’s stepped up to do this really, really important work that I believe will save lives over the years.”

In 2019, the Alcohol and Drug Council of Tompkins County secured state aid to operate a 40-bed detox facility at the Triphammer Road building that CMC’s program wishes to occupy.  Fraught with financial and staffing challenges, the Council closed its Open Access Center last February, its service in many observers’ opinions having never become fully operational.

With the treatment gap realized, legislator Brown pressed CMC’s Donnelly as to how soon the detox facility might be up and running.

“I know that ASAP isn’t an appropriate answer,” and administrator responded.  “But that’s kind of what it is….  I can’t tell you a timeline because I don’t know it.  But it’s an ASAP thing, as carefully and as soon as possible.”

Of course, left in the dust by all of Tuesday’s revelations is the Town of Enfield.  Two of its key agencies, the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) and the Enfield Community Council (ECC) became close runners-up for Community Recovery Fund support in the most recent funding round.  The Fire Company had sought $50,000-$178,000 for capital improvements, including a possible fire house bunk room.  ECC had requested $146,000-$206,000 to add a mental health wing to its community center.

Given Cayuga Medical’s late-stage access to its $1.5 Million award, the EVFC, the ECC, and scores of other Recovery Fund applicants county-wide now find their hopes dashed.  The Community Recovery Fund has effectively closed.  All Enfield ever received from it was $26,592 granted its Highway Department for new radio purchases.  That’s about four-tenths of one per cent of the total.

Faced with the prospect that CMC might default on its funding for lack of state approvals, the County Legislature in August granted the hospital corporation an extra month, until this past Monday, to finalize its approvals.  And CMC apparently did so, at least according to Dan Klein’s and Frank Kruppa’s Tuesday pronouncements, despite those approvals’ seemingly fragile façade.  As far as County Government is concerned, the CMC deal is done.

But remaining a mystery is why New York State endorsements took so long.  Pressed by this writer as we walked from legislative chambers Tuesday night, hospital Chief of Staff Donnelly shed little sunlight.  Yet one may conclude that the stabilization center’s planned co-location with the detox center and its migration from the mall may have had something to do with it.

“This project had to go through a series of steps,” Dan Klein said earlier that evening, perhaps simplifying the regulatory labyrinth.  “One of those is [the Resolution the Legislature passed that night],” he explained.  “Simultaneously to that are the state approvals going on…. It’s all part of the same project.”

And yes, the absence of a financial component to CMC’s request to Albany helped smooth it along, Donnelly acknowledged.  With regulators, she said, an attitude prevails:  “No Money, No Problem.”

###

Reported earlier:

Enfield taps savings to trim tax hike

$2.5 Million plan submitted, tweaked, sent on to October

by Robert Lynch; September 19, 2024

About halfway through a more than three-hour budget meeting Wednesday night, this Enfield Town Board member urged everyone set the budget aside, go home, rest, and revisit its refinement later.  That didn’t happen.  Town Supervisor Stephanie Redmond insisted we were making progress and should maintain the momentum.  She implored us to press on.  Over my continued objections, we did

Yes, we made progress.  But we also paid a price.  Patience strained; tempers flared.  We blurted out sometimes-hurtful words.  Enfield’s oft-applauded “Civility Resolution” took a hit. 

But what emerged by our just-before 10 PM adjournment was an almost-finished spending plan for next year.  We’d trimmed the tax levy by more than $64,000 and shaved its levy increase by several percentage points from that of a Tentative Budget that Supervisor Redmond, had presented at the meeting’s start.  The budget’s not final.  The meeting wasn’t pretty.  But the financial blueprint for Enfield—and its tax implications—is pretty much set.

Supervisor Redmond’s first offer, her so-called “Tentative Budget,” had been shared with Board members two days earlier.  But it was only made public Wednesday. 

Redmond’s opening proposal would have increased next year’s tax levy by 8.85 per cent.  It would have spent $2.51 Million; $851,521 in the General Fund, $1.66 Million in the Highway Fund, a combined 7.16 per cent spending increase.  The budget will require the Town Board to override New York State’s largely-symbolic “tax cap.”

The budget was “on the high side when I got it, and it’s still on the high side,” Redmond said of spending requests and her fiscal starting point as the meeting began.  The Supervisor conceded reductions needed to be made.  They were.

By meeting’s end, the Town Board had trimmed the projected tax levy increase to a figure just above five per cent.  Town Bookkeeper Blixy Taetzsch threw out a potential levy increase of 5.2 per cent.  She and Redmond cautioned it was a shaky number and not reliable enough for publication.  So take it for what it’s worth. (A firm $64,000 cut would yield a 5.4 per cent levy increase over last year.)

During the meeting, the Board touched on proposed salaries, but only to raise them, not reduce them. 

Supervisor Redmond had recommend Highway Department workers and the Highway Superintendent, Barry “Buddy” Rollins, get five per cent raises.  The Town Board’s majority doubled that increase to ten per cent.  As now proposed, Rollins’ salary would jump from $75,264 to $82,790 next year.

Town Clerk Mary Cornell would also receive a significant raise in pay, her combined Town Clerk’s and Tax Collector’s salary rising 8.84 per cent to $40,000.  Redmond defended the increase, saying she wants the Clerk’s salary to approach a “living wage.”

More modest raises await the Supervisor and the Town Board.  The Tentative Budget proposes only a three per cent raise for those elected officials.  This Councilperson attempted to cut the Supervisor’s and Board members’ raises to two, or maybe, 2.5 per cent.  I got no takers.

How Enfield accomplished its attempted—perhaps contrived— frugality Wednesday night was principally to rob the Town’s piggy bank, its so-called “Fund Balance.”  The Board drew $125,000 from its accumulated savings in the General Fund Balance, a multi-year surplus account.  It left the Highway Fund Balance and Highway reserve accounts untouched.

Bookkeeper Taetzsch calculated that Enfield started the current year with $617,138 in its General Fund Balance.  By the end of this December, the number, she predicted, would fall to about $583 thousand.

Given the proposed changes accepted Wednesday night, the fund balance would register $458,242 by the close of 2025, and down to only $368,210 should locked-away reserve accounts be subtracted.

An Enfield Fund Balance Policy, adopted years ago, targets $250,000 as a minimum amount for the General Fund Balance.  But that old, hard-number threshold may not have kept pace with inflation.  And Wednesday’s action would effectively reduce the General Fund Balance by $158,896, or a full 25.7 per cent over two years.

Highway workers and their Superintendent, Buddy Rollins, got their ten per cent raises through Rollins’ fiscal horse-trading.  It’s the second consecutive year that Rollins has bargained for increases.  Last year’s pay raises were just five per cent.

When Highway pay was initially proposed to rise again this year by five percent, Taetzsch said the proposed Highway Superintendent’s salary “would probably be average” for small towns like Enfield.  So it now may be higher than average.

Trade-offs Rollins and the Town Board made Wednesday to get better Highway pay most notably committed Highway workers to resume mowing Town cemeteries, a task they haven’t done for more than a half-decade.  Eliminating the expense of contract cemetery mowing would save Enfield taxpayers $7,500.

Less visible, yet more significant, Rollins also gave up $5,000 increases in each of two accounts; one for equipment expenses, the other for bridge repair.  Rollins referenced the Rumsey Hill Road Bridge’s deteriorating condition at one point in the meeting.  Yet the bridge’s attention—and its re-inspection—will likely get delayed for at least another year.

In an effort to squeeze a few final drops out of what needed to be budgeted, the Board discovered it had $2,879 left in federal American Rescue Plan (ARPA) funds.  And it used that small amount to pay for a new exterior door at the Town Clerk’s Office and the  purchase of new flags to replace the fading ones that grace light poles in Enfield Center.

The Town of Enfield holds little control over some costs, however.  Health insurance premiums are set to rise 14 per cent next year.  Premiums in the State Retirement Program will go up by more than 16 per cent for Highway staff.

Recommended by Redmond and passed through with little discussion, Enfield Planning Board members would for the first time receive a little money for their services.  Those planners, in total, would earn $1,800 in “stipends”—purportedly tax-free money—to be divided among them.  The Planning Board Secretary, currently the Town Clerk, would for the first time be paid for her duties too, a proposed $1,200.

Blixy Taetzsch, who also keeps books for Newfield and Ulysses, reported that the Planning Board secretary gets paid in Newfield, presumably in Ulysses as well.  Planning Board members get stipends in Ulysses, but not in Newfield.

Town Justice Heather Knutsen-King’s salary would rise under the proposed Enfield budget, but not by as much as she had wanted.  The Town Board left unchanged the Tentative Budget’s recommended 6.7 per cent raise for the Town Justice and for her clerk.  Knutsen-King had asked for $18,000, not $16,000.

To address resident concerns about the Highway Department’s tree-cutting practices, concerns voiced passionately at a special meeting in late-June, the Tentative Budget assigns money to retain an “arborist” to advise Superintendent Rollins on pruning, roadside cutting that critics allege has become too aggressive.  Redmond Wednesday called the $500 arborist set-aside “a wild guess.”  Several times during the meeting, Rollins, seemingly annoyed by the impending oversight, urged that the arborist line be cut so as to save money.

The Enfield Town Board Wednesday moved quickly to refine the Tentative Budget, a document that frequently gets presented by the Supervisor at one meeting and then chopped up only days or weeks later. Such delay gives Board members time to study the budget’s contents.  Not this year; at least not in Enfield.

Sensing a rushed review—and also taking heed of the increasingly-strained emotions—this Councilperson late in the evening proposed that a special meeting take place September 30^th, one devoted entirely to making further budget adjustments.  Others on the Town Board would have none of it.  The motion received no second.

Therefore, expect any last-minute revisions to come only at the Town Board’s regular October 9th session.  Changes will likely be few.  And it’s likely the Tentative Budget, as altered Wednesday—with its fund balance reduced to keep taxes low—will become Enfield’s Preliminary Budget, one approved rather routinely and then sent on to an October 23^rd Public Hearing.

[Expect additional reporting on this story.]

###

And then, there’s the Fire Budget:

Enfield Fire Budget Set for Hearing

by Robert Lynch; September 17, 2024

Following nearly another hour of trimming and tweaking at this, its fourth budget meeting in little more than a month, the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners Tuesday handed up a Preliminary 2025 Budget that will hike the tax levy more than some townspeople would like, yet increase basic costs very little beyond the huge bond payment it must make for the first time on a pricey new fire truck.

“It is what it is,” Board of Commissioners’ Chairman Greg Stevenson said of the budget following the five-member Board’s unanimous vote of approval.

The $620,475 preliminary spending plan next heads to an October 15^th Public Hearing.  It’s one that Stevenson predicts will be shorter and less contentions than the one last year, when a then-appointed Board for the newly-minted Enfield Fire District fielded numerous criticisms that might have kept them there until Midnight had not the chairman shut things down after two hours.

Compared with spending for the current year, the newly-modified 2025 Enfield Fire Budget would raise spending by 28.28 per cent when one includes the fire truck’s bonding, but only by about 2.1 per cent if one excludes bonding costs. Non-bond-related expenses in the projected budget would rise by little more than $10,000.

Among Tuesday’s final decisions, the Board locked-in $10,000 for an Equipment Repair and Replacement Reserve account and another $10,000 for an Apparatus Repair and Replacement Reserve.

Chairman Stevenson called the combined $20,000 set-aside reserves “super-low… next to nothing.”  But he added, “We understand there’s pressure on the budget for the bond payment.”

“We’re transitioning from an operation that didn’t have a savings account to one that maybe does,” Stevenson explained.

In August of 2023, at the Town Board’s direction, Enfield transferred fire protection services from the Town’s oversight to that of an independent Fire District headed by a Board of Commissioners.  Whereas, the Town Board’s contract agency, the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) had kept neither an equipment nor an apparatus reserve account for years, the Fire District now chooses to have one.

The 28.3 per cent Fire Tax levy hike projected Tuesday falls about one percentage point below the tentative figure that emerged from a prior budget planning meeting two weeks earlier.  Officials Tuesday credited much of the revision to correction of an earlier error that had overestimated one line item by a power of ten.  Its correction moved $9,000 in the taxpayer’s favor.

Other adjustments Tuesday were only minor.  Commissioners budgeted a little more for insurance; but subtracted a little from training expense.

Given property assessment data in hand, Commissioners calculated next year’s Enfield Fire Tax Rate at just under $1.90 per $1,000 assessed valuation.

As for the budget’s big item, the principal and interest payments on the most expensive fire truck Enfield has ever bought—an $825,000 pumper engine delivered last year—those outlays will cost Enfield taxpayers $126,576 for 2025, during the first in the truck’s ten-year bonding cycle.

Subtracting the truck’s financing, the Enfield Fire District’s expenses next year would total $493,899 under the preliminary budget, up $10, 207 from the current year’s spending.

The Fire District’s Public Hearing October 15^th will provide taxpayers their first—and only—opportunity to sound off on the proposed budget.  There’ll be no referendum.  Yet only after the hearing can the Board of Commissioners make figures final.

Last fall, Commissioners received howls of criticism when they took testimony at the hearing, but then raised the proposed budget’s total by 24 percent just four days later.  Stevenson perceives no similar perceived sleight of hand this time.

“We will strive to hear all of what the public says and do our regular business in a more orderly manner” hearing night, Stevenson Tuesday predicted.

###

More than just about Moira

Reporting and Analysis by Robert Lynch; September 14, 2024

If Moira Lang wants to return to the Ithaca Board of Education, she’ll have to fight to do so.  She won’t get there by coronation.  And even if Lang were to apply for a vacancy appointment—assuming the board chooses to make one—there’s no assurance a majority of board members would value her resume.

Last Tuesday, September 10^th, Ithaca’s Board of Education—one member short—split four-four on whether to fill a suddenly-occurring vacancy by reaching down to the first runner-up in last May’s seven-way school board race.  Moira Lang, a nine-year Board incumbent, was that fourth-place finisher.  And without a fifth vote to invite her to rejoin, the board kept her from ascending to the seat vacated last month by Katie Apker.  The Apker seat remains vacant.  It may stay that way through next spring.

“It seems a bit personal.  Is it personal?  Or is it to fill a seat?” Karen Yearwood, one of Lang’s strongest allies, asked colleagues, clearly rhetorically.  Her question came during a discussion that moved to a vote quicker than some might have expected.  It all was over within 15 minutes.

Resistance to Lang’s elevation may not have been personal.  But it was political.  And the divisions became evident to anyone who’s followed Ithaca City School District (ICSD) politics this past year.  Moira Lang was not just some vanilla, back-bench board member.  And these are not normal times for the Ithaca City School District.

Lang, who’d held a seat on the ICSD Board since 2015, and who’d risen to Board Vice-President by last year, was a vocal defender of a nearly $169 Million school district budget that more than 70 per cent of ICSD voters rejected at the polls last May.  When they voted down the budget, they also removed from office two long-time Board incumbents, Moira Lang one of them. 

Newcomers Emily Workman and Todd Fox assumed the seats the incumbents surrendered.  The only sitting member reelected, Adam Krantweiss, had only served on the board for one year.  If you’re looking for a term, call Fox, Workman and Krantweiss the “Young Turks” of ICSD governance. (Their age doesn’t matter.)  Moira Lang, by contrast, reflected the past; the voter-rejected past. 

The budget that Lang defended was a budget most voters found unduly bloated.  Todd Fox actively campaigned against the spending package.  Workman told a reporter she was unsure about it.  Quite clearly, many who voted last spring took Fox’s and Workman’s hesitancy into account.

“I don’t think as a Board we have the right to circumvent the democratic process,” Todd Fox said last Tuesday as he countered Yearwood’s strong advocacy of Lang’s appointment.  “There’s some people that might have voted one way previously, and they’d vote differently in the future, and I don’t think that we have the right to take that process away.”

Todd Fox wasn’t the only one to argue that you can’t transpose a past election into a new, hypothetical one.  Had four board seats—and not just three—been in play last spring, rankings may have come out differently.  And just as importantly, more candidates may have run for them.

“We had a community election, and that person (Lang) in this particular election did not get enough votes by the community to make it onto the board,” Adam Krantweiss said, his opinion reflecting Fox’s skepticism about giving first runner-up status any weight.  “I think that we should not necessarily be appointing somebody that doesn’t have the approval of enough community members to make it across the finish line.”

“If the community had been told that they had four board seats to fill, I do not necessarily believe that it would have been the same four people that were listed as the four highest vote-getters,” the quiet-voiced Workman stated.  “So there’s really no way to go back in time to know whether that person still would have received the fourth highest votes.”

Never once in all the board discussions that night was Moira Lang’s name mentioned.  It could have been.  But board members appeared to think it impolite to do so.  It was as though the person of whom they spoke had no identity and carried no legacy. 

“I actually haven’t received one message that just said we want it to be the fourth vote-getter, no matter who it is,” Workman said, infusing a dose of reality.  “Every single message, every conversation that I’ve heard among board colleagues has been specifically personal about a specific person that they are advocating for to take the seat.”

And one can see why they would.  Just like in Congress or the Supreme Court, school board majorities matter.  If you want to call them “progressives,” or advocates for “expansive educational exceptionalism,” Lang allied herself with those who place high-quality education above cut-corners thrift.  School Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown comes from that camp.  So, too, based on their past voting, do Board President Sean Eversley Bradwell, Karen Yearwood, and their fellow Board members Erin Croyle and Garrick Blalock. 

Krantweiss, along with cost-conscious Board member Jill Tripp—who remained silent during Tuesday’s debate—have taken a more frugal approach of late.  Count noses.  Eversley Bradwell, Yearwood, Croyle and Blalock could easily form a voting bloc of four.  Tripp, Krantweiss, Fox and Workman could vote the other way.  Whoever fills the Apker seat could break deadlocks and ties.  No doubt, that’s why some resisted a Moira Lang coronation.

True, educational decisions are often made by independence, tempered by nuance.  One cannot always expect four-four ties this coming school year.  Rather, it’s the attitudinal adjustment that matters here.  The spend-what-we-must culture that dominated so much of what the Ithaca City School District has been for so many years was arguably muscled aside—or at least, jostled a bit— by the stunning budget defeat of last May.  It’s the “old way of thinking” versus the new.

Erin Croyle doesn’t like what she hears and feels.  “If we want to get into that sort of treachery, we can,” Croyle said of the political feud she’s sensed building around a Lang appointment.  “But the fact is this person got the fourth most votes; the seat is empty; we need a board member; it’s a lot of work; and this person proved their worth time and time again.”

“If one person—and there’s weird allyships because one person is going to change the whole board, that is so ridiculous,” Croyle insisted.  “I’ve never seen it function like that, and there’s not devious things going on here.  We just want a full board so we can have a quorum; so we can keep business moving.”

Erin Croyle may not like what she sees, but she “gets it.”  The Ithaca school community is divided, not just over spending, but also over the kind of perceived negligence that’s found both of the ICSD’s middle schools, as well as Enfield and Beverly J. Martin Elementary Schools cited by New York State for poor academic performance.  Considering the salaries and taxes ICSD residents pay, taxpayers find that kind of failure inexcusable. 

As a result, some elected school board members don’t want to find themselves on the wrong side of the argument.

Once they deadlocked Tuesday on filling the Apker appointment with that person they dared not name, the board offered no “Plan B” alternative.  They moved on to other business.  Whether they’ll revisit the vacancy at future sessions remains unknown.  Given the comments of Krantweiss and Fox, keeping the seat unfilled until next year’s elections remains a strong possibility. 

No stomach exists for a special election, as the Board President has said it could cost $35-40,000.  The only remaining alternative to a continued vacancy would be to invite applications and vet candidates as though in a job interview.

“Some boards have done it by an interview process,” Eversley Bradwell advised fellow board members on meeting night.  “I would dare say let me know what time you have to make that take place,” implying the time they’d have is no time at all.

And still, how would one pick an Apker successor without getting into the same philosophical morass that torpedoed the Lang reengagement?

Board President Eversley Bradwell insists that the workload demands a ninth board member.  And to him, Moira Lang was the logical choice.

“For me, it was a process, not a person,” Eversley Bradwell said.  “If the fourth person said no, then we would go to the fifth person.  Those are the people who put their names forward; that did the work to be on the ballot.”

Sean Eversley Bradwell said something else.

“I challenge the idea that it is not a democratic process,” the Board President said, countering the positions of Fox, Krantweiss and Workman.  State education law, he stressed, grants school boards the power to fill board vacancies.  All continuing board members were “democratically elected,” he said.  “It can’t get much more democratic than that,” the Board President reasoned.   And “it couldn’t be any more democratic than going to the election results and figuring out who was next in line.”

The argument may sound good on its surface.  But its conclusion is inapt under the circumstances.

Just because New York Education Law permits school boards to fill vacancies, it does not mandate that they must do so.  And what’s at stake here is a politically-charged appointment, not a garden-variety one.

“There’s a lot to be done, and a lot of work to be divvied out,” Karen Yearwood said in support of filling the Apker seat.  “So it would be good to get someone with experience that we’ve seen, and which was also endorsed by one of our unions.” (The Ithaca Teachers Association had endorsed Lang.)

At least for public consumption, Sean Eversley Bradwell would view the Apker vacancy-fill in the abstract.  Emily Workman, on the other hand, sees it in real world terms, recognizing there’s a person behind the process. 

Moira Lang has never publicly stated her commitment to rejoin the Board of Education.  But she’s said nothing to dispel that interest, either.  Board members talk.  Phone calls get made.  Quite probably, Lang had informed those like Yearwood and Croyle that if offered appointment, she’d accept it.  And also quite likely, had Tuesday’s resolution passed, there’d never have been a need to reach down to the fifth-place finisher, Barry Derfel.

“I don’t appreciate the insinuation that there is any personal motive in this,” Emily Workman criticized unnamed others at her board table.  “It’s wanting to be responsive to a democratic process and the electorate being able to make the decisions about who sits on this board.”

Those with long memories may draw parallels between Tuesday’s debate and what happened in the Town of Enfield just over three years ago.  That was when its Town Board appointed a former Councilperson as Supervisor rather than holding the seat open until the next General Election.

History can easily repeat itself.  The Enfield appointment tore the town apart for a while.  Maybe it’s best that the Ithaca Board of Education not commit Enfield’s mistake, should that mistake have ever been made.  An empty seat at the board table is just that… empty.  Keeping it empty may also in the process keep peace.

###

Enfield Fire Budget may rise 29%

Big truck’s financing blamed; other costs up just slightly

by Robert Lynch; September 12, 2024

For the second straight year, Enfield taxpayers may face a double-digit hike in their Fire Tax.  And if they’re looking for the reason, they’ll find it the same.  It’s that spanking-new, shiny red fire truck; the one Enfield fire officials have always insisted they need, but which a vocal minority of residents grumble about paying for.

Initial figures, detailed in a Quarterly Report presented the Enfield Town Board Wednesday night, indicate that the proposed 2025 Enfield Fire District Budget may total $627,148, a 29.67 per cent increase from the 2024 Budget Enfield’s Board of Fire Commissioners approved one year ago.

The tentative 2025 total is based on a calculation made by Fire Commissioner Chris Willis and stated publicly at the close of the Commissioners’ most recent budget planning session September third.  The Board of Fire Commissioners intends to finalize its budget September 17^th.

Nickel and dime expenses do not account for the latest projected double-digit increase.  Fire truck bonding outlays do.  When the financing costs of the 2023 Toyne pumper engine are subtracted, the proposed Fire Budget shrinks to $550,571, a mere 3.49 per cent increase over 2024, based on Willis’ numbers.

“I don’t believe that total is 100% accurate, seeing as we have a few line items in our budget that may vary depending on some research and finalization for the 2025 year,” an Enfield Fire District official said Wednesday after being presented the Quarterly Report prior to the Town Board meeting, “so it may be worth it to mention that the $550k is not a finalized number.”

But the pumper’s $126,576 financing expense is, essentially, locked-in. 

The 2025 budget line covers $86,696 in principal and $39,880 in interest due on bonds the Board of Commissioners authorized back in March. 

The truck was bought last year by the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC), which then held purchasing authority.  It was gifted to the Enfield Fire District last March as part of Enfield’s transition to a fire district form of governance.   Along with that transfer, the Board of Fire Commissioners sold the truck’s ten-year serial bonds to a bank around April first.

“I stressed in my report that the budget figure is preliminary,” this writer, Councilperson Robert Lynch, liaison to the Enfield Fire District and author of the Quarterly Report, responded to the concerned District official.  “While a few figures may change here or there, the basic total is not likely to change much,” I maintained. 

“We’re looking at about the same as last year with bond payments on top of that,” Board of Fire Commissioners Chair Greg Stevenson observed of the proposed budget during the September third meeting. 

Indeed, in a series of three budget planning sessions that began with a non-voting “workshop” August 12^th, Commissioners made no radical departures from 2024 spending aside from adding-in the pumper’s first-year bonding expense.  The closest they came to a dramatic change was to increase—without much explanation—the projected annual salary for the Fire District Secretary.

Under the current budget draft, the Secretary’s salary would rise from $2,000 to $5,000.  The District’s other compensated appointee, the Treasurer, would see her salary remain flat at an equal $5,000.

If current estimates hold, 2025 would mark the second time in as many years that Enfield fire budgets have carried sticker shock.

Last year, a newly-appointed Board of Fire Commissioners, still finding its sea legs and leaning heavily on its then-attorney’s guidance, initially proposed a 2024 budget that was only 3.2 per cent higher than the prior year’s spending plan.  The Board took that budget to public hearing, but amended its total upwards by nearly $94,000 four days after the hearing.  The lawyer said it was legal.  But many taxpayers felt stung.

The then-revised and eventually-adopted 2024 budget raised fire service spending by more than 28 per cent above that for 2023.  Two of the Town Board-appointed Commissioners on that fledgling Board of Commissioners chose not to seek election last December.  A third was defeated at the polls.  And by the following January, the attorney had also lost his Enfield job.

Now, a 29 per cent fire spending hike could be in store for Enfield.  If the latest plan is enacted, the two budgets, taken together, would have raised local fire protection costs by 66 per cent in just two years.

“Cut a little here; cut a little there,” Chairman Stevenson told Commissioners at the close of their second budget meeting, August 20th.  They’ve tried.

When the Volunteer Fire Company contracted for the pumper engine earlier this decade, the law didn’t then require the voters to approve its purchase.  Were the truck bought today, the revised procedures affecting fire district governance would demand a referendum.  The Enfield attitudinal divide on this truck became evident last October when voters approved its long-term bonding by only an eight vote margin (77 to 69.)  The referendum was viewed as a gauge of the fire truck’s guarded support in the community.

Although the appointed Commissioners last year budgeted $65,000 for “loan payments” to cover debt service on not only the pumper, but also on a previously-bought tanker truck with bank financing ongoing, the newly-elected Board changed course earlier this year and modified its predecessor’s plans. 

Rather than bond the pumper truck for 20 years, as the October referendum would have allowed, the new Board shortened the bonding term to just ten years.  And it chose not to bond the tanker at all, but rather to save money by continuing the tanker’s low-interest bank loan.

The two decisions will save taxpayers in the long-term, but those actions front-load the obligations.  And the $65,000 set aside for debt payments last year was gobbled up this year in a couple of ways.  Commissioners used some of it to pay the tanker’s loan installments and also to meet pre-bonding transition expenses for the pumper, exigencies for which the former attorney had never provided.

Enfield residents don’t get to vote on a Fire Budget.  But the law does mandate a Public Hearing.  This year’s hearing must be held October 15th, the month’s third Tuesday.

One year ago, as one of the routines a newly-formed fire district must consider, the Board secured voter approval to override a state-specified statutory limit on its spending.  Voters approved a new, higher limit of $575,000.  And while the new budget’s calculated total would exceed the limit, officials say the bonding costs and certain lesser items don’t count toward the statutory ceiling.  As such, what’s proposed passes the test.

Addressing a second obstacle, Commissioners, at their August 20^th meeting, voted to override the state’s otherwise-limiting two per cent capped increase in the tax levy.  Stevenson called the override “a bit of a no-brainer.”

During their latest budget session, September third, Fire Commissioners tentatively placed $10,000 of their proposed budget into each of two reserve accounts; the Equipment Repair and Replacement Reserve, and a similar reserve for Apparatus.  Once money goes into such reserves, it can’t easily come back out unless used for its intended purpose. 

Last year’s Board budgeted $12,638 into the two reserves.  Yet it never split the funds between them.  Stevenson has proposed the funds now get divided equally.

At the Budget Workshop August 12, Chairman Stevenson—apparently at the attorney’s advice—floated the prospect of asking voters this December to authorize a third reserve account; a “Building Repair and Replacement Reserve.” 

“Someday we will have to decide whether to buy the fire station or build a new one,” Stevenson told the Board that night. 

But later, feeling the pinch of economy, Commissioners pretty much set the Building Reserve idea on a shelf.  Members concluded that the EVFC will likely always make its space available to the District and to its fire trucks. “We don’t need a third place to put money,” Stevenson remarked August 20, referring to the new reserve.  He has no plans to bring its creation to a vote this December.

As this Councilperson read the Quarterly Report into the record Wednesday night, other Town Board members remained mum.  The Town Board no longer holds any control over the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company or the Fire District that now oversees it.  Town Board members may now view fire finances as somebody else’s problem, not theirs.

****

Other business came before the Enfield Town Board Wednesday night:

Town Solar:  By a unanimous vote, the Town Board moved ahead with a newly-hatched plan to place solar panels atop the Town Hall, commonly known as the Old Highway Barn, the one housing the Town Clerk’s Office, a Sheriff’s Department substation, and equipment storage.

A newly-secured NYSERDA Clean Energy Communities Grant will underwrite $60,000 of the cost.  .  One solar company quoted $64,000 for the installation, meaning Town taxpayers may need to pay only about $4,000.

Over time, the solar power would defray Town Government’s electric bills, not only at the Town Hall, but also at other Enfield buildings.

Councilperson Jude Lemke questioned whether rooftop solar was the best use of the NYSERDA money, noting it will take time—many years—to recoup the overall investment.  But Supervisor Stephanie Redmond cautioned that Town options remain limited.  Redmond had asked whether the state agency would pay to insulate underused parts of the old highway barn to enable its expanded future use.  Redmond was told the grant money wouldn’t qualify for an improvement like that.

Tree Cutting:  Several Enfield residents again appeared before the Town Board to question Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy Rollins” about his controversial tree-pruning practices—particularly along Rockwell Road—practices some find too aggressive.

“We would like to keep the character of our road,” Rockwell’s Julie Magura told Rollins and the Board.

“I’m concerned these big, beautiful trees are going to be cut down,” Van Ostrand Road’s Madonna Stallman said about those standing at a place she admires.  ”Do we need to be going to the state, particularly in view of climate change?” Stallman asked after Rollins informed her that state law purportedly mandates he clear the right-of-way as he does.

Rollins said he’ll resume trimming the Rockwell foliage—often removing its overhead canopy—“the week after next.”  Rollins offered waivers for landowners to sign if they want their trees kept; waivers holding the owners responsible for any debris clean-up.  Several expressed interest in signing.

Supervisor Redmond plans another round of tree-pruning discussions October ninth.

Dog Law:  The Town Board held off finishing and scheduling for public hearing a revised Dog Control Law that’s been under Board discussion for months.  It also delayed approving the SPCA’s requested two-year renewal of its Animal Control Services Agreement.

Board members believe the two measures are tied.  And before they approve the SPCA’s renewal, they want to confer directly with agency Director Jim Bouderau, who was unable to attend Wednesday’s meeting.  They’d also like the long-dormant, multi-municipality SPCA Advisory Board to reconvene.  The Advisory Board is supposed to negotiate terms of the Animal Control Agreement on the municipalities’ behalf.  It hasn’t.

Road Safety: And the Town Board adopted a Resolution requesting a New York State and Tompkins County traffic study of the intersection of Route 79 with Black Oak and Waterburg Roads, the scene of several recent accidents.  Route 79 is rolling, with driver visibility limited at the crossing.  The Resolution asks engineers to” determine whether additional traffic controls, improved signage, and/or reduced speed limits are advisable,” and if so, to “then implement those recommended improvements.”

###

Quarter-Billion T.C. Budget would hike levy 4.34%

by Robert Lynch; September 5, 2024

Back last April 30^th at a Budget Retreat that Tompkins County legislators open to the public only because the law says they must, lawmakers directed County Administrator Lisa Holmes to craft a next year’s budget with a tax levy increase of no more than two percent.  Holmes dutifully did so, instructing department heads afterward to cut their requests by five per cent to make the numbers work.

The Administrator prepared the requested budget.  But for all intents and purposes, when she delivered her budget message to the County Legislature Tuesday night, she might as well have shut that two-percent budget into a drawer.  Very little of it reached the Legislature’s floor that night.

What Holmes did detail—and what legislators took nearly an hour to digest and discuss—was a budget of a much different stripe.  It would hike the levy increase by more than twice of that requested in April.

The Administration’s “Recommended Budget” would impose on property owners a 4.34 percent tax levy increase.  And for the first time, its total would cross the quarter-Billion dollar threshold, spending $252,317,460, to be exact.

What drove the change was a late-August independent audit report that showed that while Tompkins County government remains rich, little room remains to tap existing governmental savings—the “fund balance”—to pay for the things property taxes would otherwise support.

“If we had started with the information that we gleaned in August, and we wanted to arrive at a two per cent (budget),” Holmes told the Legislature, “we would have needed to cut a lot further earlier on in the game, knowing that we did not have fund balance to budget.  So that’s left us to the point that we’re at.”

At bottom, the choice is simple:  Should government keep more of your money in its own piggy bank?  Or should it allow you to retain more of that money in the bank of your choice?

The recommended levy increase falls just under the largely-symbolic 4.45 per cent “tax cap” New York State has calculated for Tompkins County this year.  As neutered over the years, that cap holds little more than the persuasive power for frugality.  As the County’s budget process progresses, it’s easy to see how legislators may spend beyond it.

“In my opinion, we’ve artificially kept the tax levy low the last few years at least by taking fund balance to not raise the tax levy, and I think due to numerous factors that are going on, we absolutely can’t do that, hopefully, anymore,” Ulysses-Enfield legislator Anne Koreman stated.

True, county sales tax receipts this year have proven more sluggish than expected.  Expenses are creeping up.  New York has offloaded new mandates to its counties.  But what’s crippled the budget process the most is a new Fund Balance Policy, enacted by the County Legislature amid little attention last December.

The policy change—one which Koreman supported, but which Enfield’s other legislator, Randy Brown, opposed—now requires that a full 25 per cent of a prior year’s expenditures be kept in fund balance.  In past budgets, only 18 per cent of prior revenues had to be retained.  At the time, one legislator contrasted the difference between locking away $32 Million dollars and now $45.3 Million.

The August audit showed Tompkins County held nearly $61 Million in Unassigned Fund Balance at the end of 2023.  But through a pair of actions also during the past year, the Legislature shunted about $12.6 Million of that total into reserve accounts, untouchable except for their intended purposes.  What’s left is about $48 Million.  And that’s just about the number that auditors say needs to be set aside under the new policy.

“This was the executive decision that I made,” Holmes said to defend her aiming the tax levy higher than the Legislature had directed.  “And hence the Two Percent Budget is presented for your review, and the 4.34 Percent Budget is my recommendation.

In terms of total spending—a metric seldom given much attention these days—the Recommended 2025 Budget would cross the $250 Million mark, yet only raise outlays by about $4 Million, or 1.6 percent, from the current year’s budget that’s posted on the County’s website.

A multi-meeting, committee-of-the-whole budget review process begins almost immediately; its first session occurs Thursday, September fifth.  All legislators attend those “Expanded Budget Committee” sessions.  Department heads and the community activists in search of handouts troop to chambers and make their pitches.  By the end of October, a final budget emerges.  It’s usually larger than what the County Administrator had proposed.  Lawmakers traditionally find it hard to say no.

Yet some predict this year may be different.

“It’s going to be a really, really hard budget season,” former Legislature Chair Shawna Black observed Tuesday.

“Traditionally, we have been very used to putting in ‘OTR’s’ (spending add-on’s) as legislators and having our hopes and dreams out there in the community.  We’ve listened to the people who live here.  We’ve listened to the non-profits, and we’ve been able to really invest in our community,” she added. “It’s not to say that we’re not going to do it this year, but I think we are going to have to tighten our purse strings a little bit  and prioritize what’s really important to our community.”

But the gap between the Administrator’s 4.34 per cent levy hike and the 4.45 per cent tax cap leaves little room to grow spending within the cap’s confines.

In response to legislator Lee Shurtleff’s prodding, Holmes acknowledged that both of her draft budgets would be shared side-by-side during the course of upcoming deliberations.  Yet, Budget Committee Chair Mike Lane made clear Tuesday that the lower-taxing alternative will assume second-class status.

“The Expanded Budget Committee will take up the Recommended Budget from the County Administrator,” Lane told Shurtleff after he’d asked for a starting point.  “And she (Holmes) is recommending a 4.34 percent tax levy increase.  She is not recommending the two percent one, although she’s prepared one at our request.”

With legislators perennially averse to cutbacks, one can easily infer from Lane’s words that the higher-tax budget is the only one that really matters, and that the two percent budget can best be disregarded.

What’s already emerged as the major point of advocacy this year is continued County funding for the “Community Justice Center” (CJC), a shared City of Ithaca/Tompkins County initiative that emerged from the 2021 Reimagining Public Safety collaborative.  Loosely-defined, the CJC keeps a check on suspected police misdeeds, particularly in Ithaca. The Two Percent Budget may defund CJC.  The Recommended Budget would not.  Community advocates have already lined up in the CJC’s defense.

What the Recommended Budget also does, Holmes acknowledged, is to add back some—though not all—of those five per cent cuts she’d earlier asked department heads to make.

Legislator Greg Mezey quizzed Holmes as to what extent they’d come back.  The Administrator did not give percentages.  However, her PowerPoint that night stated that the higher budget “includes all restorations under the 2% increase/5% cut scenario.”

Arguably, it is the 25 percent Fund Balance Policy—perhaps that policy coupled by the newly-set reserves—that made this year’s budgeting a challenge.  The policy was adopted last December by only a nine-to-five vote.  It lacks universal acceptance.  Nevertheless, no one has talked about repealing it.

Might there be another place to save?  Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown eyed County Government’s higher-than-expected employee vacancy rate.  Jobs found vacant don’t pay salary or benefits.

Brown estimated each vacancy saves $50,000.  “If you’re down 89 employees now… we may refund some of the fund balances with that money,” Brown suggested.

Using Brown’s math, fund balance savings could exceed $4 Million.  Holmes cautioned the calculation is risky as the vacancy rate fluctuates.

“But the money’s been gobbled up by negotiations for our various labor unions,” Mike Lane cautioned.

“For the most part, I have not funded new initiatives,” Holmes told legislators. 

“I’m calling this a transition year,” the County Administrator explained.  “You may be asking what are we transitioning to?  My answer would be to a period where we’re going to need greater fiscal discipline in recognition of the economic climate and the very robust capital plan that we have before us.”

One of those capital initiatives is a $40-60 Million Center of Government, a building whose planning the Recommended Budget would advance.  No one talked Tuesday of sidelining the office building for sake of economies. 

Meanwhile, adherence to the Fund Balance Policy has proven slavish.  Budget planners choose to bend to the policy, rather than to have the policy bend to them.

Holmes’ budget message also gave short shrift to economies; of simply doing without.  Departments were asked to cut.  Some did.  Others apparently resisted.  And those that balked were placated in the Recommended Budget.  Same goes for capital projects.

“Like the operating budget,” Holmes said, “the projects in the Capital Plan encompass many of the needs, priorities and values put forth in our Strategic Operations Plan,” a document lawmakers recently accepted.  The words that followed may provide some taxpayers scant comfort.

“The policies and reserves that have been established provide us with a roadmap for getting there,” Holmes said of reaching the strategic goals.  “It’s also  going to take  additional and gradual growth in the tax levy to fund the many capital projects we have before us, because it can’t be assumed, given what we’re seeing with sales tax revenues and the number of  projects that we have, that fund balance will be self-replenishing.”

As Shawna Black said, this budget season is going to be “really, really hard.”  And one can pretty much assume, unless there’s a taxpayers’ revolt, that the Two Percent Budget is a horse that’s departed through the barn door.  We have yet to learn how many property owners will run out to chase it.

###

Tompkins to ECC: No rebate; sorry

Reporting and analysis by Robert Lynch; September 4, 2024

If Tompkins County’s legislative majority were driving down State Street, they’d dare not go one mile over the speed limit even were there no cop in sight. 

Legislators demonstrated their risk-aversion Tuesday night as most dared not stretch the rules to do what’s right and correct an administrative injustice that never should have occurred in the first place.  It’s an injustice that’s imposed significant hardship on an Enfield community nonprofit.

By a ten-to-three vote, legislators rejected Randy Brown’s initiative that would have forgiven—or at least, attempted to forgive—more than $27,000 in property taxes and penalties assessed the non-profit Enfield Community Council (ECC) three years ago only because ECC had overlooked filing a simple exemption form by the state’s hard-and-fast deadline.

Intentionally or by happenstance, both fellow legislative Republicans supported Brown’s resolution.  The ten Democrats who cast votes opposed it. (Democrat Amanda Champion recused herself.)

“Everybody seemed to drop the ball here,” Brown, southern Enfield’s representative, told fellow legislators.  ”Because of simple paperwork, they were billed $27,000.  It’s just not right.”

Not right, perhaps, but also an error tough to correct. While members offered plenty of sympathetic words for the ECC during a half-hour’s discussion of Brown’s tax forgiveness resolution, majority Democrats leaned heavily upon County Attorney Maury Josephson’s opinion that state law permits them no path to right this wrong and to offer a rebate.

“I don’t see at the moment a constitutional way to do this as laid out in the resolution,” Josephson advised lawmakers.

The ECC taxpaying mistake dates back to 2021.  Enfield resident Helen Hetherington had reclaimed Enfield’s then seemingly-defunct Living Waters Church.  Finding no other religious organization to buy it, Hetherington sold the building to the ECC.  The church had been tax-exempt.  ECC was tax-exempt. But Hetherington, herself, was not. 

When the Community Council took title, it needed to file exemption paperwork annually with the Tompkins County Department of Assessment to reclaim its exemption.  That first year—and only that first year—it missed the no-excuses, March first submission deadline.  As a result, Tompkins County, the Town of Enfield, and the Ithaca City School District each imposed taxes on the building during their 2021-2022 billing cycles.  ECC has tried, without success, to reclaim the paid taxes ever since.

Randy Brown first sought to refund the tax money last year, yet pulled his measure twice, and it never reached a vote.  Tuesday’s retooled resolution would have returned to ECC $6,315 in interest and penalties the agency had paid.  It would immediately return Tompkins County’s portion of the tax.  And would “work to reimburse” the more than $16,000 paid to the Town of Enfield and the Ithaca City School District “as quickly as possible.”

“This is 30 per cent of their entire budget,” Brown said of the taxes ECC unnecessarily paid.  “They’re in dire straits now financially to pay their bills and to do various things,” the legislator continued.  “It’s a non-profit group, all volunteers.  Enfield is the most economically-challenged town in the county.”

Brown, fellow legislator Anne Koreman, and this Councilperson-writer (who’d spoken on ECC’s behalf at the start of the meeting), read portions of a lengthy email ECC President Cortney Bailey had sent the Legislature over the weekend.  Bailey detailed her agency’s tax problem, the Community Council’s history, its present efforts, and its fiscal plight.

“We desperately need whatever can be forgiven of the tax monies we paid,” Bailey wrote.  “Our volunteers have been doing monthly dinners in the hopes of rebuilding our coffers, but it is not enough.”

To avoid massive, additional foreclosure penalties, ECC paid the taxes and interest last December.  “Since paying the taxes, we have had issues with cash flow,” Bailey’s message continued.  Indeed, it has.  An unbalanced budget, approved by ECC’s Board of Directors in February, saw projected revenues falling nearly $12,000 short of expenses.

“This is a struggling outfit of volunteers that have been there for decades,” Brown said of the ECC.  “So they did all the right things except they didn’t submit a form.”

But the law can be unforgiving.  And for the Enfield Community Council, it appears to be just that.

“This is a tough one.  The taxpayer is in a sympathetic position,” County Attorney Josephson acknowledged about the ECC.  “On the other hand…” he cautioned, “The community center doesn’t have a claim of right to the money.”

Legislator Brown raised the question begging for an answer.  What consequences would arise should Tompkins County simply bend the rules in ECC’s favor?  What if it disregarded the letter of state law and relied instead on the law’s spirit?

“If we did provide these funds back, what happens to us?” Brown asked.  “Do we get fined?  Do we all get fired?  What’s the penalty for doing this?”

“You don’t get fined.  You don’t get fired,” Josephson replied.  “You could end up with a finding that the Legislature as a whole has violated the New York State Constitution,” he counseled.

So, what would happen then?  The attorney said litigants, although unlikely, could bring suit.  “Is somebody going to litigate fast enough to try and obtain an injunction?  Probably not,” he admitted.  New York’s statute of limitations for municipal wrongdoing is short, and finding a plaintiff with legal standing to press a case could prove hard.  Worst case, Josephson said, ECC could be asked to “disgorge the funds” returned to it.

“So they would end up in the same situation or potentially worse because they would have had the money back and may have spent it,” Josephson warned.

Yet, there’s the flip side to the argument.  “You play litigation roulette,” the attorney acknowledged.   “Maybe nothing happens.”

What’s more, the law in this area remains untested, he conceded.  Case law addressing the constitutional argument is tough to find.

Nevertheless, most legislators—including Enfield’s other representative, Anne Koreman—proved to be gun-shy when it came to defying presumed legal authority.  The majority became more than willing to let Josephson’s opinion stand as gospel.

“We all signed an oath when we took this office to uphold the constitutions of the United States and the State of New York,” Lansing’s Deborah Dawson stated in support of her refusal to give back the tax.  “It would be a really ugly optic if we were to start making exceptions to when we were going to uphold that constitution and when we were going to decide not to.”

“And for that reason alone, I simply can’t vote for this; I’m sorry,” Dawson said.

Dawson was not alone.  Sorrow aplenty for ECC spread about legislative chambers Tuesday.  And member Greg Mezey attempted what some may see as a face-saving gesture. He sought to “table indefinitely” any vote on Brown’s initiative.  He’d have relegated it to parliamentary oblivion without anyone’s fingerprints of outright rejection being on it .  Mezey’s attempt failed four votes to nine.

In the backs of many a legislative mind Tuesday may have been a recurring fear of setting bad precedent.

“If this taxpayer gets a break,” Josephson said, “how many other taxpayers come out and say I forgot this; I forgot that… Somebody comes in and says ‘I’m not paying the tax because I’m the best game in town, I’m good people.’”

Josephson’s opinions held persuasive power.  But, still, timidity dissolved poorly when mixed with sympathetic gestures expressed on the legislative floor.

“I would love to figure out a way to help them moving forward,” Travis Brooks remarked, his words coming minutes before he voted against Brown’s resolution after earlier having seconded it.

“I hope there’s a way we can help them,” Mezey echoed.  He also voted no.

“I do appreciate all the great things that are happening in Enfield,” former legislative chair Shawna Black remarked.  “Cortney’s email was very compelling.  And so if there was a way to vote for this and not to have to worry about us going against our oath, then I certainly would have done it, but I can’t support it now.  I’m sorry, Randy.”

Black admitted she would have backed the ECC rebate earlier, but not after the attorney had given his opinion.

The current legislative chair, Dan Klein, weighed in near the discussion’s end; he, too, supportive of ECC, yet likewise refusing to endorse Brown’s initiative.

“What I will do,” Klein said, “is use the power of this microphone to amplify this message:   Enfield Community Council needs a donation of approximately $28,000,”  he said   “If there’s an angel out there that can provide some or all of that, or more than one angel, your money will be put to good use.”

“That’s the best that I feel like we can do,” Klein said with regret.  He, too, opposed granting ECC the rebate.

To us who watch from afar in Enfield’s hinterlands, Klein’s entreaty may tempt us to hurl forth words we’d later regret.  The “angel” of whom the chairman now speaks can be found in the legislator’s own mirror.  Dan Klein also chairs the Legislature’s Community Recovery Fund Advisory Committee.  It’s the committee that not once, but twice has snubbed the Enfield Community Council’s appeals for support.  And it’s the committee’s chair who has within recent weeks also voiced a clear preference for redirecting a potential last-minute, more than million-dollar windfall of recovery funds to buy dump trucks and bulldozers rather than to fund community agencies like the ECC, all for the sake of administrative expediency. 

To some of us, the Legislature Chairman’s latest words ring hollow.  Sorry, but they do.

For the record, Republicans Mike Sigler and Lee Shurtleff joined Randy Brown in walking out onto that legally-tenuous limb, taking a risk, and helping the Enfield Community Council pay its bills.  We should remember them each.  They, quite rightly, deserve to be called our friends.

###

Your Taxes… Locked Up

New policy; new reserves snarl Tompkins’ budgeting process

Reporting and analysis by Robert Lynch; August 27, 2024

Equate it to your own finances.  It’s the best way to explain it. 

You’ve got tens of thousands parked in a traditional checking account; not a smart choice.  So first you switch to no-fee checking to escape those pesky, per-check charges.  It’s a good first step, although, it requires you maintain a hefty minimum balance.  Next, you apply a little self-discipline.  You move some of the cash to your child’s college fund or put it into an IRA.  Wise, of course, but it locks those funds up until you withdraw them for their intended purpose.  You’re just as financially rich, but now you’re also cash-poor.  Oh, and by the way, you’re spending more each month on life’s necessities than your paycheck brings in.  This can’t go on forever.

That, in essence, is where Tompkins County stands right now.  And to a large extent, its administrators and lawmakers have only themselves to blame.

For the better part of an hour Tuesday night, August 20^th, County Administrator Lisa Holmes briefed those seated beside her at the Daniel Tompkins Building’s big-oval about her county’s fund balance—essentially, its savings account— and fielded legislators’ questions about where it stands.  Holmes’ message carried about the same amount of glee as your average Donald Trump speech.  The fund balance is fat in theory, but starving in fact.  Legislators can’t spend most of their eight-figure surplus without breaking the rules.

“I think our fund balance issues are self-imposed,” Randy Brown, one of Enfield’s two county legislators, informed the meeting that night.  He happens to be right.

Back last December, Brown was among five legislators who opposed Tompkins County enacting its new Fund Balance Policy, one that directs Tompkins County keep a surplus equal to a full one-quarter of its nearly $200,000 in annual expenditures locked away and not touched for fear of a rainy day that may or may not come.

But that’s not the only thing downtown lawmakers have done during the past year.  First, in November, the County Legislature moved $5.72 Million from its Unassigned Fund Balance to a newly-created “Debt Service Reserve Fund,” one from which financial staff would withdraw  cash between now and 2028 to pay principal and interest on bonding debt that’s occurred during the past decade.

Then, two months later, in January, when all eyes focused on a roomful of protesters urging the legislature endorse a cease-fire in Gaza, a lopsided majority of those we’ve elected created four more reserve accounts and shoveled another $12.6 Million from the unassigned fund balance into them.  A new “Capital Reserve”—dedicated to building new buildings and the like—ate up $11 Million alone.

Each of those reserve fund resolutions carries a boilerplate stipulation: “Except as otherwise provided by law, expenditures from these Reserve Funds shall be made only for the purpose for which the Reserve Fund is established” and that “No expenditure shall be made from these Reserve Funds without the approval of this governing board,” that is, the County Legislature.

Reserve funds become a fiscal door that swings but one way.  It’s easy to put tax dollars into them, yet darned tough to pull them back out.

And those frozen-up funds produce the self-made liquidity crisis Tompkins County finds itself in as administrators and legislators craft their 2025 budget.

“In a year like this, not everything is going to be able to be funded,” Administrator Holmes cautioned.  “There are many areas that are in need of policy decisions and priority settings, including capital projects.”

Yes, to critics like this writer, one of the first capital projects to reconsider is that “Center of Government,” an envisioned $40 Million downtown office building that at least one legislator now estimates may cost taxpayers $60 Million (see separate story).  The center has already given some legislators the jitters.  But there are many more projects in the capital pipeline, including a possible new jail and “Green Building” initiatives to make existing structures more energy-efficient.

And to make matters worse, Holmes told lawmakers her county’s expenditures grew by $13.9 Million between 2022 and 2023.  That’s an eight per cent increase.  No one thinks revenues grew by an equivalent amount to wash away the added cost.  In fact, Holmes acknowledged that expected state and federal revenues actually fell by millions.

Holmes will deliver her draft budget to the County Legislature September 3^rd, just two weeks after she’d briefed lawmakers on the fund balances.  The fund balance presentation came minutes after accountants had summarized an annual audit for the County, one that actually nailed down fund balance numbers that politicians sometimes toss around with wide variation and reckless abandon.

Mind you, Tompkins County is far from broke.  Many other counties would envy our position.  It’s just that liquidity has become our problem.  The just-released audit pegged the Tompkins County unassigned fund balance at $60.9 Million at the end of last year.  It stood at $72 Million one year earlier.  It’s the $5.7 Million capital reserve lawmakers created last November that knocked the 2022 end-of-year figure to its lower number, a drop accelerated by nearly $4.8 Million in departmental add-ons to the budget we now live under.

Those budget extras—over-target requests (OTR’s) in Tompkins County budget-speak—have a way of drawing legislators to them like bees to nectar (or maybe, dogs to road kill).  During multiple autumn meetings that will resume soon, department heads and community agency leaders troop to legislative chambers to plead, cajole—and yes, whine—for their inclusion within the budget.  Traditionally, legislators have found it hard to say no.  Budget listening sessions will gear up within days.  We’ll soon learn if this year’s reception will prove different.

But here’s the immediate bind.  Those reserve funds, last year’s and this year’s, will lower this December’s predicted fund balance to (only!) $48.3 Million.  Last December’s policy decision to raise the fund balance target from 18 to 25 per cent of budget will require $48.77 Million to be left “in the bank,” so to speak, untouched, Holmes informed lawmakers.  See the problem?  At least on paper, Tompkins County will be more than $473,000 in the hole.

“Eighteen per cent was perfectly fine for a long time,” Randy Brown maintained after he heard Holmes’ presentation.  “And I think it was 15 per cent before that,” he recalled.  Indeed 15 per cent was the benchmark, until the Legislature raised it several years ago.

The New York State Comptroller sets no specific minimum percentages for municipal fund balances.  One outside association recommends at least two-or-three months of a government’s budget be kept on hand.  Three months’ spending would equal 25 per cent of budget.  Two months’ worth would be 16.7 per cent.

Lansing’s Deborah Dawson sits across from Randy Brown at the legislature’s big oval desk.  And she sits opposite from him as well when it comes to fund balance policy.  Dawson can be a fiscal pessimist at times—check that; make it almost all of the time.  Dawson was again the lockbox guardian the night Lisa Holmes shared her fund balance and budgeting assessment.

“I know that nobody’s real happy about this,” Dawson acknowledged.  “And I know that some of you are not big fans of the reserve accounts.  But I think this conversation that we’re having is one of the reasons why we needed to have the policy,” she insisted.

“We needed to have those reserves,” Dawson insisted, “because in the past, we’ve looked at this big number, (the Fund Balance), and said, ‘man, we’re flush.’  And I think that what we’re learning here is that however big the number is, it’s not necessarily that we’re flush.  And it’s better to know that stuff than to… continue spending as if the gravy train was never going to pull out of the station.”

Of course, that Tompkins County train remains loaded with gravy.  It’s only that it’s sealed in containers that no one can open without getting his hands slapped.

Last April, the Tompkins County Legislature instructed Lisa Holmes to present this fall a 2025 budget that would keep the tax levy increase at no more than two per cent, the same increase as for the current year.  Holmes still promises she’ll do that.  Only she’ll now also submit a budget that’s larger, one that would push the levy higher.   This second budget, nevertheless, would contain the levy’s increase within this year’s state-calculated “tax cap” for our county’s government, namely 4.45 per cent.

Keeping levy increases within the lower two per cent, Holmes warned, would require saying “No” to lots of people—department heads, let alone those from outside agencies.

“I still will deliver a budget with a two per cent levy increase, as directed,” Holmes assured lawmakers.  “However, having reviewed the needs and requests, I do not believe it’s going to be sufficient to meet the operational needs of the organization.”

To create the so-called “two per cent budget,” the administrator had asked department heads to cut their requests by five per cent.  Some departments can do that; others, those bound by state mandates, cannot.

One can parallel the plight facing Tompkins County with that which faced the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) last spring.  The Ithaca school superintendent first advanced a budget that carried a 12 per cent tax levy increase.  The Board of Education cut the increase to 8.4 per cent.  Ithaca’s voters still rejected it by a wide margin and forced the school board to cut deeper to win on a revote.  For Ithaca, the staff and program cuts proved painful, yet appear achievable.  Parents and teachers complain, but the reductions still take place.

The big difference between the ICSD and Tompkins County is political.  With Tompkins County, only the legislature gets to vote; the public does not.  Fiscal discipline must come from within, not without.

Administrator Holmes was cast a bit adrift last Tuesday night.  Finance Director Lorrie Scarrott was away.  Holmes budget-wise deputy, Norma Jayne, was attending remotely.  One could feel Holmes’ anxiety.  She sometimes stood unsure of herself.  Yet she was sure of one thing:  With an unassigned fund balance of $48.3 Million, “the County remains in a strong fiscal position,” Holmes said.

Finance Director Scarrott was the prime architect of the 25 per cent fund balance policy, multiple legislators indicated.  No one that night explicitly recommended the policy’s rescission, though some came close. Dryden’s Greg Mezey wondered at what point legislators could tap reserves to provide fiscal flexibility.  Rich John questioned how deeply the fund balance policy itself is anchored.

“Should we think about our policy,” John wondered, “because it is a policy, it’s not a law or anything, to give us the ability to work through our budget needs this year?”

Deborah Dawson would keep the policy, but pinch pennies instead.

“We need to remember that we’re not just in this situation because of these policies, which were fiscally prudent, but also because we’ve been spending an awful lot of money,” Dawson observed.   “I mean, an eight per cent increase in our expenditures; that’s a lot.”

Amanda Champion, sitting beside Dawson, also had no desire to revisit the 25 per cent policy set-aside.  And she echoed Dawson’s call for frugality.  “We can’t just keep going on spending and not face the consequences of that.”

Words like those are easy for Champion and Dawson to state in the abstract.  Looking a department head or agency advocate in the eye and denying a money request could prove much harder.

Lost too often, of course, is the forgotten taxpayer, the one whose hard-earned and compulsory-paid dollar has been sequestered in some accountant’s budget line by that arbitrary 25 per cent retention rule:

”What’s the plan to use some of these funds to reduce the tax burden on our constituents?” Greg Mezey asked.  “That’s my focus; it’s not just spend, spend, spend, spend, spend.  It’s how do we reduce the cost to live in Tompkins County, and how do we keep our levy and our spending in check… because I’m sure there is something that we’re doing out there at the County that we could not be doing and nobody would know the difference.”

A shout from across the room prompted correction:  “… that few will know the difference,” Mezey clarified.

But taxpayers generally don’t troop to legislative chambers; slighted bureaucrats and activists do that.  And right now the Fund Balance Policy stands; the reserves remain locked in place; a liquidity-limited budget season lies ahead; and Administrator Holmes terms 2025 a “transition year.”  A transition to what, she didn’t quite explain.

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