Economic case pushed for Center of Government siting
Reporting and Analysis by Robert Lynch; March 4, 2025
A prime reason to build a $40 Million Center of Government downtown next to the County Courthouse is so that government employees will continue to prop up the Downtown Ithaca economy, an architect guiding Tompkins County in the pricey project argued to lawmakers Tuesday.
“The main reason that we’re saying this is the right location for the Center of Government is related to the economic impact that it would have in Downtown Ithaca,” Quay Thompson, a principal architect with Holt Architects, Tompkins County’s design firm, advised a Tompkins County legislative committee.
Thompson pushed back on a hypothetical alternative—advanced by some, though still not considered seriously by most legislators—that County Government instead build its new, eight-figure office building on cheaper, more objection-free land, a “Greenfield,” somewhere outside Ithaca’s city limits.
“So not only would you lose the benefits of bringing all of the county employees right to the heart of Downtown Ithaca, but you’d also conceptually lose the employees that are currently in the Old Jail and the Tompkins Building if we were to consolidate all of them together at an off-site location,” Thompson said, albeit deceptively.
The “Do it for Downtown” argument may fall flat with some rural Tompkins County residents, taxpayers who wince at paying a premium price for an office complex buried in the bowels of Ithaca, an increasingly congested place many hate to visit, where crime is perceived as on the rise and where (paid, of course) parking is catch-as-catch-can.
But what architect Thompson and his team must work on most immediately is a presentation to the New York State Historic Preservation Office, the agency commonly known as “SHPO.”
The SHPO review centers on the County’s intent to “deconstruct” (i.e. demolish) three existing buildings on the Center of Government site. In 2021, Tompkins County brought the former Key Bank branch at Buffalo and Tioga Streets and the one-time Wiggins Law Office building adjacent to that bank. County Government would raze both buildings to make way for its new five-story office building. Its plans also call for tearing down the so-called “Building C,” the current home to the Tompkins County Board of Elections and the Assessment Department.
One year ago, alerted by the preservationist group Historic Ithaca, SHPO bureaucrats began to express concerns about the proposed demolitions. SHPO holds influence since the Center of Government site lies within the DeWitt Park Historic District. The structures may not themselves be historic, but regulators regard them as “contributing structures” to the district.
The Tompkins County-SHPO standoff has dragged on for a year. The agency demands input and warns that evading its authority could compromise Tompkins County’s ability to secure state and federal grants to help underwrite the office project. About the extent of that leverage—or the range of grants affected—local officials remain unsure.
Holt’s design team will submit to SHPO by March 20th its final justifications for the buildings’ deconstruction. SHPO representatives plan to tour the downtown site April 10.
The Tompkins County Legislature’s Downtown Facilities Special Committee took no action Tuesday. But unless plans change drastically, legislators appear moving unimpeded toward building the Center of Government on the downtown site with a groundbreaking, state willing, targeted for January 2027.
“What SHPO wants to see is have you done due diligence in trying to (sort of) create a solution for your project that preserves the three buildings… reuses and preserves them,” Thompson advised the committee Tuesday.
The problem is that keeping the old buildings is not what either the architect or most legislators want. So what Holt’s team will do instead, Thompson made clear, is to make the most persuasive argument as to why as many buildings as possible should come down. And it’s in the context of demolition advocacy that the issue of downtown economic vitality secures the architect’s attention.
Thompson called it, “the importance of locating the Center of Government downtown in Ithaca from an economic perspective.”
What the architect plans to present SHPO preservationists are three principal options. The first would retain all three of the structures and somehow build a Center of Government around them. A second option would keep only the former bank building at the corner as some sort of public-facing entrance and build a government working space in a new building behind it. The third, and the preferred, option would tear all three buildings down.
Regarding the option of keeping all buildings standing, “That’s an option that we’re trying to take off the table,” Thompson admitted.
“Leaving the three buildings on the site and building a really tall, skinny building in the middle isn’t really a viable option,” the architect opined. A new office building, he explained, must be built with an expected 80-100 year life span in mind. Moreover, one can imagine that a tall, odd-shaped monstrosity could overpower the adjacent DeWitt Park. That’s the historic space SHPO most wants to protect.
Quay Thompson hadn’t even planned to consider as an option moving the building’s site out of downtown. Only when Department of Planning and Sustainability Commissioner Katie Borgella raised the alternative did the architect latch onto it as it could sway SHPO regulators into endorsing demolition.
“Should we include a project option of moving the Center of Government to a ‘greenfield’ outside the boundary of the City of Ithaca?” Borgella asked. “It does help tell the story for why we would be investing in downtown and what the benefits are of that,” she said.
“So you’re asking if we should build this in Lansing instead of downtown?” Downtown Facilities Committee Chair, Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown, asked the planner.
“I’m asking if we should include that in the report as an option,” Borgella answered. “If it is, then it seems like it’s something SHPO should understand that if this doesn’t get approved, that (relocation) might be one of the options that the County move forward,” she said.
Some Tompkins County legislators, most notably Dryden’s Mike Lane, hate the idea of “building in a cornfield,” as Lane has derisively put it. Others, however, may prove more open.
“I’m not against moving the building location if it’s counter-productive,” Brown said, presumably referring to the obstacles faced by staying downtown and facing SHPO’s continued roadblocks. “It is what it is, right?” Brown posited rhetorically.
“We’ve always looked at… keeping the center of our government in the county seat, which is the City of Ithaca,” Mike Lane insisted. True, Tioga County built its offices in the proverbial “cornfield,” Lane acknowledged. But he thinks that was a mistake, and that his county should not follow Tioga’s lead.
“Yes, it’s cheaper, faster to do that,” Lane admitted. Nonetheless, he said, “Ithaca is central from all of the surrounding areas,” and a building’s location should consider that.
Toward that issue of centrality, some on the committee raised transportation concerns. An estimated one-third of Tompkins County residents live close enough to the downtown Courthouse complex to either walk there, bike there, or take a reliable TCAT bus.
“More and more people that I’m meeting and talking to downtown are foregoing getting a car,” Ulysses-Enfield’s Anne Koreman observed. “Some people don’t even have a driver’s license,” she said. An out-of-the-way office building, she argued, would prove inconvenient for them.
Whether through institutional ignorance or by purposeful design, architect Quay Thompson spread much misinformation about the committee’s meeting room Tuesday, arguments that would work to dispel thought of a more rural siting and keep the focus on downtown.
“So we have three buildings that we’re preparing to take down that are currently unoccupied,” Thompson told the committee. “One has become a homeless shelter. They’re deteriorating, and we haven’t been able to find tenants for ‘em for the last number of years.”
“We’ve invested a lot in the Old Jail,” the architect continued. “If we moved this project off-site into a greenfield, those buildings would continue to sit there and probably be sold off to someone else, and the investment that we’re planning for those other two buildings wouldn’t occur.”
So wrong, so misleading on so many fronts:
First, only two of the three buildings targeted-for-deconstruction are “unoccupied.” Building C is—and has remained for many years—very much in use. It’s a county office building.
Secondly, the two other buildings, the former bank and the law office, were bought specifically to be torn down to build the Center of Government. Tompkins County has never made a serious attempt to rent them out. The old bank is now a Code-Blue wintertime homeless shelter only because no one could find any other place for the state-mandated service.
And what about the Old Jail and the Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins Building, the 1854 Courthouse? No, they won’t become vacant. The Gov. Tompkins Building houses the County Legislative Chambers, and no one’s talked about moving that venue. The Old Jail was repurposed in the 1990’s. Renovations to either of the buildings would be made only to re-accommodate departments moving in after the current occupants expectedly move out.
But again, consider the arguments advanced here as bargaining points to bolster demolition’s case in any forthcoming negotiations with SHPO.
“Certainly, if we’re talking about moving off campus and letting three buildings become abandoned and not making the improvements in the two buildings that we were talking about, they can’t not look at the whole project, the whole package that we’re talking about,” architect Thompson reasoned to legislators, trying to think as he thinks the state office’s preservationists would.
Might the argument work, as biased and deceptive as some may see it? We can only wait and learn what happens in April. That’s when SHPO comes to town.
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Local “Living Wage” jumps by a third
by Robert Lynch; March 2, 2025
It’s a pay rate many a local employer would be hard-pressed to provide and many a local worker can only envy at a distance.
Reflecting inflation-driven increases in basic necessities, the so-called “Living Wage” for Tompkins County has grown to $24.82 per hour, according to figures released February 26 by the Tompkins County Workers’ Center, an Ithaca-based employee advocacy group.
The revised Living Wage stands 34.5 per cent higher than a comparable calculation the Workers’ Center made two years ago.
“It’s obviously a huge increase,” Workers’ Center Director Pete Myers admitted to a radio interviewer one day after his group had made the new number public. “There are some employers that are going to have a really difficult time with this,” Myers Thursday advised the morning host on WHCU.
To state the just-released Living Wage a little differently, paying $24.82 per hour would earn an employee nearly $200 per day, a thousand dollars a week ($992.80) or $51,625 per year.
The Tompkins Living Wage calculation stands well above—a full 60 per cent above—the legally-enforced $15.50 per hour “Minimum Wage” that New York State currently imposes on employers upstate. The state’s Minimum Wage rose by 50 cents last January. It’ll rise by another 50 cents next year.
“Tompkins County, New York, is the most expensive place to live in Upstate New York, and by some measures one of the most expensive places to live in the United States,” the Workers’ Center asserts on its website.
While the wage increase may seem staggering, it registers not far different from the number local officials had predicted last summer when Myers and his supporters brought their complaint about inadequate local wages to the Tompkins County Legislature. Tompkins County Government already applies Living Wage standards to its county workforce.
In his Thursday broadcast interview, Myers claimed as many as 23,000 employees in Tompkins County earn below the Living Wage. And the worker advocate conceded that for some employers, particularly those in the health care industry, a sector dependent on state subsidies—he singled out Racker (the former Franziska Racker Centers) as an example—the new, higher wage will likely prove impossible to meet.
Myers also acknowledged the special burden placed on “mom and pop” businesses. “This will be really hard to keep up with,” he said of the new benchmark wage and owners’ resulting struggle.
The Workers’ Center website credits researchers at the Ithaca and Buffalo “Co-Labs” for Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations for computing the revised Living Wage. “The latest study was updated to take into account the extreme inflation that took place this past year,” the website states.
“These are basic needs,” Myers said in the WHCU interview regarding the factors driving the revised statistic. Increased rent stands foremost among these, he said. “Rent has increased pretty substantially in the last year,” Myers stated.
The Living Wage calculator, posted by the Workers’ Center, estimates current countywide apartment rental at $1,489 a month, up 17 percent from the $1,276 calculated two years ago.
Still, many may find that even this new, higher rental number seems low, especially for those living in the City of Ithaca, where one must compete for scarce housing with throngs of college students.
Transportation costs have also gone up, Myers said. The new calculations peg local transportation cost at $520 per month, up from $320 two years ago.
Among the other monthly costs estimated: Food at $341; Health Care at $348; and “Taxes” at $909.43.
“It’s definitely a big number,” Pete Myers said of the newly-computed Living Wage. “But for a lot of people it’s not going to be enough to live on.”
And the worker advocate pointed out that the ILR School calculations target costs for only a single person, not a couple or a family. If children were factored in, Myers conceded, the livable pay rate could climb as high as $40 an hour, a plateau impossible for most employers to reach.
Paying a Living Wage is strictly voluntary, not the law, although some local activists have sought to persuade Tompkins County to wrest authority from New York State and enact a stand-alone local Minimum Wage, one that would mirror Myers’ higher number. Doing so would require challenging a long-standing court precedent that assigns the New York State Legislature exclusive power to set minimum compensation.
During his radio interview, Myers claimed 127 local employers voluntarily comply with the Living Wage standard. But he acknowledged that this number may become a high-water mark.
“I presume we’re going to lose a lot of Living Wage employers because of such a large increase,” Myers said.
That may already have occurred. As of February 25, the Workers’ Center’s website listed 66 “Living Wage Employers” as certified. That list includes Tompkins County Government, the Ithaca Teachers Association, and the towns of Ithaca, Caroline, and Danby. Conspicuously absent from the list are the City of Ithaca, the Ithaca City School District, and most noticeably, Cornell University.
The Workers’ Center advises that it will allow employers up to one year to “catch up” to the new, higher Living Wage. To retain certification, employers will need to pay at least $24.82 by the end of December.
Early last July, Democrat Veronica Pillar placed before a Tompkins County legislative committee a resolution that by its title would have moved toward implementing a higher County-wide minimum wage through a local law. Its title overstated expectation. The resolution was mostly process, not substance. And by the time Pillar’s bold move got watered-down and debated to death by the full Legislature one month later, it stopped short of snatching away state authority. Instead, it merely set aside money for a consultant to study the prospect.
Nevertheless, it was during those summertime meetings that Pete Myers first predicted that a $24 an hour Living Wage would be coming soon. Now that it’s here, we can look back and say Myers underestimated reality by nearly a dollar an hour.
But a Living Wage is more than just organized (or disorganized) labor’s lofty aspiration. It can hit taxpayers soon—and hard.
Remember, Tompkins County Government is a Living Wage employer. Its mandates demand payment of living wages. And because they do, our county budgets next year may require padding to cushion the wage burden blow.
“We are a Living Wage employer,” Lansing legislator Mike Sigler reminded colleagues last August when Myers first predicted a $24 Living Wage. “If you just do back-of-the envelope math… you’re looking at over $8 Million it would end up costing the County.”
Sigler that night voted against proceeding with the consultant’s study, as did two other lawmakers. The other eleven members of the Legislature supported moving forth. Nothing’s known to have surfaced publicly from that study to date. And even were the experts to chart a path forward, some recognize that challenging state authority could prove futile.
“A lot of employers are going to feel this is unrealistic,” Pete Myers admitted in his latest radio interview as he addressed the new Living Wage. “So I’m concerned about it,” he said.
Pete’s not the only one. It costs a lot to live in Tompkins County; or to pay people sufficiently to remain living here. Perhaps it’s the price Ithaca pays for its prosperity. If more small businesses shutter, or your taxes go up, this new Living Wage may stand at fault for the new reality we’re all about to face. Better brace for it.
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Posted previously:
Onward, to Albany!
Tompkins Legislature urges TCIDA expansion
[And posted after: Tompkins DEI Report carves partisan divide]
by Robert Lynch; February 22, 2025
The Ithaca Board of Education wants its voice to be heard. So does the Town of Enfield. But first, New York lawmakers must grant their consent. And this week the Tompkins County Legislature took a needed step toward making that happen.
By its unanimous vote February 18th—Ulysses’ Anne Koreman was excused, but had previously stated her support—the Tompkins County Legislature endorsed and forwarded to our state Senator and Assemblymember a request for so-called “Home Rule” legislation that would expand membership in the Tompkins County Industrial Development Agency (IDA). It would raise membership from seven people to nine.
More than just adding chairs around the table, the enlargement is seen by some as a tool to infuse wider community input into the agency’s decisions, particularly those involving tax abatements granted for housing developments and solar farms.
“This is diversity. This is inclusion. This is giving many voices a chance to be heard,” this writer, Enfield Councilperson Robert Lynch, addressed the issue at the meeting’s start. The Enfield Town Board had adopted its own resolution in January calling for local and state lawmakers to expand the IDA by the two extra seats. The Enfield resolution would have governmental leaders assign one of those two positions to someone who would represent rural towns and villages.
The IDA board has long remained at seven members. And it will take an act of the New York State Legislature to change that. The current expansion initiative began last November when the Ithaca Board of Education recommended legislators take steps to grant it—or some other Tompkins County school district—a single seat at the table. Momentum behind the expansion has grown ever since.
When the current expansion plan cleared a County Legislature committee February 5th, at least one legislator, Ithaca’s Rich John, who doubles as the IDA current Chair, expressed misgivings. He feared that a school district representative would become a roadblock, a person repeatedly vetoing otherwise-worthy IDA initiatives. John repeated his concerns to the full Legislature this past Tuesday, yet added his affirmative vote, nevertheless.
“I’m willing to vote for this resolution,” John assured legislators, “but I do have real concerns.” Emails he’d received in the resolution’s support had alleged “the IDA has undermined the schools,” John reported.
“It’s just absolutely untrue,” the Ithaca Democrat said of the critical assertion. “Pardon me, I don’t want to get hyper-political here, but it’s like listening to our president talk about tariffs and who pays for them. People say things that are just not true,” John stated.
Later, a fellow Democrat, Veronica Pillar, tempered Rich John’s assertion with a healthy dose of doubt.
“Someone said it’s not true that the IDA has harmed the school districts,” Pillar remarked, explicitly declining to attribute the refutation to her colleague one seat away. “I think none of us here probably know. It’s not our place to say. And this is why it would be great to have more diverse voices at the table.”
What emerged from committee and secured legislative support that night looked a bit different from what the Ithaca Schools or the Town of Enfield had first recommended. The County Legislature’s proposal intentionally avoids creating specific new seats that clearly-defined constituencies would subsequently fill. Instead, the adopted resolution envisions expanding the IDA board’s number by adding two more “at-large” seats, raising at-large membership from its current four persons to as many as six.
As far as recruiting those half-dozen at-large members, the resolution’s text opts for ambiguity, stating only:
“That the appointing body of the TCIDA shall seek to fill at-large seats with a diverse representative board including the following representatives from as many of the following as possible, both urban and rural areas of the County, a member from the Ithaca Area Economic Development Board of Directors… municipal taxing jurisdictions, school districts, organized labor, finance & banking, development & construction and economic development appointed in a manner consistent with New York State law and local practices.”
School district hardliners may find the new textual vagueness hard to swallow. They may need to assure themselves of guaranteed input whenever tax abatements get decided. As for Enfield, this writer/ Councilperson accepted the new language as a fair compromise. For one thing, by stating particular interest group appointment as an aspirational goal rather than making it a promise, one evades the thorny problem of multiple governing jurisdictions squabbling among themselves as to whom to designate for an assigned seat.
As presently comprised, the IDA Board of Directors draws three of its members—one short of a majority—from the County Legislature itself. The Ithaca Area Economic Development Board, a corporate appendage of the IDA, appoints a fourth member.
The City of Ithaca, by recent practice, has landed the fifth seat, although it’s technically only an “at-large” appointment. Under pressure from worker interests back in 2021, the County Legislature has ever since then reserved one position on the IDA Board of Directors for a representative of organized labor.
Before the County Legislature took its vote February 18, Lansing lawmaker Mike Sigler sought assurance that the proposed restructuring would not jeopardize labor’s guaranteed presence.
Last October, the Tompkins County IDA granted its largest tax abatement ever, a 20-year, $85 Million relief package, to Ithaca’s SouthWorks development, an ambitious private initiative to transform the abandoned Morse Chain/Emerson Power factory on South Hill into housing, commercial, industrial and retail space. Credit the SouthWorks abatement controversy for driving the Ithaca Board of Education and its unionized teachers toward requesting school-centric IDA membership.
Rich John staunchly disagrees with his naysayers. But school officials and union leaders view the massive SouthWorks abatement as sucking money out of the tax base rather than contributing money to it. The critics’ schoolhouse math only works if one assumes SouthWorks—and lesser projects like it—would still happen were the abatements not to exist.
The Ithaca Teachers Association publicly opposed the SouthWorks abatement last October. Both Ithaca School Board member Jill Tripp and Ithaca Teachers Association President Katheryn Cernera spoke in favor of IDA expansion when the enabling resolution cleared a legislative committee earlier this month.
“The recent consideration of the SouthWorks industrial project, the decision to approve the project despite strong concerns about the impact of this project on the Ithaca City School District, and the defense of this decision… all prove that continuing to approve school tax abatements for industrial development projects without input from our local schools is a tremendous mistake,” Cernera told the Housing and Economic Development Committee.
County political leaders are listening. “I think one thing that I’ve heard very loud and clear in meeting with the teachers’ unions, in meeting with school board members, in meeting with constituents, was that there’s definitely a demand for more voices to be heard on the IDA,” legislator Shawna Black asserted in defense of Board expansion the night the legislature met.
But Rich John defends the IDA. He says the agency, since its birth decades ago, has pumped forth enough prosperity to produce $71 Million annually in local tax revenues.
“The IDA in Tompkins County has been remarkably successful in building tax base, in creating jobs, in furthering energy efficiency, in furthering affordable housing,” John counseled the Legislature.
IDA’s critics, John asserted, “seem to believe that we are giving money away to developers. We don’t do that. We do not abate existing taxes. The abatement only applies to new value, the bricks and mortar that are added,” he said. “That abatement phases out over time, and then they pay full taxes just like any other property owner.”
But 20 years for SouthWorks—or 30 years for Enfield’s Norbut Solar Farm—is a long, long wait. And local taxpayers, along with those who represent them, can be of the impatient type.
“I can tell you as far as Enfield is concerned, we would not be an automatic ‘no,’” this Councilperson assured Tompkins County’s legislators, while also acknowledging that municipalities and school districts, “shut out of the process” often have had to “compromise with our revenues” when tax abatements get struck.
“We would have an open mind and look at these matters and decide whether it’s in the best public interest overall in Tompkins County,” this writer assured lawmakers.
Rich John will be leaving the Tompkins County Legislature at year’s end. So will Mike Lane, the Legislature’s longest-tenured member. He’s also a former IDA chair.
“I would just remind everybody that this is an Industrial Development Agency,” Lane counseled. “And where we’ve gone astray is because we have become mostly a housing development organization,” he said. “We don’t need any more big box apartment complexes downtown that are having a hard time renting out.”
Mike Lane, quite transparently, referenced Library Place, the tax abated, Travis-Hyde developed senior housing project at Ithaca’s Court and Cayuga Streets. Developers tore down the Old County Library, got a tax abatement, built the apartment house despite protracted delays, and recently had to restructure their bargain, in part, by letting younger tenants live there.
“We need more light industry, the kind that we used to put up at the airport,” Lane reasoned. And why should we reshape priorities? Lane says it’s because new industry is going to Cortland and Cayuga and Tioga Counties instead.
****
It’s a truism: Big box housing gets pricey, yet creates few, if any permanent jobs. Factories employ people. There’s a big difference there. And many long-term residents, like Mike Lane (and also this writer) remember when IDA abatements helped build places like Borg Warner in Lansing. Now they underwrite high-end, high-rise housing that’s here, there… and seemingly everywhere. Set that issue aside as another challenge for another day.
But the Tompkins County Legislature has acted. Those who represent us in Albany will be asked to pass the Home Rule legislation that would expand the Tompkins County Industrial Development Agency. Bills like this often wait until the bitter end. Expect legislative action sometime in May or maybe early-June. Governor Hochul could wait until year’s end to give her signature. In the meantime, we wait.
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Tompkins DEI Report carves partisan divide
Reporting and analysis by Robert Lynch; February 21, 2025
President Donald Trump wasn’t in Tompkins County legislative chambers last Tuesday night. But his shadow was.
After a nearly hour-long debate over a matter that wasn’t even expected to have been talked about, the Tompkins County Legislature voted 10-3 along strict party lines to adopt the “Institutionalizing Equity Report,” a dense, reticularly-scripted, DEI-centric diversity roadmap heralded to become the “foundational document for embedding equity within all levels of County government” according to the words of the resolution that gave it power.
Charlene Holmes, Tompkins County’s Chief Equity and Diversity Officer (CEDO) since mid-2023, claimed credit for authorship. We’re told the 52-page, data-driven document took her two years to compile. Its text was not made part of the meeting’s published agenda, but instead hitched to it through a hard-to-find data link. The report will eventually be made “publicly accessible” on the Tompkins County website, the adopted resolution promises.
The County Legislature has long proclaimed its embrace of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI). “Inclusion through Diversity” occupies a prominent position of honor as the footer of Tompkins County’s letterhead. Tompkins County was a first among upstate New York counties to recruit a Chief Equity and Diversity Officer. Its newly-hired County Administrator is African-American. So is its Commissioner of Personnel.
But with DEI having become the newly- targeted bad boy of the freshly-minted Trump Administration, the voluminous report that a majority of Tompkins’ legislators gleefully adopted Tuesday could also paint a bright, MAGA-generated bullseye on everything Tompkins County says or does. It may even cost us money.
Still, Tompkins County’s progressive Democrats eagerly raced to their battle stations February 18th to defend what CEDO Holmes had proudly and methodically written. What’s more, some lawmakers came close to tarring any colleague who might critique the report, accusing them of being someone at the inside periphery of racially-unacceptable thought.
Each of the Legislature’s three Republicans; Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown, Lansing’s Mike Sigler, and Groton’s Lee Shurtleff, voted against the report’s adoption. All ten Democrats voted their approval. (Ulysses’ Anne Koreman didn’t attend.)
“I’m not comfortable voting for this because I really don’t understand it,” a diffident, bewildered Randy Brown stated as he launched the marathon discussion after having pulled the report’s authorizing resolution from a multi-measure “consent agenda.” Had it languished there, lawmakers would likely have routinely ushered it to adoption without a whisper.
As the 52-minute debate dragged on, partisans threw some of the sharpest rhetorical elbows witnessed of late. Sparring started when Mike Sigler acknowledged he’d opposed creating the CEDO’s job in the first place, back in 2019.
“I took a lot of heat for that,” Sigler acknowledged about opposing creating the job that Holmes now administers. Sigler said his present concern is akin to what it was back then. “What is the metric of success?” Sigler asked. “How successful have we been when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusiveness?”
The Ithaca Town’s Amanda Champion, one of the report’s—and Charlene Holmes’—strongest defenders, insisted the number-driven document is a success metric in itself.
“It’s pretty clear,” said Champion, “that the goal is to collect data and to find out where we’re helping people, where we’re not helping people, where departments are helping people, where departments could do better, look at some of the challenges that departments are having and help them; that’s the goal.”
To Champion, process—process alone—can gauge success. Some may demand more meat on those DEI bones.
The resolution that legislators adopted February 18th lauds the Institutionalizing Equity Report as, “a comprehensive framework to advance and embed equity across County operations,” a framework “utilizing data-driven indicators” to do so. Yes, the document too often reads like a doctoral thesis.
“Our approach to embedding and institutionalizing equity within Tompkins County’s operations is guided by a comprehensive methodology that integrates strategic planning, equity indicators, and the Equity Mindedness Framework (EMF),” page 16 of Holmes’ work product states.
And one might ask, what exactly does an “Equity Mindedness Framework” entail? Holmes defines it:
“EMF provides a comprehensive framework for organizations to institutionalize equity by using evidence to inform targeted interventions, prioritizing the needs of marginalized groups, embedding equity into institutional practices, dismantling harmful systemic structures, and continuously improving their equity efforts. This structured approach helps organizations create lasting and meaningful change towards achieving equity across all aspects of their operations and impact within their communities.”
Hmmm. Good luck to Highway Director Jeff Smith in explaining that word salad to the typical snow plow driver at the department’s next diversity training seminar. Smith shouldn’t have to explain. It’s academic circumlocution; shredded lettuce dressed up and imitate intelligent insight. (Sadly, there is no “Plain language” version.)
As Tuesday’s debate wandered on, emotions heightened, and reality crept in from the edges.
“Diversity and inclusion, I think are fairly agreed-upon concepts,” Ithaca’s Rich John remarked. “It’s the ‘equity’ word that people struggle with,” he observed, “And what does that mean? And it can mean basic fairness. But it also can support that we’re going to try to do something to address past wrongs and rebalance as a result of that… and I don’t know how we can do that, frankly.”
Rich John then drew his argument more to the point,
“We also have to recognize in the last election that there are lots of people in our community all around us that voted for the Administration that is in place right now. They’re here. They’re our neighbors. And part of what drove them to vote as they did, I believe, is a deep skepticism about DEI,” Rich John maintained. “They don’t understand it. They think it’s doing things that shouldn’t be done.”
“So I don’t think there’s truly a consensus in Tompkins County,” John posited. John, himself, doesn’t see the report as “threatening or bad,” but he fears many others do. “And I think that’s on us that we need to bring our community along on this,” he said. “I don’t think we can say there is a consensus. Sadly, there isn’t.”
Rich John called for delaying the Legislature’s vote. Delay didn’t happen.
Liberals, Democrats like Shawna Black, exuded profound unease, maybe sensing that Trump—or at least Trump-ism—had somehow stolen into legislative chambers that night.
“God, I honestly don’t even know where to begin,” Black, the Legislature’s former chair, reacted in distress; disbelief. “I (Whew) feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone right now.” Black seemed to lose her train of thought. “It’s crazy times right now,” she remarked.
“We know what our community wants, it’s loud and clear,” Black continued. There’s no question where we need to go and how we need to vote on this… I feel we’re going back to the Dark Ages even debating this.”
Legislator Travis Brooks, African American, said he’s felt the sting of prejudicial preconceptions himself. His name on a job application suggests one kind of person; his showing up for the interview reveals another. Brooks said interviewers might expect at viewing his name to hear country music. Instead they see dreadlocks and tattoos.
“When you have people that don’t look like you, when you have different backgrounds, it enriches wherever you work, and it creates diversity, it creates thought, it creates a better product for the community that you serve,” Brooks asserted.
Mike Sigler took a second turn at the mic. Sigler sensed a mood in the room he didn’t like.
“I’m a little disappointed, frankly, in some of the things that my colleagues have said, because what they’re doing is they’re making this into ‘if you don’t vote the way that I believe you should vote, that you are on the other side and don’t believe in these things.’” Sigler stated. He said that’s wrong.
The Republican lawmaker insisted the issue is not about Trump. He said he opposed the CEDO position’s creation long before the current Administration took office. And Sigler insisted that most Americans still oppose racism.
“Are there racists in the country? Yes,” Sigler acknowledged. “Have they died off? No, they haven’t… Is it pre-Civil Rights era? No. That is an unbelievable statement, frankly, to say that we’ve made no progress in the last 70 years. That takes me aback.”
As to the DEI report, Sigler said, “Í think we can fight racism, yes, without this. I’m sorry. I thought that five years ago. I think that now.”
What’s more, Sigler continued, DEI should not confine itself to people of color. What about Asians, a minority whose percentage within Tompkins County, statistics reveal, outnumber that of blacks.
“Are we going out and actively recruiting the Asian community to the positions within the county?” Sigler questioned. “These are the kind of metrics I’m talking about.”
To the best of this writer’s knowledge, no Asian heads a top-level Tompkins County department directly answerable to the County Legislature.
“So Mike, you want data about who we’re actively recruiting,” Champion responded , peeved he would ask. “That’s what this report does,” Holmes’ most ardent defender emphasized.
Amanda Champion grew louder, increasingly animated. She looked directly Mike Sigler’s way.
About the report: “It’s all about who we are hiring; who are we not hiring. Are they men? Are they women? How do they identify? That’s what the whole thing is; it’s data!” Champion exclaimed. “And if you’re scared of the data because it doesn’t look the way you want it to look, then you’re the one with the problem.”
“And I do not think that it’s fair for you to say that it’s not fair to you,” Champion retorted, tossing out a feminist barb along the path that everyone’s female ancestors, including Sigler’s, had been “put in their place for eons.”
One other issue, less contentious, crept into the discussion that night. Groton’s Shurtleff noted that CEDO Holmes had buried on page 48 of her report her aspiration to expand her own position to become an entire County government office this year, presumably with added staff and expenses. Shurtleff couldn’t support such an expansion.
Charlene Holmes conceded she’d reached a trifle.
“You have to put it out there,” Holmes said of her CEDO Office initiative. “I put it out there; I took a chance,,, I just took what you guys already had and I put it in a pretty bow, and I said look at what we could do if we were to take what we’ve already done and enhance the work.”
Government always grows that way. Charlene Holmes’ report survived, but her position’s expansion will probably not, at least not this year. Money is tight.
****
“Looking forward, the ongoing evaluation of our efforts through tools like the climate survey, bias reporting structure, and regular progress updates will ensure that the County’s commitment to equity remains dynamic and responsive,” Tompkins County’s newly-adopted Institutionalizing Equity Report states in its concluding paragraph. “These efforts, grounded in transparency, accountability, and continuous learning, will drive Tompkins County toward an inclusive future where all individuals are empowered to thrive.”
Enjoy the word salad. Some in government choose to write that way. For Charlene Holmes sake, let’s hope President Trump isn’t sampling the lettuce.
###
Also from the Legislature:
“There’s a Time for These Things”
Mike Lane, longest-tenured T.C. Legislator, to retire
by Robert Lynch; February 18, 2025
If the Tompkins County Legislature can be said to have one statesman—more than just a mere politician—that man of elevated stature is Mike Lane. And at the end of this year, Mike Lane will be gone.
Mike Lane’s served in the Legislature longer than has anyone else now there.
Saving his announcement for the ornate venue of legislative chambers, where he sits at the end-most seat of the oval, nearest the chairperson’s podium, Mike Lane invoked a Biblical passage from Ecclesiastes Tuesday night as the centrist Democrat revealed his plans not to seek reelection this fall representing Dryden in the seat he’s held off-and-on since 1993.
“It’s the Bible that teaches us that for everything there is a season; a season to reap and a season to sow. And that’s true of public service and elective office,” Lane began his somber, measured, three-minute announcement.
“But everything has a season,” Lane continued, “and at this point I think the season is for me to say tonight that I don’t intend to seek reelection to the Legislature this fall.”
“There’s a time for these things,” a reflective Mike Lane reckoned.
After he delivered his message to a hushed legislative chamber, lawmakers, administrators, and guests provided Mike Lane a standing ovation.
“All the institutional memory is leaving,” texted one seasoned hand of Tompkins County government upon being informed of Lane’s agonizing verdict. “Sorry, but not surprised,” was that retiree’s reaction.
As incumbent Tompkins County legislators have, one-by-one—sometimes in groups—announced their reelection or retirement plans in recent weeks, a process dating back to before Christmas, Mike Lane remained mum. He’s served in the Legislature for seven, four-year terms. It marks continuous service for more than 30 years, excepting one election cycle when a Republican ousted Lane from office.
Mike Lane is now in his mid-70’s. We’ve been told he’s winding down his law practice. Some have suspected this might be the moment he’d choose to step aside. They were right.
“I’ve had the distinct honor and privilege to serve the people of the Village of Freeville, the Village of Dryden, and the area surrounding them in the Town of Dryden,” Lane took note in Tuesday’s remarks. “I’ve done my very best for them,” he asserted.
“I’ve never shied from taking stands that I thought were appropriate and in their best interest,” the retiring incumbent continued. “I listened to them. I learned from them. Sometimes I went against what I personally thought because I felt that being a representative meant that I should try to represent the views of my constituents, and of Tompkins County as a whole,” Lane observed.
And as he spoke—at times choking back emotion—Lane attempted a lighthearted departure. He quipped that “if all things were equal,” he’d serve, voters willing, “until they carried me out feet first.” A keen observer could understand how that might, indeed, have been the case. Mike Lane always made clear he loved his job, his legislative service.
Mike Lane is the second-to-last of the 14 current Tompkins County legislators to reveal his or her reelection intentions. Only first-term Republican Lee Shurtleff of Groton has not announced his plans. And Shurtleff declined to tip his hand Tuesday during his own speaking privileges on the Legislature’s floor.
Only this week did news widely circulate that another long-time legislative Democrat, Rich John of Ithaca, would, like Lane, decline to compete this election cycle. In a broadcast interview January 31st, which got little coverage beyond its Friday morning airing, John told WHCU, “I really think it’s time for me to go on to another opportunity, and frankly for somebody else to come in with new ideas and energy and give it a shot.”
Because of redistricting, which will only begin to alter legislative lines this fall, John, had he run, would have found himself in a primary contest against first-term progressive Democrat Veronica Pillar. With Pillar planning to run—and now, Rich John not running—prospects of a primary in that Ithaca City district diminish.
By recent experience, incumbent legislators in relatively “safe” party-favored districts have run, and then won, unopposed.
Mike Lane’s district, eastern Dryden, however, has proven different; much more evenly drawn between the two major parties. In his last election, in 2021, Lane beat Republican Thomas Corey by a mere eight votes. The final tally was a cliff-hanger.
And with veteran Lane’s planned departure, one can envision another competitive match-up this year. Lack of a popular incumbent could even bring a GOP pickup.
Currently, Republicans hold only three of Tompkins County’s 14 legislative seats. A redistricting plan adopted by the County Legislature in 2022 will raise next year’s number of legislators to 16.
Next year’s crop of fresh faces will be among the largest in recent memory. Not only will two new seats crowd the oval. Lane’s announcement means that at least seven incumbents will be stepping off. Nine new legislators would make nearly three-fifths of Tompkins County’s lawmakers’ newcomers. There’ll be a steep learning curve.
One of the imminent retirees, Rich John, recalled at Tuesday’s meeting how when he first planned to seek county office, he drove out to Dryden and spoke with Mike Lane.
“He was really generous with his time to just explain the Legislature to me and give me some idea of what I was getting into,” John remembered. “And that was not an anomaly,” John added. Lane’s shared advice many times since, John said. “And in terms of an institutional source of knowledge; the history that he carries around with him, that’s really going to be sorely missed,” John forewarned colleagues.
If Mike Lane has a passion, it may best be stated in terms of his defense of democracy, a passion often reaching far beyond Tompkins County’s borders.
Of any legislator, Lane has been the strongest defender of Ukraine’s fight to remain a free nation. Lane’s spoken of it often on the legislative floor. And the long-time display of that embattled nation’s flag in legislative chambers was Lane’s doing more than anyone else’s.
Democracy lights a fire in Mike Lane’s heart. And as he disclosed his political plans Tuesday night, it did so once again.
“For the next ten-and-a-half months… I will continue to do my utmost to represent (constituents) to the best of my ability and to keep my oath of office, which is to preserve, defend and protect the Constitution of the United States,” Lane promised.
At that point, as his statement drew to its close, the “big-D” Democrat in Mike Lane’s political conscience showed itself.
“Yes, I’m a lower-level elected official,” Lane acknowledged. “But representing our people under our Constitution is so terribly important to me.”
“And in these dark days”—his closest reference to the Trump Administration—“when the Constitution sometimes seems extremely in jeopardy, each of us has to step forward and make that commitment.”
Mike Lane, of course, will be stepping back. Others, no doubt, will step forward in the days ahead to inherit his legislative seat—maybe to push it to the Left or the Right.. Party petitioning begins at month’s end.
[In its business Tuesday, the Tompkins County Legislature unanimously endorsed an Enfield-encouraged measure toward expanding the Tompkins County Industrial Development Agency through state legislation. The Legislature also supported a long-shot state initiative to force manufacturers to pay to recycle the plastic they produce. More on these stories will be posted here later. / RL]
###
Why I Still Pledge
This Councilperson, Robert Lynch, speaking after requesting and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the Enfield Town Board’s monthly meeting, February 12, 2025:
Board:
“I’ve just joined this Enfield Town Board in the Pledge of Allegiance. I’ve done so for most every monthly meeting I’ve attended since I first joined this Board five years ago. I recognize that a majority of my colleagues don’t accompany me; they remain seated. One member generally stands, but declines to recite the words. That is your prerogative. The Constitution guarantees you that right. I defend your freedom to exercise your choice, just as you should always respect my decision to exercise my own within the rules of this Board.
“Much has changed in America since we last met. Some of us in this politically blended community of Enfield may welcome the change. Others may question if the United States of today remains the same country they’ve always known, respected and loved.
“And because of that concern, some of you, our residents, may now refuse to stand, hand-over-heart, and pledge to our flag. I regret that you’ve made that choice.
“The American flag I pledge to represents freedom, patriotism and love: Love for our Constitution, our Rule of Law, our resilient institutions, and our nearly 250-year heritage as a—yes, sometimes flawed, but always evolving and self-correcting—democracy. We express our love for the dedicated public servants in uniform and in civilian service. And yes, we express our love for the citizens—or non-citizens—whom we sometimes leave behind, but later reach down and pull up to join in our unique American experiment.
“Nowhere in the words I recite is there a demand of allegiance to one man—or to one woman—or to one office. We pledge allegiance to a principle, to a nation, and to a concept of liberty and justice for all that our Constitution commands we embrace.
“And if they ever rewrite the Pledge of Allegiance to demand obedience to a particular leader, I will be among the first to stop standing and requesting we recite those words.
“One thing more: I assure you that the winds of change that have buffeted our nation have not dislodged Enfield from its foundation. Enfield’s strength, its resilience, and the generosity, compassion and determination of its people remain as rock-solid as ever. I’m glad I live here and serve here. Thank you.”
[Our meeting continued.]
###
Enfield Outraces a Filing-Day Flood
Town Board hustles toward first-ever Flood Law as deadline looms
by Councilperson Robert Lynch; February 10, 2025
The common phrase is “Hurry up and wait.” But in Enfield’s case, as it addresses a new state agency mandate, it’s best to flip that adage around: “First wait, but then please hurry up.”
For the first time in its history, outsiders have found that the Town of Enfield is a place where floods may happen.
Preliminary mapping, published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) just over a year ago, has identified small slivers of livable land along Enfield Creek—and only along Enfield Creek—as lying in a newly-designated flood plain. They’re locations where floods might occur maybe only once in 100 years. Quite simply, FEMA had never bothered to look at Enfield before now.
A week before Christmas, FEMA finally made its flood maps final.
Whenever a flood plain is found, FEMA will refuse to let a town like Enfield join the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) unless it first writes regulations to limit property-owner risks in identified flood plains. And unless and until Enfield joins the NFIP, resident homeowners cannot buy federally-backed flood insurance. And for those living in the flood zone, unless they buy flood insurance, bankers will not lend money or keep existing federally-backed mortgages valid, FEMA staff advised the Enfield Town Board last year.
Moreover, New York State rules take it one nanny-state step further. Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) regulations require Enfield to become an NFIP participant—and impose the land use controls—whether or not the town wants homeowner access to the insurance program.
FEMA’s Thomas Song and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation’s Brienna Wirley made their case to the Enfield Town Board at its meeting in February 2024. They instructed Enfield to write its first-ever Flood Damage Prevention Law by a then-unspecified future deadline. Ours would be a local ordinance defining what can and cannot be built in Enfield’s tiny bit of a flood plain. Yes, to the few who may own land there, it looks a lot like zoning.
“It probably behooves us to get working on at least through the Planning Board process and through the Town, whatever we have to do to become an NFIP member, sooner rather than after the thing is adopted because no doubt it will be adopted,” this writer, Councilperson Robert Lynch, told Thomas Song and the DEC’s Wirley as they Zoomed into last February’s meeting.
“Is there a reason that we have to wait for the adoption to move forward?” Town Supervisor Stephanie Redmond asked.
“So you don’t have to if you want to work through that process, but you would have to then go through a revision to your ordinance at the time that the maps are finalized,” Wirley cautioned the Town Board that night. “So if you were to adopt an ordinance now, you would be adopting it based on preliminary maps which would then have to be revised at the time that the maps are finalized….”
So Enfield waited. That was then. This is now.
On January 13th of this year, Brad Wenskoski, Environmental Program Specialist with the DEC, advised Enfield that the maps are now final, that the clock is now ticking, and that Enfield must submit a draft “floodplain management ordinance” for its agency’s review by March 20th; in other words, little more than two months later. Supervisor Redmond forwarded Wenskoski’s instructions to the Town Board on February 5th. The matter was placed on the Town Board’s agenda for its monthly meeting, February 12.
Given the suddenly-sprung mid-March deadline, the Town Board has only its February and March meetings to cobble something together. Statutes constructed in haste too often mature into bad law.
“You don’t know how angry FEMA’s suddenly-imposed deadlines have made me,” this Councilperson replied to the Supervisor and to fellow Councilpersons the day the DEC official’s instructions were forwarded. “And I am not prepared to push some new regulation through our town’s government just to satisfy them.”
“We have procedures in Enfield,” this Councilperson, Lynch, continued. “Any model local law should first face review by our Planning Board, and then by the Town Board. If that remains proper procedure, then the Planning Board should review these documents as soon as tonight. If not, we should take our time, miss the FEMA/DEC-set deadline, and do this right.”
This writer copied Planning Board members with his reply. And a wise move that was. The Town Planning Board was set to meet that night. And after about three-quarters of an hour of fast-paced review, the Planning Board, by consensus, endorsed a 20-page draft law that the DEC had presented to us. Planners added a few additional provisions of their own, and forwarded their work product to the Town Board. First step accomplished.
In satisfying state and federal deadlines, Enfield holds a disadvantage. Every other town in Tompkins County has before stood where we stand for the first time. They’ve had flood zones identified previously and been under federal or state mandates to write flood laws. Their flood rules will need tweaking, to be sure. But unlike Enfield, places like Ithaca won’t need to start from scratch. Enfield does.
The only reason Enfield finds itself not in total befuddlement is because the DEC forwarded it a multi-page local law template that the town has used as a starting point. So far, the Planning Board, by necessity, has clung quite tightly to the DEC model law. And of five recommended add-on’s to the draft document that DEC provided—provisions that would toughen flood plain protections beyond the bare minimum—the Planning Board endorsed four of them. The only option the Planning Board did not add involved levees or “high hazard dams,” of which Enfield, quite frankly, has none.
While the recommended restrictions may trample upon liberty to some, Enfield enjoys the luxury of geographic restriction. Unlike the City of Ithaca, in which wide swaths of the municipality were newly-placed at flood risk, the Enfield Creek lowlands that FEMA maps now designate—and in which the new rules would regulate development—remain quite tiny.
Town officials last year placed only about 20-25 residences in the preliminary (now final) Enfield flood plain. Many of them are modular homes quartered at the Sandy Creek mobile home park. They stand at a point where the nearby creek babbles with little more ferocity than would a farmer’s ditch.
The Enfield Planning Board lacked time to review the DEC’s draft flood law at its leisure. But Wednesday, February 5th planners exercised their best-attempted due diligence to scrutinize its provisions and pass along something meaningful to the Town Board. Reflective of their haste, they never bothered to take a formal vote.
“I think we need the law,” Board Chairman Dan Walker told planners. “It will protect the town residents,” Walker concluded. “I’m comfortable with it.”
“What do we have to do, and what do we want to do?” Planning Board member Mike Carpenter asked. What Carpenter learned is that what the DEC had drafted constitutes the bare minimum regulation. On at least one key point, planners reached beyond the minimum.
The state agency flood rules require the first floor of any new residence in a flood plain be raised to the height that waters might rise in a so-called “100-year flood” plus two feet more.
“Pilings, columns (posts and piers), or shear walls parallel to the flow of the water” could be employed to hold the new flood-prone residence up, the DEC draft says. The Planning Board did not dwell on it, but Walker said that building a house on stilts didn’t sound like a very good idea; presumably not safe. The Town’s current draft would ban homebuilding in flood plains altogether.
Similarly, with manufactured homes, state rules allow them to be placed within a flood plain so long as they’re elevated and anchored. The Enfield draft with prohibit new mobile home placements, altogether, but allow improvements that increase that home’s value more than 50 per cent, providing the owner follows the state rules.
“For some who don’t know what they’re doing,” this is a good thing, Planning Board member Rich Teeter remarked of the regulations.
Some communities join to enforce flood regulations intermunicipally. Enfield will likely assign policing to Code Enforcement Officer Alan Teeter. To anyone’s best knowledge, Tompkins County lacks any kind of Code Enforcement Office that could coordinate the work.
“I think we should keep in local anyway,” Carpenter told colleagues.
“The only cost the town would have would be administration and enforcement,” Chairman Walker observed.
“Does he get paid extra for it?” Carpenter asked, pointing Alan Teeter’s way. The code officer shook his head in doubt. Teeter’s pay is set by the Town Board.
Walker claimed some Enfield residents have already begun asking about flood insurance. But he cautioned, “It’s not cheap.”
A DEC representative on a conference call the next day insisted that a flood insurer cannot deny coverage to a homeowner once the rules are in place, even if the insured location stands likely to flood. Yet one Planning Board member remarked he’d already been turned down for flood insurance to cover a cottage he owns along Seneca Lake.
In Enfield, creeks tumble through narrow gullies and ravines. And that presents risks the FEMA flood mappers never bothered to consider when they surveyed the town with a broad brush in 2017. That piqued Mike Carpenter’s curiosity.
“Is there liability for the Town if we do it?” Carpenter asked concerning the regulations. ”What if someone gets flooded out in a place that the maps didn’t identify? If you don’t say anything, it’s a lot easier to not get in trouble than if you say something.”
Carpenter may gain comfort to know that a “Disclaimer of Liability” in the draft law offered by DEC officials qualifies that the “local law shall not create liability” on the part of Enfield “for any flood damages that result from reliance” on it, and that the law “does not imply that land outside the area of special flood hazards or uses permitted within such areas will be free from flooding or flood damages.”
Of course, trial lawyers are paid handsomely to circumvent disclaimers like that. Then, again, nothing in the law prevents the fearful homeowner from buying insurance regardless of his exclusion.
“This law is a living document,” the draft Enfield document states at its close, a home-grown addition this Councilperson proposed to acknowledge the limited reach of the protections accorded by what’ll be placed on the Town Board’s table this week.
“And it remains the intent of the Town of Enfield through its Town Board to amend this local law for Flood Damage Prevention from time to time as the community’s knowledge of potential flood risk expands and as the community identifies additional areas of the Town that either by experience or expectation deserves protection by the cloak of these regulations,” that closing addendum states.
****
Enfield has floods, and not always in the places that FEMA and DEC think it does. But bureaucrats compartmentalize, often arbitrarily. Rules are rules, and deadlines are deadlines.
State conservation officials demand a draft law by March 20. Enfield must provide it. A Public Hearing will likely come later, sometime in the spring. DEC wants the law adopted by May 19th. Its drop-dead implementation date comes one month later.
I know, why they couldn’t have told us this a year ago? As it’s said, statutes constructed in haste….
###
Posted Previously:
A Fire House, Not a Party House
Gunning, EVFC split on room rental prospects
by Robert Lynch; February 7, 2025
A scab got scraped open this week in Enfield. It had covered a wound that’s hung around for maybe the past 37 years, but has never, ever quite healed. Maybe it never will.
To some, it’s a matter of opportunity lost.
Town taxpayers, albeit indirectly, built the current Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) fire station in 1988. To the left of its modern, multi-bay apparatus room stands a spacious meeting hall. It may be larger than necessary. About the only time any outsider sees it filled is at the annual Christmastime banquet. Fair enough. It’s already built. And better it be a bit too large than not large enough.
But the meeting room sees little use outside of EVFC meeting and training events. The Fire Company senses no need—and shows no interest—in renting out the meeting facilities to outsiders. And for the newest member of the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners, that’s a problem. Donald Gunning is the man who last Tuesday night scratched the scab open.
“We can’t use the space… We can’t rent it out,” Gunning, elected Commissioner last December on a taxpayer-partial platform, said of the fire station’s meeting facilities.
Though he’s a man of few words, Gunning cast the lone dissent February 4th as the Board of Fire Commissioners approved a continuing, one-year lease of the EVFC-owned fire station for use by the Enfield Fire District, the legal entity that the commissioners now oversee. It marked Gunning’s first dissenting vote since he took office two meetings earlier.
Under a Town Board restructuring of the fire service in 2023, the Fire District and its commissioners now serve as the bridge between the building-owning Fire Company and the Enfield taxpayer.
Two nights later, Thursday, February 6th, Fire Company membership approved the lease unanimously.
“While this may not be perfect, we need someplace where to operate out of and where to park our trucks,” Board of Fire Commissioners Chair Greg Stevenson said regarding the lease prior to the Board’s Tuesday night approval.
Commissioners’ approval of the lease was expected to have been routine. A nearly-identical lease was authorized one year ago without controversy. The Fire District paid the Fire Company $72,000 for rental of the station during 2024. This year it’s paying $75,000, an approximate four per cent increase.
The $75,000 estimate had been placed into the district’s budget last fall. Meeting after meeting for the past several months, Commissioners had planned to act on the lease only to be told that attorneys for the two parties had not yet met to nitpick the agreement’s fine points. Nobody had expected problems.
“It is what it is,” Commissioner Barry “Buddy” Rollins, who doubles as Enfield’s Highway Superintendent, said of the new lease the night of the commissioners’ vote. “But $23,000 is a lot for what the mortgage is.”
Rollins was speaking of the difference between what the Fire District will pay this year to rent the building and the annual mortgage payment its owner, the EVFC, must pay the bank. Stevenson reports the mortgage charge this year is just under $52,000.
Rollins, like Gunning, has been a critic of the Fire Company and how the EVFC spends its money.
Famously, Rollins had faulted the EVFC for taking the $76,000 proceeds from sale of an offloaded fire engine in 2023 and putting it into a “firemen’s fund” to cover everyday expenses rather than crediting the money to the cost of a new, much more expensive pumper that the company—and later the Fire District— bought to replace it.
“We have to build up some sort of reserve account,” EVFC President Dennis Hubbell told commissioners, Hubbell directing his comments mostly at Rollins and Gunning. And even though the District now owns most of the trucks, hoses and related apparatus that fight Enfield’s fires, incidental costs crop up, he said. For example, Hubbell fears the building’s boiler may fail.
The company president noted that just that night he’d reported to Commissioners his need to spend more than $6,000 on a new, replacement Internet server to make the fire station’s Wi-Fi work. Hubbell requested that the Fire District shoulder a portion of that cost. It hasn’t decided whether to do so yet.
“We had to borrow money from the firemen’s account to make it through this year,” Hubbell advised Commissioners.
But although Rollins, perhaps grudgingly, joined the majority in authorizing the new building lease, Gunning held out, remaining adamant about the loss of revenue that outside rentals might bring in.
“The fire company chose not to be in the hall rental business,” Stevenson told Gunning and others at the February 4th meeting. What’s more, Stevenson said, renting out the meeting room now would place firefighters in direct competition with the Enfield Community Council, which rents out its “Great Room,” the one-time sanctuary in the former church it bought, to host celebrations like wedding receptions and craft fairs.
And both Hubbell and Stevenson made it clear that building rentals don’t come without cost. The fire station needs to be managed were outside parties to use the building, they said. Volunteers would need to be present. Fire records warrant protection.
Hubbell, a local firefighter since the 1970’s, has a long memory of when the former fire station—now the Enfield Courthouse, Town Board meeting room, and Food Pantry—used to be the EVFC’s headquarters and was then made available to others.
Stuff was “always damaged,” Hubbell said. There was extra use of heat; bathrooms. “Nobody in the Fire Company wants to be a renter,” the president insisted.
Moreover, Hubbell said, there were competitive turf wars. “I used to catch crap from the Grange,” Hubbell remembered. “Now we’ve got two hammering us,” Hubbell said, likely referring to both the Enfield Valley Grange and the Community Council, each renters of space.
“We’re here to fight fires and train and not in the rental business,” Hubbell reiterated.
Why Enfield never demanded its fire service rent out its big, new meeting room for cash—or for that matter, move Town Board meetings over there—brings from those then present a variety of answers. One explanation holds that the Town Board was too frugal to authorize a deeper excavation for parts of the new building to prevent the spread of fire truck chemicals into meeting space. It became a codes compliance issue.
Some say the split centered on insurance coverage. And the simplest argument of all equates to strength of will. The fire company simply doesn’t want to let others into its building.
Town Board minutes at the time (1987-1988) provide little insight as to how the Town and its fire company chose to walk their separate paths.
But the issue of fire hall access nearly came to a head just last month. That’s when it briefly appeared that the Community Council and the Tompkins County Board of Elections would part ways and not renew their long-standing contract for use of the Enfield Community Center as the community’s voting location. The issue was settled and the contract renewed. But before it was, some considered the fire station as an alternate polling spot. Told later, fire officials were surprised that it was.
“We had a hall designed as a community center, and the Town Board shot it down with blazing guns,” Dennis Hubbell recalled as to the late-80’s buried-in-time standoff as he spoke just before Commissioners ratified the current agreement, 4-1.
After the meeting, Chair Stevenson said he’ll strive for a more “comprehensive” building lease the next time around. The chairman held out the possibility of a multi-year agreement and one written with greater precision.
And although attorneys have recommended against it, nothing stops the Enfield Fire District from going out on its own and building its own station, perhaps next to the Town’s current Highway Garage down the road. But the $1 Million-plus investment could prove prohibitive, especially with commissioners like Don Gunning seeking to pinch pennies.
But were such a bold move to occur, it would leave the EVFC with a four-decade old building that lacks a clear purpose. And that would include, of course, its meeting room.
###
Posted Previously:
Squeezing the Big Red Bear… and More
ICSD Board scours for funds in newly-found places
by Robert Lynch; February 2, 2025
It could prove as futile as searching for lost change under the couch. Then, again, it could still prove worthwhile if you’re looking for it in the living room mansion of Ithaca’s rich Uncle Ezra. That quest for extra cash from Ithaca’s most opulent employer was what drove the Ithaca Board of Education as it invested nearly an hour of its time last Tuesday night pursuing both new revenue sources and potential cost savings.
“This isn’t something we can control,” Board member Jill Tripp cautioned colleagues at the outset of members’ lengthy discussion over whether the Ithaca City School District could entice, persuade—but probably never compel—Cornell University to contribute more than its current $650,000 annually toward underwriting the ICSD’s yearly budget, now approaching $170 Million.
“We can’t control whether it happens, and it would require negotiations and possibly a campaign to engage Cornell in the negotiations,” Tripp, one of the ICSD’s most taxpayer-conscious board members, conceded.
Jill Tripp chairs the “Revenue Generation Advisory Council,” created last year as the Ithaca School Board struggled with financial challenges complicated by overwhelming voter rejection of its first-submitted district budget. The request for an “increased donation from Cornell University” was but one of four revenue-enhancing options Tripp presented the Board of Education January 28th for its review.
The council’s other three options included: 1) the sale or lease of district property; 2) enactment of an excise tax on utilities; and 3) reducing costs by “closing school buildings” or sharing services and expenses through “consolidation” with neighboring school districts.
At the discussion’s outset, Tripp had sought a straw poll to gauge members’ relative support. She never really got one, at least nothing equating to a rise of hands. What came forth, instead, was random praise or criticism as each option was discussed one by one.
Evident to any observer, the reconsideration of a utility tax—last contemplated around 2019 and 2020, but then rejected as a revenue generator—drew the least support. Sale or lease of surplus land or buildings brought measured acceptance. But leaning more heavily on Cornell, the revenue source holding the largest financial windfall for local schools, drew the evening’s predominant focus.
Employ a time management technique as a benchmark for interest. Members debated seeking a heightened university contribution for a full half-hour. Sale or lease of buildings warranted just eight minutes’ discussion; the utility tax, ten; closings and consolidation, only five.
“This is actually my favorite option,” Tripp said of the Ithaca district shedding itself of unused buildings and the under-utilized land that surrounds some of the structures still needed. Board president Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell, in particular, mentioned as a candidate the mothballed Danby Elementary School, which hasn’t taught a kid since maybe the late-1970’s, . Eversley Bradwell also referenced the “17-20 acres” adjacent to Enfield Elementary School.
“I like the idea of a slimmer operation where it’s possible and where it increases efficiency, so that’s my take,” Tripp said in favor of intelligent offloads.
Yet some members grew hesitant. No one called for a vote. And on the prospect of property liquidation, consensus directed members toward first seeking a study into where the school system will grow, where it will shrink, and how the district’s approximately 20 structures would fit into that vision.
Í don’t feel comfortable doing a straw poll at this point because there’s still some missing links here with all of these,” Board member Karen Yearwood cautioned.
The council’s second option, a utility tax on communication services and maybe other utilities, served as a destined-to-reject alternative raised seemingly only for the purpose of knocking it down. Those with long memories recalled public resistance when the idea was last broached near the turn of the decade.
A utility tax “would be very unpopular with our community,” Tripp admitted. “Nobody likes to hear about new taxes,” she said.
“This came up in my six-year tenure, and it’s really contentious,” Erin Croyle remembered. “I don’t think it would be very popular, and it’s a regressive tax,” Croyle stated.
A utility tax supposedly spreads the school funding burden beyond the property owner. Some taxpayers may like that idea. And it could raise a half-Million to $2 Million a year. Tripp claimed that perhaps 40 school districts in the state impose such a tax. The tax might raise monthly bills by 2.5 to 7.5 per cent.
But critics like Croyle maintain a utility tax places disproportionate burden on the less-affluent. And renters still pay hidden school taxes through the rent checks they write, she asserted. A cell phone tax, to Croyle, becomes a “double tax.”
“I don’t hear anyone screaming out for additional exploration,” Jill Tripp said of the utility tax option. “It’s unpopular for a reason, and I don’t see any point for us to pursue it at this point.”
Board President Eversley Bradwell qualified that he favored “exploring” the utility tax option, but only to “gather more information.” The evening’s discussion moved on.
Cornell University’s current annual gift to the Ithaca City School District, $650,000, as anyone could plausibly postulate that night, compensates the ICSD for educating the children of graduate students who reside in tax-exempt university housing. That rationale may or not be true. But Tripp’s Advisory Council would like to raise support much higher, perhaps to $10 Million a year. Cornell’s critics assert it’s a level more in line with what other Ivy League universities pay.
But asking is not receiving. And much of the time board members consumed Tuesday involved plotting strategy. Should the ICSD seek only a continued “voluntary contribution” or press for a legally-enforceable contract? And to achieve either, how best could the district proceed?
“Not all money is good money,” School Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown reminded the board, recalling his father’s advice.
“When I see a number like $10 Million, and if it’s going to be a ‘voluntary contribution,’ we need to know that that could go away one day pretty quickly, and then what does that leave our folks?” Brown asked.
Dr. Brown recommended a negotiated agreement, one that reduces uncertainty and establishes binding expectations.
“When folks give you this kind of money, they’re going to ask for something in return,” the Superintendent cautioned. “So what is it that we’re prepared to give up?” he questioned.
Of any member of the Ithaca Board of Education, Garrick Blalock—himself a Cornell professor—assigned to the university that night the most uncompromising transactional greed. To Blalock, Cornell acts only out of hard-hearted self-interest, never kind-spirited altruism.
“I don’t think there’s a sentiment at Cornell that a voluntary contribution is something it should or will do above what they see as their direct receipt of services,” Blalock predicted.
“They don’t pay the City of Ithaca to be nice, because they want the City to prosper per se” Blalock stated bluntly. Rather, it’s “because every time someone pulls a fire alarm in one of the Cornell dormitories, a city truck rolls out. There’s a cost associated with that, and the voluntary payment is meant to be in response to service provided,” Blalock reasoned.
Well, sort of. Reporting memory bends that argument even further in a transactional direction. Under a 2023-renegotiated, inflation-adjusted, multi-year agreement, Cornell currently pays the City of Ithaca $4 Million a year. And for two decades before that, the annual payment was $1.6 Million. Why Cornell paid Ithaca anything at all, memory has it, was that Ithaca held Cornell over a barrel. The city reportedly threatened not to sign off on campus building permits unless it was handsomely compensated. The ploy worked.
But the Ithaca City School District cannot refuse to educate grad students’ kids. So any comparable leverage for the ICSD is lost. Or is it?
Cornell needs to attract and retain top academic talent, Blalock brought to everyone’s attention. No alternative private school exits. So pure self-interest, he said, should motivate the university to prop up Ithaca’s public schools as a hiring incentive.
“So the idea of some zero-sum money flowing from the top of the hill to the bottom of the hill, I just don’t think is maybe the best approach to this,” Blalock told board colleagues. “I’d move away from words like ‘donation,’ and look towards like ‘shared success,’ and try to engage Cornell in a collaborative discussion that would raise both boats.”
Erin Croyle countered that Cornell should not just consider its highly-paid professors, but also its lesser-rewarded staff; “the people at the bottom of the hill historically getting the scraps from the castle,” she analogized.
“I think it would be a really beautiful thing if Cornell could also consider all the other employees that work here, whose children go to school here, who are struggling to get by and buy them soccer cleats,” Croyle said. Increased university contribution, she concluded, would help “take a load off of the community” for people like them.
But Blalock put himself in the Board of Trustees’ position: “Our job is not to do X, Y, and Z,” he said. “Our job is to further the objectives of the university.” That’s why, to Blalock, a self-interest incentive would sell best to decision-makers on East Hill.
“That (it) will have more traction,” Croyle recognized, “It doesn’t mean that it’s right.”
Now, how the proceed: Board members that night initially tasked Superintendent Brown to contact university administrators. One or more board members may eventually join him. By the Superintendent’s preference, the effort will likely seek a commitment that’s binding. Blalock even suggested enlisting persuasive muscle through an appeal to the Faculty Senate.
“We’ve got a plan,” Jill Tripp concluded. “We’ll come back with the specifics and Dr. Brown will continue to share his thoughts about who he wants with him and how we might go about this.”
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“Gosh, it’s getting late,” Tripp said as the clock passed Nine and her four-point presentation finally wound down. And because of that presumed collective fatigue, board members spent little effort analyzing the most sweeping—yet challenging—alternative of all: consolidation and redistricting.
Disruptive it would be. Tripp admitted it. And perhaps to stay on the safe side of controversy, her PowerPoint slide and the discussion surrounding it never wandered from generalities to specifics. Consolidation could shutter an additional building or two. And “regionalization,” as some termed it, could “reduce costs by sharing services (and/or) costs of programs and administration with neighboring school districts”
New York State likes such things, board members acknowledged. But those living or running schools within Ithaca or its adjacent districts could have a tough time of it.
“I am clearly against the idea of consolidation,” Board President Eversley Bradwell asserted. “With that being said, I am not against doing research… to figure out what the feasibility is, and it’s probably time for a feasibility study.”
Were “regionalization” to come about, the Board President predicted, the Ithaca schools would likely become the region’s “hub.”
Closing more schools like long-vacant Danby’s or farming out tasks to places like Trumansburg or Newfield stood clearly beyond what the Ithaca School Board chose to put on its plate last Tuesday night. Whatever might come later will surface in the months ahead.
But in any school district’s incremental, sluggishly slow, yet progressive evolution, change blossoms from tiny seeds planted during discussions that some might find too boring to assign much weight. Wrong they’d be. If Cornell is to cough up more money, or if a building or two is to be listed with Warren Real Estate, Jill Tripp’s presentation from the Revenue Generation Advisory Council during an otherwise dull meeting in the last week of January is where those initiatives began. Watch for next steps.
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