Local Airport takes a big budget hit

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

by Robert Lynch; October 4, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Correct,” Nalley conceded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

And posted earlier:

ICSD Security Scare Prompts Meeting Move

by Robert Lynch; October 1, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That distinction truly takes a while to understand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

Posted Previously:

Take my Building, Please!

Harold’s Square pitched to County for Center of Government

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

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

by Robert Lynch; September 23, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

Hitting Enfield’s Six Percent Sweet-Spot

Tax levy rides meeting roller-coaster; Rollins gets (very) part-time clerk

by Robert Lynch; September 18, 2025

For a second straight year, the Enfield Town Board stands poised to dig deep into its bank account to prevent next year’s tax levy from soaring into the stratosphere with a double-digit increase.

At the end of a three-and-a-half hour meeting, one marked by compromise at some points and sharp elbows at others, the Town Board September 17 refined Town Supervisor Stephanie Redmond’s 2026 Tentative Budget and ended the night with a spending document that would raise next year’s property tax levy by 6.5 percent, close to the 6.12 percent adopted for the 2025 budget last year.

Near the end of those discussions Wednesday, the Town Board voted to provide Highway Superintendent Barry Rollins his first-ever administrative assistant/clerk.  Rollins had requested the assistant be hired for up to 20 hours per week at a cost of $26,000.   The budget compromise provided about half those hours and that amount.

Redmond’s initially-submitted Tentative Budget, presented the Town Board September 10, had omitted Rollins clerical request altogether as Redmond had sought to trim spending and keep taxes in check. 

But Rollins pressed for the position’s inclusion at this Wednesday’s most recent budget session.  Aided by advice from Town Clerk Mary Cornell, the Board pulled enough money from a couple of different accounts, sought middle ground, and provided Rollins an office assistant for eight-to-ten hours weekly.

As another key issue addressed at the meeting, the Board considered, yet tossed aside an initiative that would have migrated all Highway Department employees—including Highway Superintendent Rollins—to a less expensive health insurance benefits plan.  Nevertheless, the board endorsed an amended motion that could eventually transition coverage to that cost-saving plan in future years and do it in a way that spares employees from paying higher co-pays for health care.

“I’m not willing to cut this budget on the backs of our employees,” Supervisor Redmond said bluntly in rejecting the immediate health insurance conversion.

As first presented the Town Board September 10, the Enfield Supervisor’s $2.6 Million Tentative Budget would have raised the Town tax levy by 7.32 percent.  But as the Board and Town Bookkeeper Blixy Taetzsch spent hours Wednesday methodically wandering through the many budget lines, they encountered errors or omissions that once corrected ballooned the levy increase to 10.2 percent.

“We can’t do ten percent; that’s double-digits,” Redmond reacted.

Only by tapping accumulated and anticipated fund balances—the Town’s bank savings—and digging into it deeper than first expected, did the Board lower the levy hike to 6.5 percent when it reached a stopping point just after 10 PM and adjourned for the night.

Enfield’s budget work remains far from finished.  Members will reconvene October 8.  During their Regular Monthly Meeting, they’ll take up the budget again. 

An earlier-established timetable has allowed for yet a further budget work session, one on October 15.  But as Wednesday’s meeting concluded, Redmond signaled she’d hope the October 8 meeting could resolve all remaining issues.  That would allow the plan’s elevation to a Preliminary Budget that night and lead to a Public Hearing on the budget later that month.  

Taxpayers care most about tax burdens, understandably.  But to dig into the depths of Wednesday’s deliberations, one discovers how the levy stayed in check.  It came through use of fund balances.

One year ago, the Town Board assigned $125,000 of its accumulated fund balance to offset day-to-day expenses.  Revised estimates bookkeeper Taetzsch presented the Town Board this Wednesday indicated that much of that savings would, indeed, be spent by year’s end.  That said, the Town would also likely close its books this year with about $56,000 in net revenue over expenses.

Whereas the 2025 Budget tapped $125,000 from the fund balance, and whereas Redmond’s initially-tendered 2026 budget would have drawn it down by $100,000—$25,000 less than in 2025— the revisions discussed this latest Wednesday, although not yet final, would remove $182,500 from fund balance in 2026; $175,000 of it to contain the tax levy.  An additional $7,500 would support Rollins’ part-fund administrative assistant.

Clerical help at the Highway Department was an issue settled through compromise.  But before it was, the matter separated Supervisor Redmond and Highway Superintendent Rollins for a time Wednesday. 

“But we’re trying to find places to make cuts, not trying to find ways to add into the budget,” Redmond observed as the Superintendent pressed for his administrative help.  “It’s not that I don’t think you need it, it’s not that I don’t think you deserve it, it’s that I don’t know where it’s coming from,” she told Rollins.

“Tax dollars,” the Highway Superintendent answered.  “It is what it is, if you run a business.  This is a business.”

Eventually, after this Councilperson, Robert Lynch, suggested splitting the difference and others agreed, the Town Board scaled back the clerical position to roughly half of what Rollins had first requested and funded it mostly through fund balance, but also in part through tapping another spending  line in Rollins’ budget.

A survey of seven nearby rural towns, shared at the meeting, showed that four of those towns already provide their highway superintendent’s part- or full-time clerical help; a fifth town provides it minimally.

Rollins also complained about the Supervisor’s budget deleting a $75,000 equipment reserve allocation, an amount that would have been equal to that assigned for the current year.

“Se we took away my equipment reserve?” Rollins asked.

“I didn’t know where else to cut,” Redmond apologetically advised the Superintendent.

“The Highway Department is 80 percent of this town,” Rollins stated.  “Everybody benefits from all the roads.  It’s our obligation to make ‘em safe and legal and take care of ‘em,” he continued.  “Everybody seems to be pretty pleased with the conditions of the roads.  So if you’re going to start cuttin,’ your services are going to go backwards.  That’s all there is to it.  It’s plain and simple.”

Bookkeeper Taetzsch predicted that year-end savings achieved through unspent highway moneys could replenish the equipment reserve account somewhat.

The sharpest exchanges Wednesday occurred between Supervisor Redmond and this writer, Councilperson Lynch, as they revisited a prior dust-up they’d had during this past July and August.  It involved Enfield’s failure to purchase a used mower-tractor for a fraction of what it would cost new.  The proposed budget and Enfield’s Capital Plan allow for a new tractor, a predicted $165,000 expense.  And the investment inflates the Highway Department’s equipment line by $135,000, a full 96 percent.

“And times are hard.  We may not be able to implement the Capital Plan,” this Councilperson counseled Board colleagues.  As an alternative, he advised the Highway Superintendent to “look and shop” for another good, used tractor and bring his request before the Town Board next year. 

Lynch’s comment prompted Redmond to suggest, arguably erroneously, that this Councilperson “blew it” for Enfield and nixed the prior purchase opportunity by his inquiring about the machine independently as the tractor was being readied for auction.  The Supervisor alleged that the intervention had “cost the taxpayers $100,000 in the next, coming year,” an insinuation that this Councilperson firmly denied.

“I don’t want it to be on the public record being said that I blew something that I did not blow, please,” this Councilperson corrected.

“Well, that’s what I hear,” Redmond reacted, partly speaking under her breath.

The budget meeting went on.

What partly drove the Tentative Budget’s tax levy upward was the Supervisor’s initial underestimate of how much health insurance premiums would rise for the six Highway Department employees (including Superintendent Rollins) covered by Enfield’s provider, the Greater Tompkins County Municipal Health Insurance Consortium (GTCMHIC).  Supervisor Redmond said September 10^th that she’d figured an 11 per cent increase.  Bookkeeper Taetzsch said Wednesday she’d estimated 15 percent.  But the true expected increase, likely to be finalized by the GTCMHIC Board September 25, is 18 percent.

It’s an “expensive dinosaur,” the Councilperson, the Town Board’s GTCMHIC representative, said of the Town’s current “Legacy” PPO health insurance plan, quoting a Consortium official.  “And I wouldn’t be so sure if a year from now the Legacy PPO plan even exists.”

The current Enfield health package provides more generous benefits and lower copays than do  GTCMHIC‘s other plans, but its premiums cost Enfield more.  As recently as last March, the Consortium’s Executive Directed addressed the Town Board and urged it transition to a lower-cost “Platinum Plan” alternative.

This Councilperson, Lynch, moved Wednesday to mandate that all policies migrate to the Consortium’s Platinum Plan next year.  Based on Consortium comparisons, he predicted Enfield own would save $37,704 in 2026 through the migration.  Superintendent Rollins pushed back.

“There’s a big difference in copays,” Rollins asserted.  “It is not acceptable because the copays are ridiculous.  Just the Emergency Room itself goes from like $30 to $250.” (Rollins numbers were off, but only slightly, for 2026.)

Led by the Supervisor, the Town Board rejected any mass health plan migration for next year.  Instead, it authorized investigation into establishing a “health reimbursement account” to bridge the copay gap for eligible employees and thereby permit potential universal migration to the Platinum Plan in 2027.

****

One thing more.  Highway Superintendent Rollins gave first word September 17 of what may show up this time next year;  namely his request for a sixth, full-time subordinate, a designated mechanic.

The Highway Superintendent claimed his department has already spent $40,000 in outside labor to work on his department’s equipment.  Repair shops charge $180 per hour and earn a markup on parts.  An in-house mechanic, Rollins maintained, could cost only $30-35 per hour and perform 80 percent of the work that he presently must farm out.

“An administrative assistant this year, but a mechanic is coming,” Rollins cautioned the Town Board.

###

Earlier, about this story:

Enfield first-look Budget would hike levy 7.3%

Supervisor sidelines Rollins’ request for secretary

by Robert Lynch; September 11, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• An equipment wash bay at the Highway Department;

• Blacktopping the Highway Department yard and driveway;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

Budget Message Delivered… and Delegated

Tompkins County 4.5% Levy hike recommended

by Robert Lynch; September 6, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, there’s also that office building

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reimagining SkateGarden

by Robert Lynch; September 2, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Woodring shared his frustrations as well. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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