TC Legislature may add Guards, Mags

by Robert Lynch; August 26, 2025

Upon learning of the news, one former Tompkins County official greeted it this way:  “Welcome to the Police State.”

A legislative committee Tuesday recommended a major hardening of building and meeting security for Tompkins County Government.  As one key component, security guards and screening devices—wands and/or magnetometers—would confront attendees to all Tompkins County Legislature and legislative committee meetings.

Key members of the Legislature’s Public Safety Committee made no secret of why they’d endorsed County Administration’s security recommendation.  They fear political violence.

“There’s a national trend of people being frustrated with government and with people struggling with mental health issues,” legislator Shawna Black, the committee’s strongest supporter of the new security measures, told colleagues at the August 26 session.  “And so I think it’s important for people who are at this table as well as for our staff to feel safe whenever they come to work, and that hasn’t always happened.”

The resolution won support by a four-to-one committee vote Tuesday.  Its text was not made public prior to the meeting, nor was it readily available that day other than in legislative chambers.  But based on what committee members disclosed during their discussions, the proposal would authorize hiring seven new security guards and station them at selected building entrances at specific times. 

The resolution would also purchase a magnetometer for the DeWitt Park ground floor entrance to the Legislature’s meeting place.  And it would station guards at both the Whole Health and Mental Health Department buildings, bolstering existing security at that latter location.

The security spending would draw $138,000 from the current budget’s contingency account to cover 2025 expenses.  Additional “over-target” spending of $610,000 would cover expected costs next year.

“This was something we were asked to put together by County Administration to help address some of what were considered immediate needs for security and public safety coverage in some of our buildings, including having staff for the Legislature meetings and  also for our committee meetings,”  Michael Stitley, Tompkins County’s Director of Emergency Response, told the committee. 

Stitley said County Administration had directed his office to construct the security plan.  County Administrator Korsah Akumfi, hired only last January but quickly and eagerly assuming his leadership stature, attended the meeting and defended the security measures he’d recommended.

Security is not just for legislators and employees, “but for members of the public as well,” Akumfi insisted.

“They need to feel safe, they need to feel protected, and they need to feel guided,” Akumfi stated.  “A sense of security that is visible around the county seat area is very helpful,” the Administrator asserted.

Akumfi broadened expected benefits beyond just for meetings and for the buildings, extending them “for the community as a whole,” for instance, to places like DeWitt Park, not far from the 19^th Century building where lawmakers meet.

But take a step back for a moment and ponder the Administrator’s statement.  One could analogize the same principal of community benefit to the deployment National Guard troops on the Washington Mall, or in Downtown Los Angeles or Chicago.

The Department of Emergency Response’s recommended staffing plan backed by the committee would not provide full-time guard-duty at legislative chambers. It would only do so during meetings of the Legislature and its committees.  After-hours guard staffing would rotate somewhat.  Guards would secure the Whole Health and Mental Health Departments when those offices hold evening counseling sessions, yet seek to coordinate health departmental schedules with nights when the Legislature meets and avoid staff being needed two places at once.

As part of the plan, staffing would harden at the Mental Health facilities on Ithaca’s East Green Street.  Security would extend bag and visitor searches to outside the front lobby and just inside the front door.  Security at Whole Health would be something new. 

Employees paid by the State Courts system already search those entering Tompkins County’s Main Courthouse and have done so for decades.  Guards and Magnetometers showed up at the County-supervised Human Services Building about a year ago.

Tuesday’s resolution left unclear whether some of the proposed added spending would cover existing security measures at the Mental Health and Human Services buildings.

“I don’t want people to think that government is any more or less safe than any other workplace,” Republican legislator Mike Sigler qualified.  “This is bigger than I had anticipated,” Sigler said of the seven-person hiring plan and its expected cost.

Republican committee members Sigler and Lee Shurtleff each joined Democrats Shawna Black and Veronica Pillar in supporting the security resolution.  But Sigler and Shurtleff did so with reservations.  Each voted his support arguing the proposal deserved the full Legislature to weigh in.  Yet neither promised he’d give the resolution his final support.

Public Safety Committee Chair Rich John cast the committee’s only dissent.  But he, too, remained torn as to how he’d vote when the Legislature considers it, likely on October 7.

“The trouble I’m wrestling with if this passes and we put it in place, we will have more security on any given day for the County than we do Sheriff’s deputies on the street,” Sigler concluded. “That’s hard to reconcile for me.  There should be a way to secure a building like I secure my house.”

To some extent, that’s already been done.  At a meeting in December of last year, the Legislature authorized several building hardening measures that a security study had recommended.  Among other things, visitors to the Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins Building, the Legislature’s home, can now only enter by first “buzzing in” a legislative clerk.  Similar security protocols exist at the “Old Jail” offices next door.

But legislative staffers routinely disable the buzz-in system prior to public meetings.  What’s proposed now is not so much a building security measure as it is one founded on an inherent suspicion of anyone who seeks to participate or observe public democracy’s  daily tasks.  That’s a far different matter.

The City of Ithaca has long employed magnetometer screenings and bag searches.  Security tightened after a heckler once tossed his shoe at former Ithaca Mayor Carolyn Peterson during a Common Council meeting. 

“If someone is going to come in here and harm any of us, whether it be us or our employees, this will hopefully be a deterrent,” Shawna Black said as she referenced the new security measures she supported.  “I know other communities and other municipalities have taken steps before us, and we tried to put it off a little bit, but I hope that we do move forward with this because I am afraid that if we don’t, something tragic could happen to us.”

Black asked County Attorney Maury Josephson whether Tompkins County incurs legal risk by not instituting tougher safeguards.  Josephson replied it’s a question of negligence law:  did government exercise an adequate “duty of care,” a standard that he admitted is “hard to define with precision.”

“I would imagine if there were a significant shooting event, where there were deaths, one or more deaths or serious injuries, and there was not security, that the County could face a hefty liability in those situations,” Josephson opined.

Shawna Black claimed that if one considers “threats” read in word but not conveyed in deed, public antipathy against those we elect locally—including her—has grown of late.  Black claimed that for her, “concerning emails” have multiplied “20-fold, even from last year.”

“I don’t know this is getting us where we need to go,” Public Safety Committee Chair Rich John observed of what the committee that afternoon had recommended.  John recalled his serving as a congressional intern decades ago and having then roamed freely under the Washington Capitol dome, security almost nonexistent.  Security’s much different there now, he said.  Maybe it needs to be here as well.

“Unfortunately, it seems like our society has just fundamentally changed since when I was an intern,” Rich John lamented, “in that the acceptability of atrocious behavior is now allowed and particularly by a lot of political leaders, where we should know better and we don’t.”

Rich John didn’t name names.

Whether necessary or not, the new security people and expensive things proposed for Tompkins County’s facilities come at a price, a significant one.  Lee Shurtleff cautioned that adding $610,000 to next year’s budget would bring with it a more than one percent increase in the tax levy.

“It’s money that doesn’t do anything,” Rich John acknowledged.  Yes, it protects a few from potential harm that may come—or may never come.  That said, John concluded, “I doesn’t provide services to constituents, other than when they attend a meeting, perhaps.”

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Ithaca Schools’ messy, measured cell phone ban

by Robert Lynch; August 22, 2025

Yes, it would be simpler if the principal or her assistant just grabbed phones away at the start of school, locked them up in her office, and didn’t give them back until dismissal.  It would be easier, and also probably cheaper.  But the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) doesn’t want to do it that way.

This coming Tuesday, August 26^th, at a meeting that comes only about a week before the start of class, and with the imposition of a state-mandated, bell to bell ban on student cell phone use then to take effect, the Ithaca Board of Education is expected to adopt rules to implement Albany’s hastily-enacted prohibition.  Most likely, the ICSD will issue high-tech, signal-canceling pouches to students.  Pupils would put their phones within those Velcro-sealed pouches, stuff the pouches into their backpacks, and then keep them there throughout the school day.  That’s the plan.

“Now, don’t take them out, Abigail and Aiden.  Please.  Scout’s honor?”  Sure.

The 21^st Century classroom environment has changed.  Unless you learn there, work there, or visit there, you may not comprehend the transformation.  Some say the change accelerated on the eve of the pandemic.  A near-parasitic attachment has now glued the learner to his or her electronic device. Yes, it’s an addiction, an unhealthy one.  And yes, the habit’s tough to break.  The teenager of today has never known life differently.

“I used to joke and say that my grandbaby could watch YouTube videos before she could speak,” School Board President Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell told the Board of Education August 12. ”And that was a fact, that wasn’t a joke.”

“We are still so embedded in using our phones in every part of the day,” Board colleague Erin Croyle later remarked.  “I support not having cell phones in school,” Croyle affirmed.  But then she added, “My kids hate me because I’m always telling them no screens and they’re not having phones.”

“All these things are dependent on a certain level of student trust, some level of culture shift,” Eversley Bradwell cautioned in matching the new rules to ingrained behavior.  “It’s a generation that’s grown up with these devices.  How we change that, that’s going to be the real question.”

For nearly an hour during their August 12 meeting, ICSD educators agonized over how best to implement Governor Kathy Hochul’s initiative to keep smart phones away from students as they learn.  The ban was ratified by the State Legislature in May as part of New York’s yearly budget.  Toward achieving compliance, ICSD Board members talked at length August 12, yet never achieved consensus.

The Ithaca Board of Education that night gave perfunctory, performative “first reading” acknowledgement—yet it stopped short of line-by-line approval—to a vaguely-worded compliance policy, one that would pretty much sanction any remedial measures the school district would choose to take:

“The ICSD Board of Education prohibits the use of personal internet-enabled devices by all students in preK-12 during the school day and on school grounds,” the draft policy states in part. 

The draft document continues:

“The District shall provide at least one method for students to store internet-enabled devices on-site during the school day.  Storage options include, but are not limited to the following:  school-issued secure pouches/containers, secured lockers, and/or administrative office storage.  Student backpacks are not considered adequate for storage purposes.”

That said, the internet-blocking, yet darned easy to open Velcro pouches will likely become the default method of smartphone confinement.  Why?  Because as was revealed at the meeting, administrators have already bought them.  The pouches cost the district about $20 each, $20,000 in total, partially reimbursed by the state.

“I guess I’m a little bit surprised that the pouches were already purchased,” Board member Adam Krantweiss inquired at the early-August session.  “I’m curious about the cost of that.”  In short, shouldn’t the Board of Education have decided the issue first?

In Krantweiss’ opinion, quite simply, Administration put the cart before the horse, or more aptly stated, the purchase before the policy.

“We knew there was going to be a rush,” Kari Burke, ICSD’s Director of Athletics and Wellness and the District’s point-person on cell phone policy-writing, told Krantweiss.  Not only is Ithaca buying the Hochul-compliant pouches, so, too, are many other districts, she said

“We didn’t want to be waiting in the queue,” Eversley Bradwell concurred, defending the arguably presumptive purchase.

“We knew we had to do something,” School Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown weighed in.  “I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to it either,” Dr. Brown added.  “But we are being compliant with what I see as a paternalistic and oppressive law.”

Ouch!  Dr. Brown’s words revealed much.  Not only students, but also many educators and parents dislike the cell phone ban that reelection-eyeing Hochul muscled through the Legislature last spring. Some “caregivers”—the newly-PC synonym for “parents”—believe cell phone access enables quicker, better student notification in the event of a school shooting, even though many in law enforcement disagree.  Parents like to helicopter their kids.  And there’s the heavy-hand-of-Albany argument too.  Eversley Bradwell said some districts are considering lawsuits.

At a pre-election candidates’ forum May 15, Madeline Cardona, subsequently elevated to a one-year school board term, voiced concern about the cell phone ban.  She warned it might compromise student safety.  Cardona remained mostly silent during the board’s August 12 discussions.

Todd Fox, a conservative elected to the ICSD Board in the taxpayer-driven, back-to-basics boomlet of 2024, came to the early-August meeting as the cell phone ban’s most ardent defender.  But Fox questioned the Velcro pouches’ effectiveness and the wisdom behind the district’s buying them.  Each board member had been given a sample pouch.  Fox waved his around as a prop.

“My concern is, they’re not going to use these,” Fox asserted during his show-and-tell. “They’re big.  It’s bulky… If I was a student, I wouldn’t carry this.”

“We bought these because we had to comply with the law,” Fox conceded.  “What I’m saying is we didn’t need to purchase these because I don’t think they’re going to work.”

And then, Todd Fox argued, there’s the issue of student compliance. Velcro pouches entail about the lowest level of achievement predictability permitted under Hochul’s law.

“How does this stop kids from using their phones?” Todd Fox asked.  “What I’m curious about is what’s to stop them in the middle of class kind of just opening this up and pulling their phone out,” Fox said, holding the pouch.

“Besides the obvious of their knowing that they may be violating a policy or norm in the classroom setting,” Kari Burke replied, attempting a plausible, though strikingly ingenuous answer.  She then added, “The Velcro is a bit of a deterrent because it’s obviously pretty loud.”

“This seems like an adult solution to a kid’s problem.” Fox concluded of the pouch idea.  “Kids are looking at this like, ‘You gotta’ be kidding me.  I’ll put it in my backpack.”

What validates Todd Fox’s suspicion are the tepid enforcement procedures currently envisioned by the ICSD. 

“No student will be suspended if the only reason for taking such action is the student’s violation of this policy,” the draft document explicitly prescribes.

The proposed policy also speaks of a “common set of tiered responses” for those who violate the rule.  It also qualifies that:

“The Superintendent shall emphasize equitable, restorative practices when enforcing this policy and ensure that responses considered punitive in nature do not disproportionately affect protected groups or exacerbate inequity.”

A three-page document appended to the proposed policy details “Restorative Justice Supports and Suggestions” for enforcing the ban.

The referenced document advises that when a student takes out a phone:  1) Stay calm and use a supportive approach; 2) Offer a gentle reminder about the new regulation and invite a brief dialogue; and 3) Check in with the student and ask ”What do you need right now?”

And should a student have “broken an agreement or classroom norm,” the document advises instructors to pose questions like: 1) “What happened?”; 2) “What were you thinking or feeling at the time?”; 3) “Who was affected by your phone use?”; 4) “What part of our school expectations did you go against?”; and 5) “What do you need to do to make things right?”

Most with logic gained in the real world, far outside the educational bubble can find the problem here. 

“I see this as a multi-minute conversation with any student who then brings out a cell phone during class,” board member Jacob Shiffrin observed.  “And I don’t see how that’s feasible, so I’m struggling to understand.”

“There’s always a place for restorative conversations in that situation,” Superintendent Brown insisted.

Stressing what he termed “the addictive nature of cell phones,” Board President Eversley Bradwell said, “I never want to be in a situation where I’m being punitive for someone who relapses.”  He added, “For me, it is restorative.  It has to be from a place of love… When people are struggling for cultural change, the response is not to be punitive.  The response is not to be regressive.  The response is to be restorative.”

Largely based on the fine lines of enforcement, the Board of Education postponed its specific policy endorsements until its meeting on the 26th.

Aside from the Velcro pouches, other compliance options do exist.  So-called “Yondr” [a brand name] magnetic-locking pouches came up in discussion.  They’d cost more, yet provide greater assurance of  proper enforcement.  A Yondr locking device, presumably stationed at the door, would seal the phone-holding bags upon student arrival, and then release the magnet at day’s end.  But Yondr technology is not perfect.  Students can buy magnet releases online for as little as $6.

“Students are incredibly clever,” Burke advised her board.  They can buy the unlocking device “and have a nice side business unlocking other students’ pouches.”

State rules also allow learners to keep their phones in their lockers all day, the Board was told.  But welcome to the high school culture of 2025, one where the pupil doubles as a packhorse.  “Kids walk around with all their stuff all day,” Erin Croyle reported.

Eversley Bradwell shared one novel idea a few districts have tried.  It’s most bizarre; painting the entire school with radiofrequency-blocking paint.  “Please don’t do that,” he said the State Education Department has advised.

And back to this story’s original idea—and it’s permitted within Ithaca’s draft policy—bell-to-bell phone confiscation.  But as far as ICSD’s concerned, it’s a non-starter.

“We do not issue these devices to students,” Kari Burke reminded the board of the phones.  “We do not want to take them off of their person.  We do not want to be responsible for them.”

“That comes with all kinds of liability,” the board president said as to administrative sequestration.  “We’ve heard feedback from parents:  ‘No, I don’t want that; I don’t want you having my child’s phone while they’re in the school day,’” Eversley Bradwell said caregivers have told him. “I would feel uncomfortable holding—having the school be liable for people’s property for a significant amount of time,” the board president said.

The proposed ICSD cell phone policy would carve limited exceptions, allowances to students needing phones for insulin monitoring, for translation to English, or to those responsible for another family member’s care.

Exceptions aside, and all obstacles considered, Board member Karen Yearwood offered perhaps the best idea.  It starts at home.

“We as adults should be responsible in guiding our children,” Yearwood maintained.  “Why are the students bringing the phone to school unless they need it for any medical reasons?” Yearwood asked.

“It’s going to be messy,” Board President Eversley Bradwell predicted in finding the cell phone ban’s sweet spot.  “That’s just a fact.  It’s going to be messy.”

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Enfield Chief expands EMS response, decries TC dispatching

by Robert Lynch; August 20, 2025

The stock price of Tompkins County’s 911 dispatching system did not gain value in Enfield Tuesday night.

“There seems to be a real issue with the County,” Enfield Fire Chief Jamie Stevens broached the subject bluntly during the early minutes of the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners meeting August 19.

And with Chief Stevens’ words, a session whose focus was expected to bring a first peek at  next year’s Enfield Fire District budget rewrote its lead headline to one far less fiscal and far more a matter of human injury, if not life-and-death.

Chief Stevens expressed to Commissioners his displeasure with Tompkins County 911 Dispatch, the emergency operations phone center that receives emergency calls, prioritizes them, and then sends out ambulances and volunteer rescue squads according to perceived need.  Based on his involvement with an in-home medical emergency the weekend before, the chief concluded the current system is overly-rigid, arbitrarily applied, and disproportionately reliant on what’s read from a book rather than what’s found in the field.

And because of that incident, Jamie Stevens announced his decision. 

“I’m now responding to all EMS calls, including ‘Alpha’ calls,” the Fire Chief enounced. 

By his orders, Enfield Rescue Squad volunteers will now be sent routinely to those second-to-the-bottom types of emergencies, to medical events to which they hadn’t in recent times been summoned.  Up until now, the Rescue Squad had only been activated by the 911 Center on its determination of the next-higher level of emergency, the “Bravo” call, and to call levels more serious.

Before Tuesday’s discussion had ended and the meeting had moved on, not only Stevens, but also Board of Fire Commissioners Chair Greg Stevenson and Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) President Dennis Hubbell had all joined in their criticism of the Tompkins County’s 911 Dispatch unit and of the Department of Emergency Response (DOER) that oversees it.

“They do a poor, poor job of it,” Stevenson characterized the 911 Center’s performance. “They don’t listen; they want to argue,” Stevenson complained. 

“I have significant concerns about the County being able to manage what they have.  I hate to think what it would be like if they had an ambulance service,” Stevenson continued.

Toward that end, the Department of Emergency Response had prepared and submitted to Tompkins County legislators this past May a plan that would vastly expand the County’s Rapid Medical Response (RMR) program, now in its second year of implementation.  The expansion would include a limited ambulance operation that would provide basic life support and hospital transport services.  Its goal would be to gap-fill an overstretched Bangs Ambulance service as well as ambulance services operated by several municipalities, principally by Dryden and Trumansburg.

The “Enhanced RMR” proposal currently faces a rough governmental ride.  DOER’s plan would increase the service’s funding nearly six-fold.  Key lawmakers warn that Tompkins County just doesn’t have the money to fund it.

The heart of Tuesday night’s complaints involved the 911 Center’s doggedly-followed “Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD) Codes,” the ones guiding dispatchers when they assign the severity level of each 911 call.  The six categories range from “Omega” calls (non-medical public assistance) through codes “Alpha,” “Bravo,” “Charlie,” “Delta,” and “Echo.” (Note the alphabetical advancement of the final five codes.) 

According to a DOER PowerPoint slide shared with county and local lawmakers in October 2023, threats to life would be assigned “Echo” status.  The “Alpha” code would be given to “non-emergent, minor injuries,” those where a patient was merely “sick and injured.”  By contrast, “Bravo” calls would elevate to “emergent minor injuries,” where someone “falls with bleeding, striking head, etc.,” medical events that may require transport to an emergency room.

The 911 Center’s categorization impacts not only whether a volunteer rescue squad will be activated, but also the sophistication of ambulance equipment and personnel deployed.  It also affects whether the ambulance is sent “hot,” with lights flashing ad sirens blaring; or “cold,” proceeding quietly, at normal highway speeds.

The weekend incident that raised Chief Stevens’ ire and prompted his EVFC edict took place at a private residence.  It involved a patient with a perceived hip injury whose host called the 911 Center, the caller familiar with the fire service and 911 protocols.

As the Fire Chief and the Commissioners’ Chair pieced details together after Tuesdays meeting had ended, the subject caller had phoned 911 dispatch. The caller had described the patient’s condition.  The 911 dispatcher accordingly assigned the “Alpha” severity status.  A Bangs Ambulance was sent to the scene, but without lights or sirens… or a paramedic.

As minutes passed, the patient showed increasing signs of injury, an injury likely requiring paramedic-level treatments.  The caller phoned back and urged an elevated response. 

“We don’t upgrade calls,” the dispatcher firmly told the caller.  At that point, the caller enlisted Fire Chief Stevens’ assistance.

“I am the Fire Chief, and I want the call upgraded,” Stevens sternly informed the 911 Center.

At that point, as officials later informed Tuesday’s meeting, the dispatcher backed down, Enfield Rescue was alerted, and a second, better-staffed and equipped Bangs Ambulance was sent.

Last weekend’s botched response wasn’t the first time such an error has occurred, Chief Stevens recalled.  One time, he said, “I went on an Alpha call that happened to be a full cardiac arrest.”

Neither Enfield’s rescue squad nor most others respond to the lowest-level “Omega” calls, ones that may not require any medical attention at all.  Company President Hubbell equated the typical Omega call to complaining about a “toothache.”

Multiple officials within the Enfield fire service recalled Tuesday that the six-levels of EMD codes were put in place in the early-2000’s at the request of Tim Bangs, President of the private Bangs Ambulance service, Tompkins County’s largest transport agency.  And those officials allege Bangs requested the coding protocol for both professional and legal protection. 

“The problem is years ago Tim Bangs and his attorney requested the County to do this,” Stevenson told Commissioners.

But EVFC President Hubbell also places blame on the emergency dispatchers themselves and on the arbitrary discretion they employ.

Hubbell remembers that service as a 911 dispatcher used to require one’s holding an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) certification.  No longer.  A dispatcher qualifies by having acquired a largely textbook- and lecture-based Emergency Medical Dispatch certification.  One completes a course at the Fire Academy in Montour Falls, takes the test, and then starts answering calls.

“You do well on your test, but you have no real fire or EMS service experience,” Hubbell complained.  “It’s like having a truck driver who doesn’t have a license.”

The company president Tuesday endorsed the heightened local response protocols that Chief Stevens imposed effective with Tuesday’s meeting.  Yet Hubbell concedes those rules have a downside. They will summon volunteers more frequently and place increased strain upon each member’s time and commitment.

“I agree with what we’re doing,” Hubbell stated.  “It’s going to cover our butt.”

At the same time as the Board of Fire Commissioners was addressing dispatching, County Administrator Korsah Akumfi in downtown Ithaca was briefing the Tompkins County Legislature on his progress in refining next year’s requested Tompkins County Budget and in narrowing an earlier-forecast $11 Million budget deficit.

As it stood that night, Akumfi still forecast a $4 Million to $4.5 Million budget shortfall.  Yet among the programs retained in his draft calculations, Akumfi said, was “the Rapid Medical Response service, as is.”

Those final two words hold meaning.  If they are taken at face value, Akumfi’s budget, to be finalized for legislators next week and shared with the public after Labor Day, would not include the more expensive RMR enhancements that DOER has strongly lobbied for.  DOER’s initiative, if adopted, would boost the RMR annual budget from its present $544.828 to more than $3 Million.

County-run Rapid Medical Response currently operates only during daytime hours and only on weekdays.  The enhancements the Department of Emergency Response seeks would expand the service to nights and weekends.  And though its rules stand slightly at odds with the dispatching codes, Enfield fire officials report that the RMR vehicles, staffed by EMT’s do, indeed, answer Alpha-level calls.  And they respond using lights and sirens.

Had enhanced RMR been operating on the night of the Enfield Fire Chief’s publicized emergency, RMR might have then responded.  Still, its lone after-hours van might have been deployed elsewhere in the county that night, rendering its availability meaningless.  And the RMR unit may have had only an EMT on board, not a more-skilled paramedic, a professional authorized to administer a higher level of care and provide more specific medications.

And any new ambulances requested to bolster RMR’s stature would only provide basic life support and hospital transport, not advanced life support, were it needed.

And, of course, the dispatch system would remain the chain’s weakest link.  Heightened emergency response is only as effective as the dispatcher who requests it. 

Enfield is not the first local fire company to expand its responses into Alpha-level emergencies.  Most of Tompkins County’s fire companies have already done so, Chief Stevens stated after the meeting.  Enfield and Lansing, he said, were the final holdouts to expand into this (supposedly) less-serious status of medical events, less-serious, that is, if you can believe that the 911 dispatcher is correct—which, of course, has become the problem.

The Board of Fire Commissioners came close Tuesday to formally endorsing Chief Stevens’ expanded activation rules through passing a resolution. The board stopped short of doing so at the last minute, concluding that a unanimous, informal expression of consensus stood sufficient.

“It’s a shame we have to address our policies to make up for the poor performance on the other end,” Chairman Stevenson remarked as the board ended its discussion of 911 Dispatch and moved on to other business.

“Is the County ambulance the right decision?” Stevens asked fire commissioners, the fire chief implying that such a service would not be.  Can life-and-death decisions “be made by one phone call,” Stevens asked?

But for Enfield, the Fire Chief’s weekend call may have made a long-term difference.  Enfield EMT’s will now be called out more often.  The community’s rescue squad will have an added presence.  Expect the fire station door to open more frequently. 

And yes, expect Enfield fire officials to urge a change in what may have become an imperfect Emergency Medical Dispatch coding system, not to mention the way that system’s getting applied.

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“Nickel and Diming” toward a tolerable Tompkins tax

by Robert Lynch; August 20, 2025; additional reporting August 21, 2025

Rest assured, Tompkins County, your county tax bill will not rise by the 20 to 40 percent that a worst-case budget scenario, unveiled in late-July, had portended.  Something like a four-to-six percent increase now seems more likely.  That said, your personal contribution toward keeping our county’s government solvent and humming stands likely to take a bigger bite out of your wallet next January than in years past.

Revised projections, detailed by County Administrator Korsah Akumfi to the Tompkins County Legislature Tuesday night, cut by more than half the roughly $11 Million deficit he’d earlier forecast following a publicly-shrouded Budget Retreat legislators attended July 23.  As updated to the Legislature at the August 19 meeting, the Administrator now forecasts a deficit of $4 Million to $4.5 Million.

“How I interpret the process that we adopted is nickeling and diming the departments and agencies and taking $50 from here, $100 there, a thousand from here,” Akumfi described his new style of budget crafting.

“We evaluated the numbers, we as a team… and we have as of now been able to close the gap down to about $4 Million; $4.5 Million,” the Administrator said.

At a July 24 meeting of the Tompkins County Council of Governments (TCCOG), held one day after the Retreat that presumably only legislators and government staff had attended, Akumfi had shared two scenarios.  The more restrained of the two, a “Maintenance of Effort” budget would have kept current programs in place, but incurred an $11 Million deficit, one that could only be closed via a 20 percent increase in the property tax levy.

An alternative spending plan, one that would tack on an added $12 Million in spending to underwrite a list of “Enhancement Requests,” would have pushed the 2026 tax levy over that for the current year by a whopping 40.3 percent.

Korsah Akumfi is new to Tompkins County and to its budget process this year.  But even he understood that tax increases of the magnitude he’d warned of stand far beyond reason.  Instead, at the July Retreat, and also the day later, he’d shared a PowerPoint slide listing alternative levy increases ranging from four to ten percent and predicting the financial impact of each.

“Our goal… is to be able to present a proposed budget that falls within four to six percent,” the Administrator told legislators Tuesday based on his updated fiscal calculations. “We are now hovering around about six-and-a-half percent.  So we still have a few days to go.”

Those “few days,” Akumfi predicted, will likely end this Friday.  The Administrator plans to reach final recommended figures by August 22, compile budget books for lawmakers to peruse privately next week, and then unveil his recommendations to the public Tuesday, September second, one day after Labor Day.

But at that point, the 2026 Tompkins County Budget will still be far from final.  Legislators first will invite department heads and agency representatives to a series of meetings for each to plead his or her individual hardship.  Lawmakers will then review budget lines to the point of micro-management.  A final budget won’t be put to a public hearing until late-October, followed by the Legislature’s vote in November.

Whatever the finally settled-upon tax levy increase, the percentage is bound to climb above the 2.72 percentage point rise legislators last year adopted for the 2025 County Budget now in place.

“It’s a moving target,” Legislature Chair Dan Klein aptly described Tompkins County’s confusing, labyrinthian budget process, one made even more convoluted by the new Administrator’s newly-preferred math.  “This is a process, these are snapshots in the moment, changes almost every day at this point,” Klein cautioned.

It’s next-to-impossible to compare this year’s Tompkins County budget preparation to those of years past.  That’s because Korsah Akumfi has insisted his budget flow from the bottom-up and not from the top-down.

Shortly after assuming his employment here in January, Korsah Akumfi made known his distaste for Tompkins County’s two-decade-old practice of setting legislatively-directed “target” tax increases, and then squeezing spending to fit within the target framework.  Instead, the new Administrator prefers to first solicit departmental and agency spending requests rather open-endedly, compare them with spending for past years, trim as he deems appropriate, and then hand the Legislature whatever the calculator finally registers.

So it’s of little surprise to the financially astute that a “target-free” budget like this year’s has more headroom for economy—for the fiscal balloon to deflate, so to speak—because those economies were never dictated at the outset.

Nonetheless, department heads and agency leaders never like the prospect of spending less money, and our new Administrator has found that out.

“Speaking to the agencies, we have had several pushbacks,” Akumfi acknowledged to legislators Tuesday, “and we are also pushing back to their pushback to try and present something that is reasonable.”

Something new that Korsah Akumfi has attempted this year, as he informed the Legislature, is a sort of five-year lookback at departmental spending.  It appears to be his way of gauging how one department compares to another and whose increases may be out of line.

“So the goal has been to evaluate the departments’ requests as well as agencies as compared to actual expenditures the previous five years and evaluate the reasonableness of the estimate, both revenues and expenditures,” Akumfi said.

Based on that five-year lookback, Akumfi claimed he could trim projected spending below what was first forecast in some categories.  The administrator did not identify which departments suffered the curtailments.

Of course, inflation kicks costs up, perhaps more in one department than in another.  And fluctuations with state and federal aid can affect departments differently.  As such, determining exactly how effective, practical, and successful Akumfi’s new style of budgeting will turn out remains to be seen.

Just a few weeks ago, when the earlier-predicted $11 Million deficit loomed large, Administration blamed the shortfall on a predicted $5 Million increase in spending and a $6 Million loss of revenue.  Now, in an effort to partially close the revenue side, Akumfi told legislators Tuesday he’ll recommend $2.7 Million be drawn from what had been set aside last year in a “tax stabilization” reserve.  $1.5 Million of that withdrawal would be used to pad down the tax levy; the remaining $1.2 Million would go to unspecified “one-time expenses.”

Akumfi’s Tuesday night “snapshot” defied granularity.  It painted with broad strokes.  Yet a couple items secured mention, including the Rapid Medical Response service.  Akumfi indicated that moneys existed for Rapid Medical Response’s continuation, but only for the service “as is,” not necessarily for any $2.5 Million expansion into a limited county-wide ambulance operation that some emergency response service proponents would like it to become.

Legislators asked Akumfi a few questions, though not many. Deborah Dawson inquired about how the five-year historic lookback procedure would accommodate for inflation and for recent employee collective bargaining agreements.  The Administrator retreated to talk of the ongoing “vacancy rate” and its effect on the payroll.  He never answered the question directly. 

Rich John asked the Administrator to tell him how much of the $6.5 Million in newfound deficit reduction came through lower spending versus enhanced revenue.  Akumfi couldn’t parse the numbers.

The Administrator did say there’s not much hope of tapping County Government’s sizable—though shrinking—fund balance, its savings account, for help in closing gaps.  County policy currently dictates a full 25 percent of annual expenses remain in fund balance.  Although its total lags by as much as a year behind reality, Akumfi calculated the fund balance account now stands well below the policy’s requirement.

Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown inquired whether the City of Ithaca, through its sales tax agreements, should be paying Tompkins County a larger share to fund the Department of Emergency Response, especially given the high proportion of 911 calls coming from city residents.  Colleague Mike Lane cautioned the issue’s complicated.

Rich John stated he’d prefer Akumfi aim low with his recommended tax levy increase, perhaps keeping it at around four percent, so as to allow legislators in their fall deliberations the flexibility to add-in selected spending items as they identify “where there’s real need.”

“I would much prefer if we came in somewhere closer to the four percent, and this body was looking at additional spending, rather than trying to reduce spending,” John advised.  Because when it comes to cutting spending, the legislator admitted, “I don’t think we’re very good at that.”

****

The Legislature’s agenda item that was expected to generate controversy at the August 19 meeting never did.  By a vote of 13 to one, lawmakers authorized the temporary relocation of both the Department of Assessment and the Office for the Aging to a newly-purchased one-story office building at 31 Dutch Mill Road, about a mile and a half north of the airport, off Warren Road.

The Office for the Aging would occupy space originally intended for the Board of Elections.  At the Legislature’s earlier August fifth meeting, numerous commenters, including a spokesperson for the League of Women Voters, objected to the Elections Office’s move to a rural site, and the Legislature vetoed the idea.  Critics contended that a rural office would deprive Ithaca’s urban residents of continued easy access to the Elections Board to sign up to vote or to cast absentee ballots.

In a memo attached to the August 18 agenda, Director of Assessment Jay Franklin heartily endorsed his department’s temporary move.  Assessment must relocate to further County plans to deconstruct Assessment’s current home and then build the planned Center of Government on its footprint.

But the Office for the Aging’s relocation to Lansing and out of its downtown home at State and Albany Streets would appear on its face to prompt the same concerns as did the Board of Elections’ earlier-planned move.  It would deny convenient access to older adults who may choose to walk to the location or take public transit.

But in contrast to the concerted resistance expressed two weeks earlier by voting rights advocates, no one from the public spoke against the Office for the Aging’s move at the start of Tuesday’s meeting.  And Office for the Aging Director Lisa Monroe didn’t address it either.  She may not even have attended.

County Administrator Akumfi explained that he had met with Monroe and her staff and quelled any objections.

“So they don’t see this as a disruption,” Akumfi said of Office for the Aging leadership’s attitude.  But rather, he said, they view it “as an opportunity so that they can reinvent their programming to serve the residents very well.”

The Administrator concluded that visitors unable to drive to the out-of-the-way Lansing location could take the Gadabout paratransit minibus instead.

Ithaca legislator Shawna Black cast the lone dissent on the relocation plan.  She maintained that regardless of its economic and structural attributes, the Lansing location for the Office for the Aging is just too far removed from the community’s center.

“I continue to have very strong beliefs that our forward-facing departments need to be on the bus line and need to be accessible to everyone,” Black asserted.  “There are no complaints about the building itself… just the location really does not seem conducive to County business,” she said.

The Office for the Aging relocation arrived to the Legislature last-minute, made known only days before the meeting.  Administration had recommended the Office for the Aging’s move so as to later relocate the Board of Elections into Aging’s State Street storefront and thereby satisfy the Legislature’s insistence that the Elections Board remain downtown. 

Tuesday’s resolution did not address the Board of Elections relocation.

The Legislature earlier this month purchased the vacant, 13,000-square foot Dutch Mill Road building for $1.2 Million.  Assessment and the Office for the Aging would remain there for at least four-to-five years until the Center of Government is finished.

Newfield legislator Randy Brown suggested an even longer relocation.  At nine dollars a square foot, Brown asked, Why not stay there?”

###

Previously reported:

Panels purloined, Enfield install proceeds

by Robert Lynch; August 15, 2025

Enfield solar installer Rebekah Carpenter stated the obvious: “This is a bummer.”

At One AM on Sunday morning, August third, thieves drove their big pickup to behind the Enfield Town Hall.  They latched on to an open flatbed trailer loaded with solar panels, and drove it off.  Carpenter’s company, Fingerlakes Renewables, owned that trailer and those panels.  Some were soon slated for deployment atop the Town Hall under a state-granted project.  The trailer was found abandoned several days later in Alpine.  The panels were gone.  They still are.

Yet despite that theft, Fingerlakes Renewables’ solar installation atop the Town Hall, Enfield’s largely-vacated former highway garage, is nearly done.   As of Friday, August 15, Carpenter said all that essentially remains is an electrical inspection and then connecting the array to the power company’s grid.

“We already bought the panels and put them up,” Carpenter informed this writer just before Noon on Friday.  She said work may take “another day or so on the roof,” as the replacement panels’ mountings “fit us a little bit different.”

The fact that a trailer load of solar panels got stolen at the Enfield work site took a while to reach public attention.  Carpenter first wrote about it in a Facebook post Saturday, August 9.  Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond informed Town Board members at the board’s August 13 meeting by reading Carpenter’s post to them.

“Hey folks- about a week ago someone stole four pallets worth of solar panels (144 panels in total) from my trailer parked in Enfield,” Carpenter had posted.  “They abandoned the trailer so I have that back, but the panels were worth significantly more than the trailer,” Carpenter continued.

Contacted Friday, Rebekah Carpenter declined to state publicly the estimated value of the stolen panels taken.  She admitted their value was not covered by insurance.

“I’m essentially a solo business owner so this isn’t corporate thievery; they just took a huge amount of money from a business that doesn’t make a huge amount of money,” Carpenter’s August 9 posting lamented.

Asked why the theft had not delayed the Enfield project, Carpenter explained that after having learned of the disappearance, she’d notified her supplier and was overnighted replacement panels.  As her firm did not purchase Chinese-made panels, Carpenter explained that tariff-related or supply-chain issues did not impact her reorder.

Brian Jolly, an investigator with the Tompkins County Sheriff’s Office, reported Friday that his department’s investigation into the Enfield solar panel theft is continuing.  Jolly said that contents of Carpenter’s social media posting did not compromise the department’s investigation and that her comments could be shared more widely. (Need for that assurance delayed reporting this story.)

Having just learned of the theft and unaware of how widely knowledge of it had circulated, this Councilperson, Robert Lynch, had requested a closed, executive session of the Enfield Town Board August 13 to discuss the matter, to share among board members any confidential law enforcement information that might exist, and to explore the theft’s financial implications for the Town.  Supervisor Stephanie Redmond declined the executive session request.

“It’s all over Facebook, everybody knows” Redmond replied dismissively and with a lighthearted voice. 

“We have had an issue,” a more subdued Redmond acknowledged as she returned to the topic later in the meeting.  The Supervisor then read Carpenter’s August 9 Facebook post.

At its March meeting earlier this year, the Enfield Town Board awarded Fingerlakes Renewables the contract to install the Town Hall rooftop solar, the company’s $70,248 offer determined to be the “best value” among five competing bids submitted.  Fingerlakes Renewables, coincidentally, was the only Tompkins County-based firm to bid. 

A New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (“NYSERDA”) Clean Energy Communities grant covered most of the contract expense.  Though bids came in slightly over the Town’s initial $65,000 budget, the Town Board decided to proceed with the project given the expected long-term energy savings.

As Carpenter recalls, the flatbed carrying the panels arrived at the Enfield Town Hall site on the Friday before the overnight weekend theft.  Weather conditions delayed installation, so Carpenter remained unaware of the flatbed’s unauthorized removal until the following Wednesday, August 6.  That’s when Schuyler County authorities notified her of the empty trailer’s abandonment in Alpine.

“It was so out of view,” Carpenter remarked as to the trailer’s concealment behind the long, concrete block former highway garage.  “I didn’t tell people they were back there,” the business owner insisted.

Reportedly, an Enfield Volunteer Fire Company surveillance camera from a considerable distance away caught the best view of the Sunday morning theft.  Another camera, mounted upon the Enfield Town Hall, may have caught a glimpse of the incident as well.  But Town Board members were told Wednesday that the Town Hall camera and alarm system is old and outdated and did a poor job with identification.  The Town Board August 13 voted to spend just over $1,300 to upgrade the alarm system and buy another camera.

According to Carpenter’s Facebook posting, the vehicle that hitched onto the trailer was a dark gray Toyota Tacoma extended cab pickup, maybe 2009-2011 vintage.

Presumably to avoid theft, the panel-laden trailer could have been parked inside one of the locked, largely-unused highway equipment bays inside the building.  Why wasn’t that space used?

“We could have,” Carpenter answered with a sigh of regret peppered with an ample shake of 20/20 hindsight.   

“The most frustrating thing is there’s no use for these solar panels by anyone,” Carpenter explained.  There’s no real salvage price, she claimed.  “And you have to know what you’re doing to install solar panels,” she added.  It takes professional installers.  And the “inverters,” the electrical devices that interface the panels and the grid, were secured that night at Carpenter’s house.

It’s really an “impractical stack of stuff,” Carpenter said of what she suspects now sits in somebody’s storage shed .  Solar contractors won’t touch them, she maintained, as they’d suspect they’re stolen merchandise.  The only potential purchaser could be the occasional homeowner prospect.

Of the 144 solar panels purloined from behind the old Enfield highway barn, only 62 were destined for the Town Hall project.  The remaining 82, the contractor said, were intended for “three other jobs.”

“I’m not counting on getting them back, it’s a big loss” Rebekah Carpenter acknowledged.  But she’s taking the theft in stride.  “Worse things happen to people,” Carpenter reasoned.

###

The Tractor We Lost. The Price We Paid

by Robert Lynch; August 14, 2025

This is not a news story. This is commentary, pure commentary, my commentary.  Let’s get that straight up front.  As a news story, what happened this past night may never get reported.  Maybe it shouldn’t.  And I am not the best person to report it. Not only am I too close to what happened; my reporting it would only add fuel to an all too frightful fire.  And Enfield, you don’t need another fire right now.

Wednesday, August 13, just before we laid to rest a drawn-out Town Board meeting, I placed onto Enfield’s agenda a “Discussion Item”: “Town of Enfield Purchasing Practice and Policy.”  My request for dialogue followed our failed attempt in late-July to secure at auction a good-to-excellent used tractor for the Enfield Town Highway Department.

I’m mindful, I said, of the need to keep our focus on the merits of issues rather than the people involved, and I’d written my words in advance and read them verbatim from a script; stilted, yet necessary.  When I began my statement I never envisioned what would come afterward:

Board:

“Since our last meeting, July 18, the Town of Enfield lost out on a bargain.  As Councilperson, I hold a duty to our residents to minimize its chance of happening again. Put bluntly, I came up short.

“At a Special Meeting July 18, our Town Board, at the request of Highway Superintendent Rollins, authorized Superintendent Rollins to use up to $70,000 from the Highway Equipment Reserve Fund to purchase, at auction, a 2022 John Deere mower tractor.  Among the four Town Board members attending, the vote was unanimous.

“But we did not buy the tractor, despite Superintendent Rollins’ and our Board’s best efforts.  Here’s what happened:

“Superintendent Rollins and other parties participated in an Auctions International online auction July 21 for purchase of the John Deere mower tractor owned by the Town of Arcadia.  As scheduled, the auction closed at 6 PM that day.  During the auction’s final minutes, two bidders increased their offers back and forth, generally by $100 increments.  I presume Superintendent Rollins was one of those final bidders.  The auction closed.  The recorded high bid, by bidder “ssrebel56” was $61,100. 

“Auctions International records indicate that the tractor’s seller, the Town of Arcadia, declined to accept the closing high bid.  In accordance with the auction’s rules, the seller set a Minimum Bid of $90,000, which closing high bidders could match and then purchase the equipment.  The Town of Enfield, through Superintendent Rollins, did not match that minimum bid.

“In response to my email inquiry, Tom Kuhlman, Highway Superintendent for the Town of Arcadia, wrote me the following message August fourth about the tractor’s sale:

‘Yes I have found buyer, sold for $85,000.  Last conversation I had with your Superintendent he offered $75,000.  Said that’s all he had budgeted.  Sorry I couldn’t let it go for that!’

“Understandable.  But let me stop for a moment and make one point clear. Nothing I state here is intended to disparage the Highway Superintendent; his knowledge, judgment or competence or to undercut his authority.  Superintendent Rollins exercised discretion that this Town Board, explicitly or implicitly, has assigned his office.  I applaud the Highway Superintendent for having located this good, used tractor.  I encourage him to seek another one of comparable quality.

“Town Board policy and the consensus of this Board’s majority, as expressed to me by Town Supervisor Redmond in her email message of July 25, is that the Highway Superintendent, not the Town Board, holds final decision-making power regarding capital equipment purchases for the Town Highway Department.  As stated by Supervisor Redmond: 

‘The town board does not have authority to direct how the highway superintendent expends his equipment line. We have authorized him to utilize $70k from equipment reserves for the purchase. Anything beyond that is the highway superintendent’s discretion to utilize other lines of funding he has available.’

“I respectfully disagree with the wisdom of the referenced policy.  We, this Town Board, hold final account to our residents, our taxpayers, for making wise purchasing decisions in their behalf.  In time, I will move to modify Town Policy within the confines of the law, so as to accord this Town Board greater authority in the exercise of major capital expenditures; of equipment valued at perhaps over $20,000.  But for now, I accept Town Board consensus as the Supervisor has stated it.

“’The tractor is in excellent condition.  It is a good tractor,’ I informed this Town Board during our brief meeting of July 18.  I had personally inspected the tractor in Arcadia three days prior to the meeting; even though some Town officials, judging from their comments that night, had implied that I should not have performed my inspection.  I make no apologies.  I performed due diligence on behalf of my constituents.  If given the opportunity, I’d do so again.  Based on Highway Superintendent Kuhlman’s statement to me, an equivalent new tractor—Arcadia had just bought one—would cost Enfield $161,000, about twice the cost of the auctioned tractor.

“I do not blame our Highway Superintendent for Enfield’s failure to procure the used tractor.  I blame myself, and to some extent, I blame other members of this Town Board.  We failed to provide the Highway Superintendent the sufficient guidance we should have.

“When items go to auction, our Town Board cannot predict an exact sales price beforehand.  But we can state our preference for acceptable bidding limits.  We, this Town Board, did not do so.  ‘I’m willing to go to 100,’ one Town Board member, either Supervisor Redmond or Councilperson Hinkle, remarked that night during pre-vote discussions.  I should have joined her in stating that opinion.  I did not.  I regret not having done so.  If an apology to anyone needs be made, that’s the one I should make; to this Town, to its taxpayers.  A mower tractor purchase stands in our Capital Plan, its purchase now moved to 2026.  Our taxpayers may pay a painful price for the mistake we made last month.

“I recommend that in future decisions regarding the purchase of capital equipment made available at auction, we, the Town Board, provide clearer guidance as to how high an offer we would accept, where our comfort level lies.  Furthermore, we should always transfer sufficient funds from the applicable reserve account or accounts to cover that maximum acceptable bid.  Had we done so July 18, we might have saved Enfield taxpayers $75,000, maybe more. (Expect tractor prices to rise next year.)  We’d also have a like-new John Deere mower tractor.

“We, Town Board, can do better.  Let’s try.”

I then invited responses from others.  My request got answered.

****

Put bluntly, what flowed from my invitation can best be described as an “excoriation.” Our Town Supervisor, Stephanie Redmond, in a full-throated scold of me, faulted not only the procedural reforms I’d advanced; but also, more importantly—and at her argument’s core—my even having taken the initiative to inspect and inquire into the equipment the Highway Superintendent had attempted to buy, yet didn’t.  Redmond alleged I lacked the mechanical wisdom to evaluate the equipment considered.  Asked calmly, yet directly by me as to why he’d chosen not to offer more money for the tractor, Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy” Rollins answered it was because he didn’t want to.

Already, Supervisor Redmond’s avenging words have gained their permanent place in the meeting’s audio archives.  We can all listen to them and weep.  It would be better still if they wandered their way into the nearest wastebasket.

You’ll likely not read those words quoted by me.  I’m working too hard at the moment to mend the tattered shreds of Enfield civility.  Yet the opprobrium which our Town’s highest officer heaped upon an elected colleague that night truly matters.  Not only did our Supervisor shower irreparable embarrassment upon herself, she also diminished the stature of her office and the reputation of the beloved town she professes to serve.

Most dangerously, Supervisor Stephanie Redmond’s vitriol cast a haunting chill over that hot summer night’s meeting room.  It conveyed an air of retribution. 

I’d proposed purchasing policy reform.  The Supervisor advanced a correction of her own.  She’d have Town legal counsel draft a policy that would limit officials like me from any independent inquiry into the Highway Superintendent’s purchases, of my employing objective oversight.  Another Councilperson sought to dissuade the Supervisor from pursuing her initiative that far.  We’ll see if Redmond’s wishes grow legs as time passes.  Still, it’s obvious that reprisal these days does not confine itself to people and places far removed from Applegate Road.

In May 2021, in response to past squabbles long since forgotten, attorney and mediator Ronald Mendrick authored a report for Enfield.  It was commissioned by the Town Board, paid for by Town taxpayers, and discretely tucked away, yet accessible even today on the Town website for anyone to read. (Search the “For Residents” tab under “Report of Investigation.”) 

Ronald Mendrick interviewed 13 people then involved in Town government affairs.  He drew conclusions.  The mediator found that a “culture of controversy” had infected Town of Enfield politics and had done so for many years past.  It had festered to that day.  It had prompted back-and-forth bickering among those both in and out of power.  It had led to “yelling” and “swearing” at Town Board meetings.  Once, even law enforcement needed to intervene.  Mendrick offered recommendations on how we could all break the habit, the cycle,  the culture of controversy; how we could better behave, become more productive, and serve our constituents more effectively. Running 24 pages, it’s a long read.  But I encourage you read it.

Amid the clamorous criticisms and dispensable rebukes that punctuated the close of Enfield’s August 13 Town Board meeting, I sandwiched-in a single paragraph from the mediator’s voluminous report of four years past:

“[A]ll discussion by officials should address the issue, not the person suggesting or speaking about it. That is, in debate rather than address a person, speak about the issue and the direction to be advocated, even when supporting another’s position.  For example, instead of starting with ‘Jane has a good point, and I support her position,’ start with ‘adopting the resolution would be best for the Town because …’. Making it about the issue, not a person, sets the tone for respectful discussion of the merits and gets away from the personal attributions and feeling of personal attacks….”

During much of what I recited, the Supervisor talked over me.

Enfield needs better Town Board oversight in its management of capital purchases.  In time, perhaps with new people to work with, the change will happen, but not now.  In the Mendrick Report’s preamble, an unattributed source described Enfield as the “wild western hills” of Tompkins County.  At least a few of us would like to see those hills flattened a bit.  That they have not been. 

I attempted to take the high road this past Wednesday night.  I sought to address a tough issue, one made controversial only because one or more members of our leadership team had chosen to personalize the debate.  The “high road” proved too potholed to navigate that evening.  My chosen vehicle sadly headed toward the ditch.  Maybe in time—with everyone’s help—we can steer it back toward the center line for the betterment of all.

Peace.

Bob Lynch

###

Posted Previously:

Board of Elections to Stay Downtown… Someplace

by Robert Lynch; August 6, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

The Previous story; since updated:

Lansing Bound: Board of Elections, Assessment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

Bad News Budget

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

Reporting and Analysis by Robert Lynch; July 29, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that was then; this is now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

Posted Previously:

T.C. Legislature doubles-down on DEI

Reporting and analysis by Robert Lynch; July 19, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The debate over wordsmithing continued. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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