Big truck’s financing blamed; other costs up just slightly
by Robert Lynch; September 12, 2024
For the second straight year, Enfield taxpayers may face a double-digit hike in their Fire Tax. And if they’re looking for the reason, they’ll find it the same. It’s that spanking-new, shiny red fire truck; the one Enfield fire officials have always insisted they need, but which a vocal minority of residents grumble about paying for.
Initial figures, detailed in a Quarterly Report presented the Enfield Town Board Wednesday night, indicate that the proposed 2025 Enfield Fire District Budget may total $627,148, a 29.67 per cent increase from the 2024 Budget Enfield’s Board of Fire Commissioners approved one year ago.
The tentative 2025 total is based on a calculation made by Fire Commissioner Chris Willis and stated publicly at the close of the Commissioners’ most recent budget planning session September third. The Board of Fire Commissioners intends to finalize its budget September 17th.
Nickel and dime expenses do not account for the latest projected double-digit increase. Fire truck bonding outlays do. When the financing costs of the 2023 Toyne pumper engine are subtracted, the proposed Fire Budget shrinks to $550,571, a mere 3.49 per cent increase over 2024, based on Willis’ numbers.
“I don’t believe that total is 100% accurate, seeing as we have a few line items in our budget that may vary depending on some research and finalization for the 2025 year,” an Enfield Fire District official said Wednesday after being presented the Quarterly Report prior to the Town Board meeting, “so it may be worth it to mention that the $550k is not a finalized number.”
But the pumper’s $126,576 financing expense is, essentially, locked-in.
The 2025 budget line covers $86,696 in principal and $39,880 in interest due on bonds the Board of Commissioners authorized back in March.
The truck was bought last year by the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC), which then held purchasing authority. It was gifted to the Enfield Fire District last March as part of Enfield’s transition to a fire district form of governance. Along with that transfer, the Board of Fire Commissioners sold the truck’s ten-year serial bonds to a bank around April first.
“I stressed in my report that the budget figure is preliminary,” this writer, Councilperson Robert Lynch, liaison to the Enfield Fire District and author of the Quarterly Report, responded to the concerned District official. “While a few figures may change here or there, the basic total is not likely to change much,” I maintained.
“We’re looking at about the same as last year with bond payments on top of that,” Board of Fire Commissioners Chair Greg Stevenson observed of the proposed budget during the September third meeting.
Indeed, in a series of three budget planning sessions that began with a non-voting “workshop” August 12th, Commissioners made no radical departures from 2024 spending aside from adding-in the pumper’s first-year bonding expense. The closest they came to a dramatic change was to increase—without much explanation—the projected annual salary for the Fire District Secretary.
Under the current budget draft, the Secretary’s salary would rise from $2,000 to $5,000. The District’s other compensated appointee, the Treasurer, would see her salary remain flat at an equal $5,000.
If current estimates hold, 2025 would mark the second time in as many years that Enfield fire budgets have carried sticker shock.
Last year, a newly-appointed Board of Fire Commissioners, still finding its sea legs and leaning heavily on its then-attorney’s guidance, initially proposed a 2024 budget that was only 3.2 per cent higher than the prior year’s spending plan. The Board took that budget to public hearing, but amended its total upwards by nearly $94,000 four days after the hearing. The lawyer said it was legal. But many taxpayers felt stung.
The then-revised and eventually-adopted 2024 budget raised fire service spending by more than 28 per cent above that for 2023. Two of the Town Board-appointed Commissioners on that fledgling Board of Commissioners chose not to seek election last December. A third was defeated at the polls. And by the following January, the attorney had also lost his Enfield job.
Now, a 29 per cent fire spending hike could be in store for Enfield. If the latest plan is enacted, the two budgets, taken together, would have raised local fire protection costs by 66 per cent in just two years.
“Cut a little here; cut a little there,” Chairman Stevenson told Commissioners at the close of their second budget meeting, August 20th. They’ve tried.
When the Volunteer Fire Company contracted for the pumper engine earlier this decade, the law didn’t then require the voters to approve its purchase. Were the truck bought today, the revised procedures affecting fire district governance would demand a referendum. The Enfield attitudinal divide on this truck became evident last October when voters approved its long-term bonding by only an eight vote margin (77 to 69.) The referendum was viewed as a gauge of the fire truck’s guarded support in the community.
Although the appointed Commissioners last year budgeted $65,000 for “loan payments” to cover debt service on not only the pumper, but also on a previously-bought tanker truck with bank financing ongoing, the newly-elected Board changed course earlier this year and modified its predecessor’s plans.
Rather than bond the pumper truck for 20 years, as the October referendum would have allowed, the new Board shortened the bonding term to just ten years. And it chose not to bond the tanker at all, but rather to save money by continuing the tanker’s low-interest bank loan.
The two decisions will save taxpayers in the long-term, but those actions front-load the obligations. And the $65,000 set aside for debt payments last year was gobbled up this year in a couple of ways. Commissioners used some of it to pay the tanker’s loan installments and also to meet pre-bonding transition expenses for the pumper, exigencies for which the former attorney had never provided.
Enfield residents don’t get to vote on a Fire Budget. But the law does mandate a Public Hearing. This year’s hearing must be held October 15th, the month’s third Tuesday.
One year ago, as one of the routines a newly-formed fire district must consider, the Board secured voter approval to override a state-specified statutory limit on its spending. Voters approved a new, higher limit of $575,000. And while the new budget’s calculated total would exceed the limit, officials say the bonding costs and certain lesser items don’t count toward the statutory ceiling. As such, what’s proposed passes the test.
Addressing a second obstacle, Commissioners, at their August 20th meeting, voted to override the state’s otherwise-limiting two per cent capped increase in the tax levy. Stevenson called the override “a bit of a no-brainer.”
During their latest budget session, September third, Fire Commissioners tentatively placed $10,000 of their proposed budget into each of two reserve accounts; the Equipment Repair and Replacement Reserve, and a similar reserve for Apparatus. Once money goes into such reserves, it can’t easily come back out unless used for its intended purpose.
Last year’s Board budgeted $12,638 into the two reserves. Yet it never split the funds between them. Stevenson has proposed the funds now get divided equally.
At the Budget Workshop August 12, Chairman Stevenson—apparently at the attorney’s advice—floated the prospect of asking voters this December to authorize a third reserve account; a “Building Repair and Replacement Reserve.”
“Someday we will have to decide whether to buy the fire station or build a new one,” Stevenson told the Board that night.
But later, feeling the pinch of economy, Commissioners pretty much set the Building Reserve idea on a shelf. Members concluded that the EVFC will likely always make its space available to the District and to its fire trucks. “We don’t need a third place to put money,” Stevenson remarked August 20, referring to the new reserve. He has no plans to bring its creation to a vote this December.
As this Councilperson read the Quarterly Report into the record Wednesday night, other Town Board members remained mum. The Town Board no longer holds any control over the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company or the Fire District that now oversees it. Town Board members may now view fire finances as somebody else’s problem, not theirs.
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Other business came before the Enfield Town Board Wednesday night:
Town Solar: By a unanimous vote, the Town Board moved ahead with a newly-hatched plan to place solar panels atop the Town Hall, commonly known as the Old Highway Barn, the one housing the Town Clerk’s Office, a Sheriff’s Department substation, and equipment storage.
A newly-secured NYSERDA Clean Energy Communities Grant will underwrite $60,000 of the cost. . One solar company quoted $64,000 for the installation, meaning Town taxpayers may need to pay only about $4,000.
Over time, the solar power would defray Town Government’s electric bills, not only at the Town Hall, but also at other Enfield buildings.
Councilperson Jude Lemke questioned whether rooftop solar was the best use of the NYSERDA money, noting it will take time—many years—to recoup the overall investment. But Supervisor Stephanie Redmond cautioned that Town options remain limited. Redmond had asked whether the state agency would pay to insulate underused parts of the old highway barn to enable its expanded future use. Redmond was told the grant money wouldn’t qualify for an improvement like that.
Tree Cutting: Several Enfield residents again appeared before the Town Board to question Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy Rollins” about his controversial tree-pruning practices—particularly along Rockwell Road—practices some find too aggressive.
“We would like to keep the character of our road,” Rockwell’s Julie Magura told Rollins and the Board.
“I’m concerned these big, beautiful trees are going to be cut down,” Van Ostrand Road’s Madonna Stallman said about those standing at a place she admires. ”Do we need to be going to the state, particularly in view of climate change?” Stallman asked after Rollins informed her that state law purportedly mandates he clear the right-of-way as he does.
Rollins said he’ll resume trimming the Rockwell foliage—often removing its overhead canopy—“the week after next.” Rollins offered waivers for landowners to sign if they want their trees kept; waivers holding the owners responsible for any debris clean-up. Several expressed interest in signing.
Supervisor Redmond plans another round of tree-pruning discussions October ninth.
Dog Law: The Town Board held off finishing and scheduling for public hearing a revised Dog Control Law that’s been under Board discussion for months. It also delayed approving the SPCA’s requested two-year renewal of its Animal Control Services Agreement.
Board members believe the two measures are tied. And before they approve the SPCA’s renewal, they want to confer directly with agency Director Jim Bouderau, who was unable to attend Wednesday’s meeting. They’d also like the long-dormant, multi-municipality SPCA Advisory Board to reconvene. The Advisory Board is supposed to negotiate terms of the Animal Control Agreement on the municipalities’ behalf. It hasn’t.
Road Safety: And the Town Board adopted a Resolution requesting a New York State and Tompkins County traffic study of the intersection of Route 79 with Black Oak and Waterburg Roads, the scene of several recent accidents. Route 79 is rolling, with driver visibility limited at the crossing. The Resolution asks engineers to” determine whether additional traffic controls, improved signage, and/or reduced speed limits are advisable,” and if so, to “then implement those recommended improvements.”
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Quarter-Billion T.C. Budget would hike levy 4.34%
by Robert Lynch; September 5, 2024
Back last April 30th at a Budget Retreat that Tompkins County legislators open to the public only because the law says they must, lawmakers directed County Administrator Lisa Holmes to craft a next year’s budget with a tax levy increase of no more than two percent. Holmes dutifully did so, instructing department heads afterward to cut their requests by five per cent to make the numbers work.
The Administrator prepared the requested budget. But for all intents and purposes, when she delivered her budget message to the County Legislature Tuesday night, she might as well have shut that two-percent budget into a drawer. Very little of it reached the Legislature’s floor that night.
What Holmes did detail—and what legislators took nearly an hour to digest and discuss—was a budget of a much different stripe. It would hike the levy increase by more than twice of that requested in April.
The Administration’s “Recommended Budget” would impose on property owners a 4.34 percent tax levy increase. And for the first time, its total would cross the quarter-Billion dollar threshold, spending $252,317,460, to be exact.
What drove the change was a late-August independent audit report that showed that while Tompkins County government remains rich, little room remains to tap existing governmental savings—the “fund balance”—to pay for the things property taxes would otherwise support.
“If we had started with the information that we gleaned in August, and we wanted to arrive at a two per cent (budget),” Holmes told the Legislature, “we would have needed to cut a lot further earlier on in the game, knowing that we did not have fund balance to budget. So that’s left us to the point that we’re at.”
At bottom, the choice is simple: Should government keep more of your money in its own piggy bank? Or should it allow you to retain more of that money in the bank of your choice?
The recommended levy increase falls just under the largely-symbolic 4.45 per cent “tax cap” New York State has calculated for Tompkins County this year. As neutered over the years, that cap holds little more than the persuasive power for frugality. As the County’s budget process progresses, it’s easy to see how legislators may spend beyond it.
“In my opinion, we’ve artificially kept the tax levy low the last few years at least by taking fund balance to not raise the tax levy, and I think due to numerous factors that are going on, we absolutely can’t do that, hopefully, anymore,” Ulysses-Enfield legislator Anne Koreman stated.
True, county sales tax receipts this year have proven more sluggish than expected. Expenses are creeping up. New York has offloaded new mandates to its counties. But what’s crippled the budget process the most is a new Fund Balance Policy, enacted by the County Legislature amid little attention last December.
The policy change—one which Koreman supported, but which Enfield’s other legislator, Randy Brown, opposed—now requires that a full 25 per cent of a prior year’s expenditures be kept in fund balance. In past budgets, only 18 per cent of prior revenues had to be retained. At the time, one legislator contrasted the difference between locking away $32 Million dollars and now $45.3 Million.
The August audit showed Tompkins County held nearly $61 Million in Unassigned Fund Balance at the end of 2023. But through a pair of actions also during the past year, the Legislature shunted about $12.6 Million of that total into reserve accounts, untouchable except for their intended purposes. What’s left is about $48 Million. And that’s just about the number that auditors say needs to be set aside under the new policy.
“This was the executive decision that I made,” Holmes said to defend her aiming the tax levy higher than the Legislature had directed. “And hence the Two Percent Budget is presented for your review, and the 4.34 Percent Budget is my recommendation.
In terms of total spending—a metric seldom given much attention these days—the Recommended 2025 Budget would cross the $250 Million mark, yet only raise outlays by about $4 Million, or 1.6 percent, from the current year’s budget that’s posted on the County’s website.
A multi-meeting, committee-of-the-whole budget review process begins almost immediately; its first session occurs Thursday, September fifth. All legislators attend those “Expanded Budget Committee” sessions. Department heads and the community activists in search of handouts troop to chambers and make their pitches. By the end of October, a final budget emerges. It’s usually larger than what the County Administrator had proposed. Lawmakers traditionally find it hard to say no.
Yet some predict this year may be different.
“It’s going to be a really, really hard budget season,” former Legislature Chair Shawna Black observed Tuesday.
“Traditionally, we have been very used to putting in ‘OTR’s’ (spending add-on’s) as legislators and having our hopes and dreams out there in the community. We’ve listened to the people who live here. We’ve listened to the non-profits, and we’ve been able to really invest in our community,” she added. “It’s not to say that we’re not going to do it this year, but I think we are going to have to tighten our purse strings a little bit and prioritize what’s really important to our community.”
But the gap between the Administrator’s 4.34 per cent levy hike and the 4.45 per cent tax cap leaves little room to grow spending within the cap’s confines.
In response to legislator Lee Shurtleff’s prodding, Holmes acknowledged that both of her draft budgets would be shared side-by-side during the course of upcoming deliberations. Yet, Budget Committee Chair Mike Lane made clear Tuesday that the lower-taxing alternative will assume second-class status.
“The Expanded Budget Committee will take up the Recommended Budget from the County Administrator,” Lane told Shurtleff after he’d asked for a starting point. “And she (Holmes) is recommending a 4.34 percent tax levy increase. She is not recommending the two percent one, although she’s prepared one at our request.”
With legislators perennially averse to cutbacks, one can easily infer from Lane’s words that the higher-tax budget is the only one that really matters, and that the two percent budget can best be disregarded.
What’s already emerged as the major point of advocacy this year is continued County funding for the “Community Justice Center” (CJC), a shared City of Ithaca/Tompkins County initiative that emerged from the 2021 Reimagining Public Safety collaborative. Loosely-defined, the CJC keeps a check on suspected police misdeeds, particularly in Ithaca. The Two Percent Budget may defund CJC. The Recommended Budget would not. Community advocates have already lined up in the CJC’s defense.
What the Recommended Budget also does, Holmes acknowledged, is to add back some—though not all—of those five per cent cuts she’d earlier asked department heads to make.
Legislator Greg Mezey quizzed Holmes as to what extent they’d come back. The Administrator did not give percentages. However, her PowerPoint that night stated that the higher budget “includes all restorations under the 2% increase/5% cut scenario.”
Arguably, it is the 25 percent Fund Balance Policy—perhaps that policy coupled by the newly-set reserves—that made this year’s budgeting a challenge. The policy was adopted last December by only a nine-to-five vote. It lacks universal acceptance. Nevertheless, no one has talked about repealing it.
Might there be another place to save? Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown eyed County Government’s higher-than-expected employee vacancy rate. Jobs found vacant don’t pay salary or benefits.
Brown estimated each vacancy saves $50,000. “If you’re down 89 employees now… we may refund some of the fund balances with that money,” Brown suggested.
Using Brown’s math, fund balance savings could exceed $4 Million. Holmes cautioned the calculation is risky as the vacancy rate fluctuates.
“But the money’s been gobbled up by negotiations for our various labor unions,” Mike Lane cautioned.
“For the most part, I have not funded new initiatives,” Holmes told legislators.
“I’m calling this a transition year,” the County Administrator explained. “You may be asking what are we transitioning to? My answer would be to a period where we’re going to need greater fiscal discipline in recognition of the economic climate and the very robust capital plan that we have before us.”
One of those capital initiatives is a $40-60 Million Center of Government, a building whose planning the Recommended Budget would advance. No one talked Tuesday of sidelining the office building for sake of economies.
Meanwhile, adherence to the Fund Balance Policy has proven slavish. Budget planners choose to bend to the policy, rather than to have the policy bend to them.
Holmes’ budget message also gave short shrift to economies; of simply doing without. Departments were asked to cut. Some did. Others apparently resisted. And those that balked were placated in the Recommended Budget. Same goes for capital projects.
“Like the operating budget,” Holmes said, “the projects in the Capital Plan encompass many of the needs, priorities and values put forth in our Strategic Operations Plan,” a document lawmakers recently accepted. The words that followed may provide some taxpayers scant comfort.
“The policies and reserves that have been established provide us with a roadmap for getting there,” Holmes said of reaching the strategic goals. “It’s also going to take additional and gradual growth in the tax levy to fund the many capital projects we have before us, because it can’t be assumed, given what we’re seeing with sales tax revenues and the number of projects that we have, that fund balance will be self-replenishing.”
As Shawna Black said, this budget season is going to be “really, really hard.” And one can pretty much assume, unless there’s a taxpayers’ revolt, that the Two Percent Budget is a horse that’s departed through the barn door. We have yet to learn how many property owners will run out to chase it.
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Tompkins to ECC: No rebate; sorry
Reporting and analysis by Robert Lynch; September 4, 2024
If Tompkins County’s legislative majority were driving down State Street, they’d dare not go one mile over the speed limit even were there no cop in sight.
Legislators demonstrated their risk-aversion Tuesday night as most dared not stretch the rules to do what’s right and correct an administrative injustice that never should have occurred in the first place. It’s an injustice that’s imposed significant hardship on an Enfield community nonprofit.
By a ten-to-three vote, legislators rejected Randy Brown’s initiative that would have forgiven—or at least, attempted to forgive—more than $27,000 in property taxes and penalties assessed the non-profit Enfield Community Council (ECC) three years ago only because ECC had overlooked filing a simple exemption form by the state’s hard-and-fast deadline.
Intentionally or by happenstance, both fellow legislative Republicans supported Brown’s resolution. The ten Democrats who cast votes opposed it. (Democrat Amanda Champion recused herself.)
“Everybody seemed to drop the ball here,” Brown, southern Enfield’s representative, told fellow legislators. ”Because of simple paperwork, they were billed $27,000. It’s just not right.”
Not right, perhaps, but also an error tough to correct. While members offered plenty of sympathetic words for the ECC during a half-hour’s discussion of Brown’s tax forgiveness resolution, majority Democrats leaned heavily upon County Attorney Maury Josephson’s opinion that state law permits them no path to right this wrong and to offer a rebate.
“I don’t see at the moment a constitutional way to do this as laid out in the resolution,” Josephson advised lawmakers.
The ECC taxpaying mistake dates back to 2021. Enfield resident Helen Hetherington had reclaimed Enfield’s then seemingly-defunct Living Waters Church. Finding no other religious organization to buy it, Hetherington sold the building to the ECC. The church had been tax-exempt. ECC was tax-exempt. But Hetherington, herself, was not.
When the Community Council took title, it needed to file exemption paperwork annually with the Tompkins County Department of Assessment to reclaim its exemption. That first year—and only that first year—it missed the no-excuses, March first submission deadline. As a result, Tompkins County, the Town of Enfield, and the Ithaca City School District each imposed taxes on the building during their 2021-2022 billing cycles. ECC has tried, without success, to reclaim the paid taxes ever since.
Randy Brown first sought to refund the tax money last year, yet pulled his measure twice, and it never reached a vote. Tuesday’s retooled resolution would have returned to ECC $6,315 in interest and penalties the agency had paid. It would immediately return Tompkins County’s portion of the tax. And would “work to reimburse” the more than $16,000 paid to the Town of Enfield and the Ithaca City School District “as quickly as possible.”
“This is 30 per cent of their entire budget,” Brown said of the taxes ECC unnecessarily paid. “They’re in dire straits now financially to pay their bills and to do various things,” the legislator continued. “It’s a non-profit group, all volunteers. Enfield is the most economically-challenged town in the county.”
Brown, fellow legislator Anne Koreman, and this Councilperson-writer (who’d spoken on ECC’s behalf at the start of the meeting), read portions of a lengthy email ECC President Cortney Bailey had sent the Legislature over the weekend. Bailey detailed her agency’s tax problem, the Community Council’s history, its present efforts, and its fiscal plight.
“We desperately need whatever can be forgiven of the tax monies we paid,” Bailey wrote. “Our volunteers have been doing monthly dinners in the hopes of rebuilding our coffers, but it is not enough.”
To avoid massive, additional foreclosure penalties, ECC paid the taxes and interest last December. “Since paying the taxes, we have had issues with cash flow,” Bailey’s message continued. Indeed, it has. An unbalanced budget, approved by ECC’s Board of Directors in February, saw projected revenues falling nearly $12,000 short of expenses.
“This is a struggling outfit of volunteers that have been there for decades,” Brown said of the ECC. “So they did all the right things except they didn’t submit a form.”
But the law can be unforgiving. And for the Enfield Community Council, it appears to be just that.
“This is a tough one. The taxpayer is in a sympathetic position,” County Attorney Josephson acknowledged about the ECC. “On the other hand…” he cautioned, “The community center doesn’t have a claim of right to the money.”
Legislator Brown raised the question begging for an answer. What consequences would arise should Tompkins County simply bend the rules in ECC’s favor? What if it disregarded the letter of state law and relied instead on the law’s spirit?
“If we did provide these funds back, what happens to us?” Brown asked. “Do we get fined? Do we all get fired? What’s the penalty for doing this?”
“You don’t get fined. You don’t get fired,” Josephson replied. “You could end up with a finding that the Legislature as a whole has violated the New York State Constitution,” he counseled.
So, what would happen then? The attorney said litigants, although unlikely, could bring suit. “Is somebody going to litigate fast enough to try and obtain an injunction? Probably not,” he admitted. New York’s statute of limitations for municipal wrongdoing is short, and finding a plaintiff with legal standing to press a case could prove hard. Worst case, Josephson said, ECC could be asked to “disgorge the funds” returned to it.
“So they would end up in the same situation or potentially worse because they would have had the money back and may have spent it,” Josephson warned.
Yet, there’s the flip side to the argument. “You play litigation roulette,” the attorney acknowledged. “Maybe nothing happens.”
What’s more, the law in this area remains untested, he conceded. Case law addressing the constitutional argument is tough to find.
Nevertheless, most legislators—including Enfield’s other representative, Anne Koreman—proved to be gun-shy when it came to defying presumed legal authority. The majority became more than willing to let Josephson’s opinion stand as gospel.
“We all signed an oath when we took this office to uphold the constitutions of the United States and the State of New York,” Lansing’s Deborah Dawson stated in support of her refusal to give back the tax. “It would be a really ugly optic if we were to start making exceptions to when we were going to uphold that constitution and when we were going to decide not to.”
“And for that reason alone, I simply can’t vote for this; I’m sorry,” Dawson said.
Dawson was not alone. Sorrow aplenty for ECC spread about legislative chambers Tuesday. And member Greg Mezey attempted what some may see as a face-saving gesture. He sought to “table indefinitely” any vote on Brown’s initiative. He’d have relegated it to parliamentary oblivion without anyone’s fingerprints of outright rejection being on it . Mezey’s attempt failed four votes to nine.
In the backs of many a legislative mind Tuesday may have been a recurring fear of setting bad precedent.
“If this taxpayer gets a break,” Josephson said, “how many other taxpayers come out and say I forgot this; I forgot that… Somebody comes in and says ‘I’m not paying the tax because I’m the best game in town, I’m good people.’”
Josephson’s opinions held persuasive power. But, still, timidity dissolved poorly when mixed with sympathetic gestures expressed on the legislative floor.
“I would love to figure out a way to help them moving forward,” Travis Brooks remarked, his words coming minutes before he voted against Brown’s resolution after earlier having seconded it.
“I hope there’s a way we can help them,” Mezey echoed. He also voted no.
“I do appreciate all the great things that are happening in Enfield,” former legislative chair Shawna Black remarked. “Cortney’s email was very compelling. And so if there was a way to vote for this and not to have to worry about us going against our oath, then I certainly would have done it, but I can’t support it now. I’m sorry, Randy.”
Black admitted she would have backed the ECC rebate earlier, but not after the attorney had given his opinion.
The current legislative chair, Dan Klein, weighed in near the discussion’s end; he, too, supportive of ECC, yet likewise refusing to endorse Brown’s initiative.
“What I will do,” Klein said, “is use the power of this microphone to amplify this message: Enfield Community Council needs a donation of approximately $28,000,” he said “If there’s an angel out there that can provide some or all of that, or more than one angel, your money will be put to good use.”
“That’s the best that I feel like we can do,” Klein said with regret. He, too, opposed granting ECC the rebate.
To us who watch from afar in Enfield’s hinterlands, Klein’s entreaty may tempt us to hurl forth words we’d later regret. The “angel” of whom the chairman now speaks can be found in the legislator’s own mirror. Dan Klein also chairs the Legislature’s Community Recovery Fund Advisory Committee. It’s the committee that not once, but twice has snubbed the Enfield Community Council’s appeals for support. And it’s the committee’s chair who has within recent weeks also voiced a clear preference for redirecting a potential last-minute, more than million-dollar windfall of recovery funds to buy dump trucks and bulldozers rather than to fund community agencies like the ECC, all for the sake of administrative expediency.
To some of us, the Legislature Chairman’s latest words ring hollow. Sorry, but they do.
For the record, Republicans Mike Sigler and Lee Shurtleff joined Randy Brown in walking out onto that legally-tenuous limb, taking a risk, and helping the Enfield Community Council pay its bills. We should remember them each. They, quite rightly, deserve to be called our friends.
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When eight isn’t enough… maybe
ICSD likely to fill Board vacancy; choice uncertain
by Robert Lynch; August 30, 2024
If you wager on things like these, consider Moira Lang the odds-on favorite to return soon to her long-held seat on the Ithaca Board of Education. But don’t bet the ranch on it. The Ithaca Board—and Lang—were burned badly by the voters last spring, and since then, actions within the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) have become hard to predict. Filling a newly-found vacancy could become for the Ithaca board just another one of those modern-day can’t-guess moments.
Earlier, at the Board of Education’s August 13th session, we’d first learned of colleague Katie Apker’s sudden board resignation. Apker didn’t attend that night. Another member revealed her colleague’s decision and offered a resolution of thanks. Apker, a Cornell educator, had served just a single year of her three-year term. No reason was then given for her departure.
Two weeks later, August 27th, the remaining school board members discussed how they might fill the Apker vacancy—or whether they should fill it at all. The only thing decided for sure that night was that there’d be no special election. And even that question never came to a vote. It didn’t need to, given a special election’s estimated cost. Board President Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell said running an off-cycle round of voting could impose a $35,000-$40,000 burden on taxpayers.
“I’m opposed to a special election just because of my innate frugality,” Board member Jill Tripp remarked. No one disagreed with her.
With a special election off the table, just two options remained: Either fill the Apker vacancy through appointment, or leave the seat vacant and live with a board of eight until next spring’s annual voting.
A plurality of the board—though not a clear majority—supported appointing a ninth member. Moira Lang, first runner-up in last May’s seven-way race for three board seats, became the instant favorite of two of those she’d sit beside. No one else’s name got mentioned.
“She has an incredible amount of experience that you can really utilize right now,” Enfield’s Karen Friedeborn said in praise of Lang’s credentials. Her comment arose during the meeting’s floor privileges. Friedeborn became the first to suggest Lang’s appointment.
Nonetheless, achieving consensus on how to handle the Apker vacancy proved elusive, agreement hobbled by empty chairs at the table. Two board members—Erin Croyle and Todd Fox—weren’t there. That left only four voicing clear support for appointing Apker’s successor. Two others suggested the vacancy remain. Moving forward even on procedure would take five votes.
“I am not worried about a 4-4 split,” Board President Eversley Bradwell said. “My worry is solely about the significant amount of work that it’s going to require for us to move things forward over the next months; so I am in favor of a ninth person,” he said.
With either a direct endorsement or by clear inference, members Karen Yearwood and Garrick Blalock supported appointing Moira Lang. Both during and after the session, Eversley Bradwell also implied he’d back Lang, noting the long-time member’s “experience” and her endorsement by the Ithaca Teachers Association during the spring campaign.
A Board of Education member since 2015 and a former Ithaca teacher herself, Lang was voted off the board this year after she’d endorsed a nearly $169 Million school budget that carried an 8.4 per cent increase in the tax levy. More than 70 per cent of Ithaca’s voters had rejected the initial budget.
Incumbent Adam Krantweiss and newcomers Emily Workman and Todd Fox won the election in May. Fox came in third and bested fourth-place Lang by 419 votes. While Lang had strongly defended the rejected budget, Fox had openly opposed it. Another incumbent who’d supported the budget, Eldred Harris, came in last.
But Todd Fox was absent meeting night. Erin Croyle was also excused. Croyle had actually opposed the first budget put to voters on grounds it was too stingy. It’s easy to see how Croyle might support Moira Lang’s appointment. But even were Eversley Bradwell to join Yearwood, Blalock and Croyle, Moira Lang’s assured support would then only rise to four board members, not five.
“Personally, I would think I would like to see… all the people who are on the board be elected by the community,” Krantweiss argued. “I would prefer to keep it an eight-person board,” Krantweiss continued. “That way, everybody who’s on the board is elected by the full community, not the board.”
Yearwood and Blalock countered that inviting Lang to rejoin them does, indeed, reflect the public will. Had Apker resigned several months earlier rather than when she did, they said, voters would have elected four to their board, not just three; and Lang would have inherited Apker’s unexpired term.
“The community spoke at that time,” Yearwood insisted. Lang was their fourth choice, she reasoned.
“We would have had one more position to fill,” Blalock said in support of Yearwood’s logic. “The election would have filled it with the person with the next number of votes.”
But Krantweiss, a clinical psychologist with a Ph.D., sensed flawed reasoning. He equated the distinction to a physics problem. Putting a fourth position in play, he said, inserts a dynamic component to an otherwise-static election.
“If everybody got to vote for four people, we actually don’t know how the elction would have shaken out,” Krantweiss concluded, “because people might have voted differently, and the people who came in fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh might have been shuffled if everybody got to cast an extra vote.”
Jill Tripp, viewed by many as the taxpayer’s ally during the budget process, shared Krantweiss’ fear that attempting to appoint a new member would only reopen old wounds and never produce agreement.
“I share Adam’s concern about our ability to agree on a ninth member,” Tripp said, “and I would like that, obviously, to be unanimous. So I would probably come down on the side of continuing with eight, as awkward as that may be at times.”
Of the six members attending Tuesday, only Tripp and Krantweiss supported leaving the seat open. With three others—Yearwood, Blalock, and the Board President—favoring or leaning toward Lang—Emily Workman carved for herself a middle-position.
“It’s much better to have a nine-person board,” Workman acknowledged. “I also think that it doesn’t feel like the right choice to just go down the line to someone who lost the election,” she said.
At Tripp’s suggestion, members agreed to draft a future resolution that would endorse Yearwood’s proposal to go down the line to each successive loser in the May election and appoint the first of those former candidates who’d accept to serve. The resolution will likely see action in September. The school board meets September third, and then the tenth and the 24th.
After the meeting, Eversley Bradwell cautioned there’s no assurance this “down-the-line” vacancy-filling approach would secure a majority. Should it fail, he said, someone might offer a different idea.
Moira Lang has yet to commit publicly her willingness to rejoin the board. If she’d decline, former teacher and BOCES administrator Barry Derfel would stand next on the list.
As for Katie Apker’s reasons for ending her brief tenure, The Ithaca Times August 29th quoted a statement in which she cited “recent shifts in my personal and work obligations.” Apker gave no indication that politics played a role.
“I am disappointed not to be able to continue, but have great respect for the remaining members of the Board who continue to serve our Ithaca community,” Apker wrote the Times.
One can draw rough parallels between the dilemma that now faces the Ithaca Board of Education with that which the Enfield Town Board confronted three years ago when the post of Town Supervisor fell vacant.
Back then, two of those on a member-gutted, three-person Town Board supported appointment of former Councilperson Stephanie Redmond as Supervisor. The third member (this writer-Councilperson) wanted to let the voters decide at the ballot box. Eventually all three voted to elevate Redmond so as to avoid crippling Enfield’s governance and throwing its future to the courts.
Of course, the Ithaca City School District’s impending decision carries far less drama. The school board can easily continue with eight members, just as it did two years ago after a similar resignation.
Nevertheless, just as with Enfield’s best-forgotten morass, politics can intrude. Moira Lang supported the initial budget. Voters rejected both the budget and also her. Were Lang appointed now, budget critics could perceive it as a sneaky end-run to undo a course correction they’d demanded and to bring back someone from ICSD’s “old guard” when fresh blood and a new direction is what they wanted.
It’s why appointment of Lang—or anyone else, for that matter—to fill the Katie Apker vacancy takes on elevated importance.
“It’s clear that we probably will not come to a consensus,” Board President Eversley Bradwell conceded. “But the question is, can we find a path forward.”
###
Your Taxes… Locked Up
New policy; new reserves snarl Tompkins’ budgeting process
Reporting and analysis by Robert Lynch; August 27, 2024
Equate it to your own finances. It’s the best way to explain it.
You’ve got tens of thousands parked in a traditional checking account; not a smart choice. So first you switch to no-fee checking to escape those pesky, per-check charges. It’s a good first step, although, it requires you maintain a hefty minimum balance. Next, you apply a little self-discipline. You move some of the cash to your child’s college fund or put it into an IRA. Wise, of course, but it locks those funds up until you withdraw them for their intended purpose. You’re just as financially rich, but now you’re also cash-poor. Oh, and by the way, you’re spending more each month on life’s necessities than your paycheck brings in. This can’t go on forever.
That, in essence, is where Tompkins County stands right now. And to a large extent, its administrators and lawmakers have only themselves to blame.
For the better part of an hour Tuesday night, August 20th, County Administrator Lisa Holmes briefed those seated beside her at the Daniel Tompkins Building’s big-oval about her county’s fund balance—essentially, its savings account— and fielded legislators’ questions about where it stands. Holmes’ message carried about the same amount of glee as your average Donald Trump speech. The fund balance is fat in theory, but starving in fact. Legislators can’t spend most of their eight-figure surplus without breaking the rules.
“I think our fund balance issues are self-imposed,” Randy Brown, one of Enfield’s two county legislators, informed the meeting that night. He happens to be right.
Back last December, Brown was among five legislators who opposed Tompkins County enacting its new Fund Balance Policy, one that directs Tompkins County keep a surplus equal to a full one-quarter of its nearly $200,000 in annual expenditures locked away and not touched for fear of a rainy day that may or may not come.
But that’s not the only thing downtown lawmakers have done during the past year. First, in November, the County Legislature moved $5.72 Million from its Unassigned Fund Balance to a newly-created “Debt Service Reserve Fund,” one from which financial staff would withdraw cash between now and 2028 to pay principal and interest on bonding debt that’s occurred during the past decade.
Then, two months later, in January, when all eyes focused on a roomful of protesters urging the legislature endorse a cease-fire in Gaza, a lopsided majority of those we’ve elected created four more reserve accounts and shoveled another $12.6 Million from the unassigned fund balance into them. A new “Capital Reserve”—dedicated to building new buildings and the like—ate up $11 Million alone.
Each of those reserve fund resolutions carries a boilerplate stipulation: “Except as otherwise provided by law, expenditures from these Reserve Funds shall be made only for the purpose for which the Reserve Fund is established” and that “No expenditure shall be made from these Reserve Funds without the approval of this governing board,” that is, the County Legislature.
Reserve funds become a fiscal door that swings but one way. It’s easy to put tax dollars into them, yet darned tough to pull them back out.
And those frozen-up funds produce the self-made liquidity crisis Tompkins County finds itself in as administrators and legislators craft their 2025 budget.
“In a year like this, not everything is going to be able to be funded,” Administrator Holmes cautioned. “There are many areas that are in need of policy decisions and priority settings, including capital projects.”
Yes, to critics like this writer, one of the first capital projects to reconsider is that “Center of Government,” an envisioned $40 Million downtown office building that at least one legislator now estimates may cost taxpayers $60 Million (see separate story). The center has already given some legislators the jitters. But there are many more projects in the capital pipeline, including a possible new jail and “Green Building” initiatives to make existing structures more energy-efficient.
And to make matters worse, Holmes told lawmakers her county’s expenditures grew by $13.9 Million between 2022 and 2023. That’s an eight per cent increase. No one thinks revenues grew by an equivalent amount to wash away the added cost. In fact, Holmes acknowledged that expected state and federal revenues actually fell by millions.
Holmes will deliver her draft budget to the County Legislature September 3rd, just two weeks after she’d briefed lawmakers on the fund balances. The fund balance presentation came minutes after accountants had summarized an annual audit for the County, one that actually nailed down fund balance numbers that politicians sometimes toss around with wide variation and reckless abandon.
Mind you, Tompkins County is far from broke. Many other counties would envy our position. It’s just that liquidity has become our problem. The just-released audit pegged the Tompkins County unassigned fund balance at $60.9 Million at the end of last year. It stood at $72 Million one year earlier. It’s the $5.7 Million capital reserve lawmakers created last November that knocked the 2022 end-of-year figure to its lower number, a drop accelerated by nearly $4.8 Million in departmental add-ons to the budget we now live under.
Those budget extras—over-target requests (OTR’s) in Tompkins County budget-speak—have a way of drawing legislators to them like bees to nectar (or maybe, dogs to road kill). During multiple autumn meetings that will resume soon, department heads and community agency leaders troop to legislative chambers to plead, cajole—and yes, whine—for their inclusion within the budget. Traditionally, legislators have found it hard to say no. Budget listening sessions will gear up within days. We’ll soon learn if this year’s reception will prove different.
But here’s the immediate bind. Those reserve funds, last year’s and this year’s, will lower this December’s predicted fund balance to (only!) $48.3 Million. Last December’s policy decision to raise the fund balance target from 18 to 25 per cent of budget will require $48.77 Million to be left “in the bank,” so to speak, untouched, Holmes informed lawmakers. See the problem? At least on paper, Tompkins County will be more than $473,000 in the hole.
“Eighteen per cent was perfectly fine for a long time,” Randy Brown maintained after he heard Holmes’ presentation. “And I think it was 15 per cent before that,” he recalled. Indeed 15 per cent was the benchmark, until the Legislature raised it several years ago.
The New York State Comptroller sets no specific minimum percentages for municipal fund balances. One outside association recommends at least two-or-three months of a government’s budget be kept on hand. Three months’ spending would equal 25 per cent of budget. Two months’ worth would be 16.7 per cent.
Lansing’s Deborah Dawson sits across from Randy Brown at the legislature’s big oval desk. And she sits opposite from him as well when it comes to fund balance policy. Dawson can be a fiscal pessimist at times—check that; make it almost all of the time. Dawson was again the lockbox guardian the night Lisa Holmes shared her fund balance and budgeting assessment.
“I know that nobody’s real happy about this,” Dawson acknowledged. “And I know that some of you are not big fans of the reserve accounts. But I think this conversation that we’re having is one of the reasons why we needed to have the policy,” she insisted.
“We needed to have those reserves,” Dawson insisted, “because in the past, we’ve looked at this big number, (the Fund Balance), and said, ‘man, we’re flush.’ And I think that what we’re learning here is that however big the number is, it’s not necessarily that we’re flush. And it’s better to know that stuff than to… continue spending as if the gravy train was never going to pull out of the station.”
Of course, that Tompkins County train remains loaded with gravy. It’s only that it’s sealed in containers that no one can open without getting his hands slapped.
Last April, the Tompkins County Legislature instructed Lisa Holmes to present this fall a 2025 budget that would keep the tax levy increase at no more than two per cent, the same increase as for the current year. Holmes still promises she’ll do that. Only she’ll now also submit a budget that’s larger, one that would push the levy higher. This second budget, nevertheless, would contain the levy’s increase within this year’s state-calculated “tax cap” for our county’s government, namely 4.45 per cent.
Keeping levy increases within the lower two per cent, Holmes warned, would require saying “No” to lots of people—department heads, let alone those from outside agencies.
“I still will deliver a budget with a two per cent levy increase, as directed,” Holmes assured lawmakers. “However, having reviewed the needs and requests, I do not believe it’s going to be sufficient to meet the operational needs of the organization.”
To create the so-called “two per cent budget,” the administrator had asked department heads to cut their requests by five per cent. Some departments can do that; others, those bound by state mandates, cannot.
One can parallel the plight facing Tompkins County with that which faced the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) last spring. The Ithaca school superintendent first advanced a budget that carried a 12 per cent tax levy increase. The Board of Education cut the increase to 8.4 per cent. Ithaca’s voters still rejected it by a wide margin and forced the school board to cut deeper to win on a revote. For Ithaca, the staff and program cuts proved painful, yet appear achievable. Parents and teachers complain, but the reductions still take place.
The big difference between the ICSD and Tompkins County is political. With Tompkins County, only the legislature gets to vote; the public does not. Fiscal discipline must come from within, not without.
Administrator Holmes was cast a bit adrift last Tuesday night. Finance Director Lorrie Scarrott was away. Holmes budget-wise deputy, Norma Jayne, was attending remotely. One could feel Holmes’ anxiety. She sometimes stood unsure of herself. Yet she was sure of one thing: With an unassigned fund balance of $48.3 Million, “the County remains in a strong fiscal position,” Holmes said.
Finance Director Scarrott was the prime architect of the 25 per cent fund balance policy, multiple legislators indicated. No one that night explicitly recommended the policy’s rescission, though some came close. Dryden’s Greg Mezey wondered at what point legislators could tap reserves to provide fiscal flexibility. Rich John questioned how deeply the fund balance policy itself is anchored.
“Should we think about our policy,” John wondered, “because it is a policy, it’s not a law or anything, to give us the ability to work through our budget needs this year?”
Deborah Dawson would keep the policy, but pinch pennies instead.
“We need to remember that we’re not just in this situation because of these policies, which were fiscally prudent, but also because we’ve been spending an awful lot of money,” Dawson observed. “I mean, an eight per cent increase in our expenditures; that’s a lot.”
Amanda Champion, sitting beside Dawson, also had no desire to revisit the 25 per cent policy set-aside. And she echoed Dawson’s call for frugality. “We can’t just keep going on spending and not face the consequences of that.”
Words like those are easy for Champion and Dawson to state in the abstract. Looking a department head or agency advocate in the eye and denying a money request could prove much harder.
Lost too often, of course, is the forgotten taxpayer, the one whose hard-earned and compulsory-paid dollar has been sequestered in some accountant’s budget line by that arbitrary 25 per cent retention rule:
”What’s the plan to use some of these funds to reduce the tax burden on our constituents?” Greg Mezey asked. “That’s my focus; it’s not just spend, spend, spend, spend, spend. It’s how do we reduce the cost to live in Tompkins County, and how do we keep our levy and our spending in check… because I’m sure there is something that we’re doing out there at the County that we could not be doing and nobody would know the difference.”
A shout from across the room prompted correction: “… that few will know the difference,” Mezey clarified.
But taxpayers generally don’t troop to legislative chambers; slighted bureaucrats and activists do that. And right now the Fund Balance Policy stands; the reserves remain locked in place; a liquidity-limited budget season lies ahead; and Administrator Holmes terms 2025 a “transition year.” A transition to what, she didn’t quite explain.
###
Dollars for Dozers, but not for us
CMC last-minute lifeline dims Enfield agencies’ funding hopes
Reporting and analysis by Robert Lynch; August 22, 2024
When it comes to Tompkins County’s Community Recovery Fund, two facts stand out: Cayuga Medical Center will always receive the benefit of the doubt; and Enfield’s deserving agencies will always receive nothing.
It happened again Tuesday. It happened by surprise. And it happened because Tompkins County Legislature Chair Dan Klein bent a rule he’d earlier helped make.
With two members absent—Shawna Black was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention—the legislature voted eleven-to-one to grant Cayuga Medical (CMC) a one-month extended deadline to secure the state approvals it needs to access a long-standing, $1.5 Million grant from the Recovery Fund. CMC would use the money to build a Crisis Stabilization Center to treat mental health emergencies.
“Finance took a harder look within themselves to see if we could extend that deadline, and the answer was, yes, we could,” Klein told legislators.
The 31-day extension means more than just the flip of a calendar page. It cements a make-or-break choice. By pushing CMC’s approval deadline from the end of this month to the end of next, Albany’s more-likely-than-not rejection of the hospital corporation’s request would provide too little time for local officials to repurpose the $1.5 Million to other deserving Recovery Fund applicants, including two from Enfield.
The Community Recovery Fund, created by the County Legislature in 2021, passes through a fraction of our county’s share of the federally-supported American Rescue Plan (ARPA). Those ARPA rules set firm deadlines, one of which falls this December. And while local administrators may push themselves to the limit to accommodate CMC’s last-minute compliance, they indicated Tuesday that they will not do so for anyone else.
Their decision means that if state approvals don’t come in, and if CMC loses its Recovery Fund award, Tompkins County will likely—and quickly—redirect the $1.5 Million into its General Fund, where it will be used to buy bulldozers and the like.
“That’s the worst news you’ve told me tonight, Bob,” a frustrated Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners Chair Greg Stevenson told this writer/Councilperson, Robert Lynch, Tuesday night when advised of the impending one-month CMC extended deadline. The Board of Commissioners was meeting in Enfield as the County Legislature was conferring downtown. Legislators voted about an hour after Enfield’s meeting adjourned.
The Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) that the commissioners oversee was one of two Enfield agencies that stood among a select list of finalists poised to receive Recovery Fund cash should the hospital’s application get denied. The Enfield Community Council was the other.
The EVFC became the second runner-up for funding last year in the Recovery Fund’s most recent major round of disbursements. Though it had sought more support initially, Enfield’s Fire Company in May 2023 requested between $50,000 and $178,000 for its “Capital Improvement Project.” Fire Company President Dennis Hubbell said Tuesday that EVFC would have used the funds to build a “bunk room” for volunteers and for other worthwhile projects.
Fourteen of 35 funding candidates received Recovery Fund support in that May ’23 round of awards. The EVFC came in at number sixteen.
The Enfield Community Council fell a bit lower on last year’s list of 35. It sought—and still seeks—a minimum $146,000 to replace a dilapidated trailer adjacent to its Community Center with a Mental Health Wing. The expansion would in part provide counseling services to Enfield residents.
It was Legislature Chair Klein—who also chairs the Community Recovery Fund Advisory Committee—who joined in a committee request in late-June that put CMC on-notice: Either obtain the long-denied New York State approvals for the Crisis Stabilization Center by August 30th, or else forfeit its $1.5 Million Recovery Fund award. CMC’s was by far the largest amount distributed.
The committee gave a similar ultimatum to Khuba International, the organization which seeks to establish a cooperative farm in Danby. Khuba got $74,086 from the fund in May of last year, but faces delays—and perhaps resistance—from some Danby Town zoning officials.
Tuesday’s adopted resolution granted both CMC and Khuba a one-month deadline extension.
“CMC has had almost two years to get those state approvals since the legislature awarded them that $1.5 Million,” this writer, representing Enfield, told the County Legislature Tuesday. Conveyed was a Town Board Resolution, adopted August 14th, recommending that any unused Recovery Fund moneys be redistributed to earlier-denied applicants.
“We really feel it would be unfortunate, and to a certain extent a retraction of your earlier commitments, to take this money and fold it back into what I affectionately call ‘Bucks for Bulldozers,’ which means taking the money back if CMC can’t use it and spending it on highway equipment or something else,” this Councilperson told legislators, speaking before Klein’s extended deadline was placed on the legislature’s floor. If the state approvals come through by August 30th, “then this is academic,” I qualified. “But we thought… our Town Board should be on record in favor of using this money for its original purpose.”
Legislature Chair Klein had suggested at a committee meeting August 5th that any redirected recovery funds go toward Highway Department purchases should CMC default. Nothing he said at Tuesday’s full Legislature meeting dispelled that idea.
Only Newfield-Enfield legislator Randy Brown dissented on granting the critical, one-month extension of the CMC and Khuba deadlines.
Enfield’s other representative, Anne Koreman, supported the revised, September 30th deadline. Ithaca legislator Veronica Pillar, who in committee had voiced support for redistributing forfeited CMC funds to other agencies, was among the two members excused from the meeting.
Dan Klein sprung his extended deadline initiative with no public forewarning. It found its way into legislators’ secretive “red folders” and was not published with the evening’s agenda.
“It is now believed that a September 30, 2024 deadline will give the County sufficient time to reallocate the money, if necessary,” Klein’s red-folder Resolution sought to justify what he’d proposed.
But “reallocate the money” to whom?
“I don’t know what another 30 days does,” legislator Travis Brooks asked. “I’ve heard Veronica loud and clear. I’ve heard other members of the community loud and clear about the possibilities of using those funds for some of the things we didn’t fund instead of trucks and stuff for the County,” Brooks said.
“So I can’t support this,” Brooks continued. (He eventually did.) “They’ve had two years,” he observed of the hospital’s elusive quest. “Have they indicated they can get this done in that time if we give them 30 days?” he asked Klein.
“So they haven’t quite indicated that they can,” Klein told Brooks. “But there are things happening on both of these projects (CMC and Khuba) that’s coming in the next 30 days that will kinda’ just indicate one way or the other whether they’re likely to be successful or not.”
No, Dan Klein’s answer did not ring with confidence. Instead, it suggested a heaping abundance of high-powered, brute force arm-twisting by Ithaca’s monopoly hospital.
“They are expecting certain things to come into play within the next 30 days that will indicate whether they think they can go ahead with the project as currently outlined or not,” Klein said.
But just stop and think: Our giant hospital, our powerful, pushy, opulent Cayuga Health, quite plainly senses no shame as it sits upon—some might say, squanders—$1.5 Million in governmental generosity, money Albany’s upper-floor bureaucrats may never permit it to spend. CMC is running out the clock while other deserving applicants could put that money to good use right now.
Quite plainly, based on the words Dan Klein employed, Cayuga Health has relied on nothing more than a hope and a prayer and an overdose of wishful thinking. If only County legislators could see what the Enfield Town Board clearly does.
The legislative chair also said Khuba officials had met with Danby authorities earlier that day. Klein hadn’t learned the meeting’s outcome.
County Administrator Lisa Holmes was off her game Tuesday night. Troubled by things unexplained, she struggled through a fund balance presentation earlier in the meeting, a presentation sometimes painful to watch. And the soon-to-retire administrator deferred to her deputy, Norma Jayne, when asked by Brooks whether there’s time before year’s end to redirect surplus Community Recovery funds to back-up applicants.
“As much as I’d love to see that happen, I think that if we had to go outside the County (that is, County departments)… to try to coordinate with the different agencies to get contracts signed within the timeline, that would be very difficult,” Jayne replied.
Mind you, it would not be impossible to do what Brooks had proposed; just messy. It’s County Budget season. A new budget director is still in training. Jayne may need to write most of the budget herself. Legislators always complicate the process more than they probably should. Quite simply, administrators would rather not be bothered with doing anything more.
“I’ve got the contracts on my desk,” Enfield Fire Company President Hubbell stated bluntly at the Commissioners’ meeting Tuesday, Hubbell believing administrative staff had exaggerated their headache. Likewise, ECC President Cortney Bailey has said that within days of an award to her agency, she could get contracts signed, an old building torn down, and the new wing started.
But there’s a back-door Tompkins County strategy also at work here, one only hinted about in public. If the state approvals don’t come through, and County Government needs to claw back CMC’s lost $1.5 Million to buy bulldozers and the like, some would like Tompkins County to repurpose its own taxpayer dollars to underwrite the Crisis Stabilization Center—and do so at a time when state regulators become more receptive to it.
A mental health stabilization unit is “desperately needed” here, Lansing’s Mike Sigler stated in support of last-ditch lobbying and another month’s delay. “Frankly, there no real excuse for us at this point not to have a unit like this,” Sigler said. He’s optimistic that, given time, regulators will come around to his thinking.
But sorry, even if Tompkins County finds a way to circumvent state law and “gift” Cayuga Health the Stabilization Center’s subsidy later, those state prohibitions would undoubtedly slam the door shut on agencies like the ECC or Enfield’s firefighters.
Legislator Greg Mezey pointedly asked whether a government—his government—could pull off such a fiscal shell-game; whether it could redirect CMC’s potentially-forfeited cash for County use, but then replenish the Recovery Fund coffers later with local tax dollars and do so legally. Administrator Holmes and County Attorney Maury Josephson each agreed it could not.
“So it’s either they (CMC and the state) get their act together by September 30th, or it’s ‘Dollars for Dozers?’” Mezey asked the chairman.
“Yes,” Klein answered.
“That’s unfortunate,” Mezey said with sadness.
****
Yes, it’s unfortunate. But of course, it’s predictable. For us living in this west-side outlier of a town, the Tompkins County Community Recovery Fund remains as it’s always been: It’s a fund for somebody else. The ARPA clock ticks. The hospital banks on a prayer. Administrators make things easy on themselves. And Enfield, again, receives nothing. Life goes on, we guess.
###
The “Cornfield Option” gains ground
by Robert Lynch, August 18, 2024
Tompkins County legislator Mike Lane is the last person you’d expect to say what he said. But yes, he said it, and in a public meeting. He spoke last Tuesday, August 13, as a key legislative committee addressed the regulatory roadblocks to demolishing downtown buildings to make way for a Center of Government.
“Should we be looking at another option?” Lane asked the Downtown Facilities Committee, on which he sits. “Should we be looking at building out somewhere else, where we could build a big-box office building, a modern office building, and not have to worry about us having to build down here?”
The Dryden lawmaker is just one of 14 legislators, yet his voice is critically influential. And his comment was a surprise. Sitting on one committee or another, Mike Lane for years has faulted other people’s suggestions that Tompkins County abandon the “Downtown Campus,” as he’s termed it, and consolidate its office space elsewhere. He’s rejected the idea that we should follow some other counties’ lead and in his words, “build in a cornfield somewhere.”
Now Mike Lane, at least in frustration, has grown an appreciation of cornstalks.
Mike Lane’s fallback option surfaced as the Downtown Facilities Special Committee heard that it may be next spring before the New York State Historic Preservation Office—nicknamed SHPO—tours two vacant buildings near the Tompkins County Courthouse, buildings County Government bought for $3 Million in 2021 intending to raze them quickly and replace them with a $40 Million Center of Government.
Those now-vacant buildings—the former Key Bank and attorney Walter Wiggins’ “Professional Building”—lie within Ithaca’s DeWitt Park Historic District. And because they do, SHPO holds leverage. The state agency probably cannot forbid demolition. But it could impede the process and stand in the way of future governmental benefits like state and federal grants.
And with the SHPO approval process dragging out much longer than expected, Lane thinks an alternative deserves consideration.
“Should we be looking at parallel tracts to look at that (a site outside of downtown), and let the folks know this isn’t our only option?” Lane asked the committee. “The City needs to know it. SHPO needs to know it. There are other options out there.”
Historic preservationist concerns about a Center of Government surfaced last year when the City of Ithaca attempted to impose control over future building designs. It relied on a City ordinance that mandated pre-demolition review by the Ithaca Landmarks Preservation Commission. In January, the County Legislature sought to pre-empt City authority by endorsing a 1988 state court decision that had granted another county in New York the right to overrule its own included-city’s development objections.
But in March, two months after Tompkins County thought it had removed the City Hall roadblock, along came SHPO. And matters have proven a mess ever since.
The Urban Renewal-era Key Bank and Wiggins Offices stand out like sore thumbs beside DeWitt Park’s other nearby buildings. The “Old Courthouse” (now called the Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins Building), currently housing the Legislature’s chambers, was built in 1854. The Italianate mansion Boardman House is also 19th Century. Likewise, the nearby Presbyterian and Baptist Churches are old. By comparison, the glass-and-steel Key Bank building and the brick-and-block law office are mere architectural youngsters. Yet SHPO considers each a “contributing structure” to the historic district and grants them grander stature than either probably deserves.
There’s a third building in play as well; so-called “Building C,” which the Board of Elections and the Assessment Department now use. It would likely come down only after the Center of Government is built. But SHPO seeks to review Building C’s historic contribution too.
So, the review bureaucracy proceeds slowly, and everybody simply waits.
“I’ve always been a strong supporter of having the Center of Government downtown, centrally located in the county, in the county seat,” said Deborah Dawson, another legislator with newly-born second thoughts. “But now a few more hurdles may convince me that we ought to be exploring another option.”
Committee Chair Randy Brown reminded Dawson that the Tompkins County Legislature has already approved proceeding with a downtown Center of Government. It did so last September.
“We can change our mind if it turns out not to be fiscally responsible,” Dawson replied.
“I agree,” Brown said.
Quite honestly, however, part of the current delay is of Tompkins County’s own making. Local planning officials want to postpone SHPO’s on-site visit until a preliminary design for the new building is ready.
Although the Tompkins County Legislature resolved its direction on a Center of Government nearly a year ago, the County still has not hired an architect, so there’s no design sketch for regulators to review. Six firms have applied for the assignment. Administrators narrowed the list to four just recently. Interviews will start soon. Legislators will pick the winner. But don’t expect anything for anybody to look at until spring.
Making sure architects are in place and an initial design has been prepared before SHPO arrives “would probably be in our best interests and help us present our strongest case for the path that we think really does make sense,” Megan McDonald, Deputy Commissioner of Planning and Sustainability, advised the committee.
“We would need something more than a “general concept,” McDonald cautioned.
All that’s now in hand is just that concept; the plan for a modern office building likely five stories high, nothing more. Decision-makers lack anything with even cocktail-napkin specificity. A few years ago, there was talk of someone’s preliminary sketch, shared privately. But it was rejected as downright ugly and incompatible with anything close to it. We, the public, never got a glimpse.
And to think of it, maybe the reason that historic preservationists and SHPO seek regulatory leverage is not so much their love for a couple of tired 1960’s buildings as it is fear of what may take their place. SHPO may have viewed—as we all have—the recent transformation of Ithaca, and what can occur when a small, booming city explodes upward when it cannot spread outward. Simply put, quirky is dying. And what historic DeWitt Park does not need now—or at any time—is for a small-windowed, gray-paneled, five-story box as its neighbor to glower over it.
Mind you, Mike Lane would rather the Center of Government not leave the downtown campus. He’s just angry that nothing’s moving forward right now. And exiting for the fields of Lansing was but one of two options he’d offered the committee that morning. The other was to stick a thumb into SHPO’s eye. (There’s a more colorful, less family-friendly metaphor.)
“We already have a Resolution on record to deconstruct the legal building,” Lane recalled. “Well, now look what’s happened. We’ve got the impediment of SHPO here. I would say again, I think we should just proceed (with demolition).”
“If we lose a grant, we lose a grant,” Lane retaliated to SHPO’s purported power. “But I think if we’re going to build a building on this corner, we need to take these buildings down, the sooner the better.”
Ulysses-Enfield legislator Anne Koreman took issue with Lane’s damn-the-torpedoes approach.
“If we are this close, I’m totally in favor of waiting for deconstruction or demolition until we get the experts on board,” Koreman told the committee.
Some, like Lane, stand tempted to snub the Historic Preservation Office. Yet it may be playing with fire. McDonald cautioned that the agency’s approval is one of those little checkboxes grant applicants in an historic district must always mark before state or federal funders free up cash.
“I can’t say no funding is available,” McDonald said. “But it would blow up that process,” she cautioned, as every state and federal agency in this situation looks to SHPO for a sign-off.
The “cornfield option” is a backup choice that’s grown momentum of late, even if largely behind the scenes. Dryden’s Greg Mezey has several times suggested the Legislature pursue it. So has Lansing’s Mike Sigler. It’s possible—though not assured—that a majority of legislators may support site relocation, though they mostly talk about it only privately. Still, some on the Legislature remain reluctant to take that left turn, particularly those from the City of Ithaca.
“I would think that taking our Center of Government out of the center of the county would be a real failure,” City legislator Rich John told the committee, as he countered Mike Lane’s “parallel tract” idea. “But I can understand the sentiment because here we are.”
“I agree with Rich that the Center of Government belongs in the center of the county, John’s City-based colleague, Veronica Pillar, echoed. “I would not support going on some parallel path somewhere else, as what it sounds like is a bargaining chip. This should be more of a ‘collaborative with the community’ process as much as possible.”
Greg Mezey that morning sat on the fence, a surprising position given his prior statements.
“You’ve heard me talk before about maybe we should look somewhere else,” the Dryden freshman lawmaker told the committee. He said he may still lean that way. “But I also think that we’ve decided to move in a path, in a direction, and we need to continue to support that; let the process play out as painful and as glacial as government and bureaucracy moves.”
From what we’re told, SHPO bureaucrats, from their far-away perch, want architects to somehow consider incorporating elements of the existing structures—if not whole buildings—into a Center of Government’s final design. Harmonizing a 50-60 year old structure with modern-day design and code requirements seems incongruous on its face. Legislators recognize that. But Albany preservationists may not.
“Is there anybody in this room who thinks that would be a wise use of money; try to rehabilitate that building and reuse it in some way?” Rich John asked rhetorically about the former bank building on the corner of Buffalo and Tioga Streets.
“Trying to incorporate part or a whole building is really going to put us at a loggerhead” when it comes to modern building codes and handicap accessibility rules, McDonald reminded the committee. “Public buildings are held to a higher standard,” she said.
“I see it very, very difficult to re-use three buildings,” County Facilities Director Arel LeMaro advised the committee. “They’re so different.”
The Downtown Facilities Committee had earlier expected the bank and legal buildings would be fully deconstructed by early next year, with deconstruction beginning as soon as now. But with SHPO staff not likely to tour until next spring, final building removal has become an open question.
“We’re on our timetable still,” Chairman Brown insisted. Yet Brown’s words conflict with an Administration timetable presented the committee last December. According to that schedule, the consultants were to have been picked by last April, designs handed up this November, the project bid next year, construction begun in 2026, and the Center of Government ready for occupancy in 2028.
Presuming SHPO can be placated, and given the Planning Department’s desire to present the pesky agency a design sketch before it comes here, Brown acknowledged reality: “The ball has rolled as far as it can roll for now.”
And legislator Lane peppered the 90-minute committee meeting with one final pessimistic observation before Brown closed it down. After Greg Mezey had suggested that the planned five-story Center of Government should be raised one story higher to accommodate future growth, Lane observed, “I think we’re looking at a $60 Million project.”
Face it, there’s nothing like a 50 per cent price hike to make a cornfield ever more inviting.
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Enfield Board fights T.C. Recovery takeback
Dog Law review slows; SkateGarden rules set
by Robert Lynch; August 15, 2024
When the Tompkins County Legislature first parceled out its $6.5 Million Community Recovery Fund in December 2022, the Town of Enfield and its hometown agencies got nothing. When the Legislature held a second round of awards in May of last year, the Town itself got $26,592—four-tenths of one per cent of the total—to buy new radios for its Highway Department. Meanwhile, the Enfield Community Council (ECC) and the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC), despite standing comfortably in the queue, got frozen out—again.
But in that same process, as has been well-reported, Cayuga Medical Center (CMC) won the largest award of all, $1.5 Million, 23 per cent of the funding pot, to help build a Crisis Stabilization Center in the Shops at Ithaca Mall.
In the past year, things haven’t much changed. But for CMC, that’s a problem. Despite repeated attempts, the hospital corporation has found itself unable to dislodge Albany regulators from their reluctance to give the Crisis Center the approvals it needs. Tompkins County legislators in late-June gave CMC until the end of this month to secure Albany’s OK or else forfeit the Recovery Fund grant.
That’s where the Enfield Town Board stepped in Wednesday night.
In a two-page, 14-paragraph Resolution that took longer to read than to discuss or vote on, the Town Board urged the County Legislature to re-open the Community Recovery Fund’s application process to 21 select applicants, including both the ECC and the EVFC, should the hospital fail to meet its August 30th deadline, a failure most officials expect.
“Enfield Community Council sought $146,000 for a mental health wing on its Enfield Community Center,” this Councilperson, Robert Lynch, told the Tompkins County Legislature August 6th. Lynch responded to committee talk that legislators might, instead, redirect the CMC money for County purposes. This writer insisted that the ECC investment would be “very compatible” with what CMC has proposed, yet cannot persuade regulators to approve.
“I think that what we should do is not take that $1.5 Million, which is a quarter of the Community Recovery Fund, and put it back into this big, dark hole called the General Fund,” I told the Legislature that night. “I think we should open it up to applicants like ECC and see if we can do good things with it for the community, that the community will be proud that we did.”
Faced with tight contracting requirements for the Recovery Fund, deadlines imposed by the federal government because the $6.5 Million total is drawn from Tompkins County’s award under the American Rescue Plan (ARPA), legislators in committee August 5th got jittery. They feared that if they opened up a new round of reviews, recipients might not meet the deadlines, and the federal money would be lost.
“The contingency plan is that we’re going to use it (that is, the $1.5 Million) for County purposes, probably highway equipment or something expensive and easily justified with ARPA money,” Dan Klein, Chair of both the Legislature and the Community Recovery Fund Advisory Committee, said in answering committee member Veronica Pillar’s question as to what contingency the committee had made for redistributing the CMC money.
Pillar replied that clawing back the money to the General Fund would be “uncool” and that the optics to the community would be “not great.”
But at the early-August meeting, Klein also held out the prospect that his recommended contingency plan could be revisited “if anybody has a different idea.” Should CMC come up dry on August 30th, the full Legislature would likely determine as a group how to reassign the surplus cash.
“[T]he removal of nearly one-quarter (23%) of the original CRF allocation through redirecting its resources to County purposes would severely weaken the program’s beneficial community impact and run contrary to the program’s original intent and its stated promise to Tompkins County residents,” the Enfield Town Board’s adopted Resolution stated.
The Town Board approved the Resolution unanimously and routinely without debate. The Resolution directed the Town Clerk to notify the Tompkins County Legislature of Enfield’s position.
Anne Koreman, one of Enfield’s two Tompkins County legislators, attended the Town Board meeting Wednesday. She left before the Resolution was adopted. Advised before she left that the matter would receive Board attention, Koreman declined a commitment on whether she’d support or oppose it. However, Koreman did point to the late-December contracting deadline, one which she may have misunderstood as a deadline for actual project completion.
Koreman also remarked that recent Tompkins County sales tax distributions have slumped, implying that the Recovery Fund moneys might prove needed for general government purposes.
“[B]oth the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company and the Enfield Community Council stand ready, willing and able to utilize CRF funds and comply with appropriate government deadlines,” Wednesday’s Town Board Resolution stated assuredly.
ECC President Cortney Bailey has said in the past that should her application receive Recovery Fund approval, an existing trailer standing on the site of the mental health wing could be demolished within 48 hours, and the new building promptly put in its place.
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In other Enfield Town Board business:
Dog Law Revisions: In contrast to the sharp words and graphic descriptions of its last meeting two weeks earlier, the Town Board Wednesday took a second, more methodical and less adversarial look at its draft 16-page Dog Control and Licensing Law, one that would replace a simpler, three-page document now on Enfield’s books.
Because of newly-learned legal and contractual complexities, Town Board members concluded that what had started out as a relatively simple adjustment of dog licensing fees last April has morphed into a much larger undertaking, one that may not lead to a Public Hearing or a final vote until November.
In its latest, nearly hour-long review, the Board brushed past the earlier, testy issue of whether an owner should be held liable for a dog killing an intruding pet on the dog owner’s own property. Instead, ironically, talk turned to protecting the lives of dogs seized and impounded after they’d become lost or run unlicensed, and whether the draft law’s current language—as well as that of Enfield’s dog control contract with the Tompkins County SPCA—provides sufficient protection against euthanasia.
“All seized and unredeemed dogs pursuant to [state law] will be humanely destroyed (in accordance with the procedures described in the law) or make (sic) them available for adoption through the SPCA of Tompkins County,” Enfield’s current, three-year contract with the SPCA states.
Led by this Councilperson, the Town Board questioned whether the contract’s current phrasing puts the SPCA’s priorities backward: that adoption should become the agency’s first objective; euthanasia only a last resort.
“Our SPCA is currently a no-kill shelter,” Councilperson Lynch, reminded colleagues. “That does not mean it will always stay that way.”
The Town of Enfield now pays the SPCA $16,737 annually for dog control. The contract, negotiated jointly with six other municipalities, will expire in December. Terms call for an intermunicipal Advisory Board to negotiate a new contract by the end of this September. But Town Clerk Mary Cornell cautioned that the Advisory Board has not met for a while. In fact, no one at Wednesday’s meeting knew who represents Enfield on that Board.
And because of the Enfield Board’s concern about dog impoundment and possible euthanasia, this year’s negotiations could prove more important than they usually do.
Enfield’s draft Dog Law, presumably based on a New York Agriculture and Markets statute—its terms also presumably embodied within the SPCA contract—would allow only five days for an “unidentified” dog to be impounded before the SPCA could either adopt it out or kill it. The impoundment period would only be two days longer for a dog that carries clear identification but remains unclaimed.
Town Board members voiced consensus that residents and their dogs would benefit from a longer impoundment period. But the change might run into conflict with state law and also require the SPCA to charge Enfield more money.
Enfield SkateGarden: Continuing a home-grown process very much made up as it goes along, Town officials Wednesday learned more—and took action—as Enfield SkateGarden visionary and overseer Daniel Woodring and his army of volunteers construct the Town-owned and County-funded Enfield skateboarding park across from the Town Hall.
Remarking that the Town and promoters are very much “flying by the seat of their pants,” this Councilperson, Lynch, offered, and the Town Board unanimously adopted, a nine-point list of “general rules” SkateGarden’s umbrella nonprofit group must follow as a “precondition” for their holding the weekly benefit concerts planned at the park.
In addition to insurance requirements previously imposed, Woodring and his volunteer partners must provide sufficient portable restroom facilities, control traffic and event parking, ban alcohol consumption on premises consistent with Town policy, and provide illumination should autumn concerts extend after dark.
As for the park’s actual construction, Woodring funneled word to the Board through Deputy Supervisor Greg Hutnik that the park’s most critical component, the “half-pipe” bowl, is set for pouring September 14th. Woodring will use Sakrete and reinforcement rods purchased from Lowe’s and a cement mixer he bought himself. Commercially mixed concrete, Hutnik explained, would cost too much and might not work with the ramp’s odd shape.
Town Supervisor Stephanie Redmond, Town Clerk Mary Cornell, and Hutnik found themselves tangled into knots Wednesday deciding how Woodring could buy the needed materials, purchase them on the Town’s behalf, and still get a municipal sales tax exemption. As with anything labeled “SkateGarden,” nothing has proven simple.
Woodring—again, through Hutnik—advised the Board that the SkateGarden’s first Band Series concert is set for Thursday, August 29th; assuming, of course, that Woodring follows through on a Town requirement to purchase event insurance.
Redmond advised the Board that the coverage Woodring’s non-profit has said it will buy satisfies Enfield’s own insurance carrier. It would provide the Town $1 Million of liability protection. As of Wednesday’s meeting, Woodring had not yet documented to Redmond his organization’s actual purchase of the policy. Hutnik explained that the Tompkins County Parks Grant underwrites SkateGarden’s construction, but cannot also pay for the insurance.
The Benefit Band Series’ initial act was revealed at the meeting. An online event poster announces SkateGarden’s first performer as “Drew Kiddoo and the Blackouts.” Please, Enfield, best ignore the spider, the knives and the poster’s blood-dripping hands.
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Earlier reporting; the prior meeting
A Childless Catman and the Enfield Dog Law
Reporting and commentary by Councilperson Robert Lynch; August 5, 2024; updated Aug. 10, 2024
Warning: Some of the graphic descriptions contained in this story may be unsuited for young readers. Parental discretion is advised.
We, the Enfield Town Board, are having a Dickens of a time updating our town’s Dog Law. What started out as a simple assignment last spring has devolved into something incredibly complex and lawyer-laden. And after our Board’s July 31st meeting, it’s become controversial as well.
The Town of Enfield Dog Control Law was last revised in 2010; its fees increased in 2018. Since then, of course, inflation has crept up. At our April meeting, Town Clerk Mary Cornell suggested our Town impose late fees for dog licenses renewed more than 30 days late. She also suggested slight fee increases. A simple fix, we thought.
One month later, Clerk Cornell informed Board members they would need to call a Public Hearing to adjust the fees. In June, we held that first hearing.
But in the interim, Guy Krogh, the attorney for the Town, got a look at the existing, two-page Dog Law. He didn’t like it. Krogh said it hadn’t kept up with the times and with the evolution of New York’s canine control. The attorney offered a 16-page alternative, a document full of legal stipulations, detailed definitions, and what some might regard as regulatory surplussage.
The 2010 law had listed seven broad, prohibited acts by dogs and their owners. Most of those remaining sections stated their dictates in no more than a paragraph; sometimes a single sentence. Many of these sections dealt with fees and procedures. It was a law easy to read and to follow.
But lawyers get paid to keep towns out of trouble. So when Krogh forwarded Clerk Cornell his 8,700-word revised draft on June 12th, the same date as the Public Hearing, Board members turned their attention to what the attorney had written. Members implicitly cast aside the simple for the complex.
Since the new draft was nothing like the advertised document it replaced, the June Hearing served no purpose. We’d need a new hearing. Cornell suggested the Board schedule it for August, giving the Town Board the month of July to review the revised submission and to suggest changes.
That brings us to the July 31st Town Board meeting, and to where a dry-as-day-old-toast document suddenly took on new life.
What was expected to be the high point of the late-July meeting was the predicted sending to public referendum of local laws that would lengthen the future terms of three Town officers. The Dog Law review was supposed to be the meeting’s boring part. It was not.
All went routinely until the Board got to “Section 11.” It was a single paragraph—new language—buried in the document better than halfway through it. It dealt with owner liability for dog misconduct.
“If any domestic animal, farm animal, or companion animal is injured or killed as a result of being attacked, chased, or worried by any dog, the owner of said dog shall be liable to claims for such damages,” Section 11 began. It continued: “The owner of such injured or killed animal may make a complaint to the Animal Control Officer, who shall proceed pursuant to the dangerous dog rules of the [New York State Agriculture and Markets] Law….”
And that’s when—put most plainly—dog-lover and cat-fancier parted ways and divided the Town Board into fighting factions that produced a stand-off from which, at least in this writer’s opinion, the meeting never recovered.
“Oh, I actually want to strike that entire thing if it’s made to be like on my personal property,” Town Supervisor Stephanie Redmond interjected. “Because, I have a neighbor’s cat that comes onto my personal property, my dog is going to eat it… like and there’s nothing I’m going to do to stop it….”
“It won’t leave my property to go and find a cat,” Redmond said of her dog. “She’s just sitting on my porch all day long. But if a cat comes wandering in front of my porch, she will eat it.”
“I agree that if they’re on your property; but this sentence has to stay,” Councilperson Jude Lemke, our Board’s resident attorney, advised the Supervisor. “It just has to be, ‘provided, however, such domestic animal, farm animal, or companion animal has not wandered onto your property,’ or something like that.”
“I have a problem with making it that lenient, because…” this Councilperson, Robert Lynch, reacted. Before I could finish my sentence, Lemke continued.
“I can’t stop my dog from eating a cat that comes on my property,” Lemke admitted.
“Yeah, that happens all the time,” Redmond concurred. “The neighbor came. Oh, we won’t go there,” the Supervisor said with a sigh. Redmond never provided details. They would prove interesting to learn.
“Well, you’ve made my day!” this Councilperson, dead serious, told Redmond. I found no sympathy, nor concurrence, but rather muffled laughter heard from others at the table.
“You gotta’ control your animals,” Redmond replied to this cat owner.
“I know. I know,” I said. “But cats do wander. Take it from somebody who’s been through that. My cats are confined now. But they didn’t used to be. And I—I do worry. In my neighborhood there are dogs that attack and kill cats. And I don’t like it.”
Over the years, before Enfield’s forest dangers of known or unknown origin prompted this pet lover to confine the confine-resistant felines in his family, my Midnight calls to summon home twin felines Juliet and Angel were legend on Gray Road. I never lost either of them to a predator. But I‘ve lost other cats both before and after.
Councilperson Cassandra Hinkle related her own personal, unintended tragedy:
“We have a six-foot fence on our property that has one gate, that both of our dogs stay in,” Hinkle said. “A neighbor’s cat ended up in the property somewhere. I don’t know where they were. But the dog went into there. I closed the gate. Fifteen minutes later, there’s a ruckus, and my neighbor’s cat is deceased. And that’s not the thing that was planned. The gate was closed. It’s just a fence. What more could I have done?”
Yes, accidents like Hinkle’s sometimes happen. Credit that Councilperson for at least attempting control and confinement with her fence. Supervisor Redmond, at least by most people’s definition, views confinement differently. Redmond says her dog (somehow) recognizes lot lines, stays within them, and within those boundaries is allowed to run free.
“There’s no way I’m ever going to stop my dog from eating a cat,” Redmond told our meeting. “I couldn’t. There’s no possible way for me.”
“I try,” Councilperson Lemke replied, Lemke acknowledging she faces a similar challenge.
“My dog has never been around cats, except the cats that come in the yard that they chase and go after,” Lemke said. “They’re the only cats they ever see. So how am I supposed to teach my dog that that animal is somehow different from all the other animals that come on our property?”
“Maybe now that as she’s getting older, I could get her back,” Redmond said of her own dog. She followed her statement with more impromptu giggling.
“Then if you know that your dog has a propensity to kill other domestic pets that wander onto your property, you probably should confine your dog,” I answered with dead seriousness.
“I do. To my property,” Redmond replied, with a defensive chuckle.
“To your property? Or do you confine him or her to a pen?” I rebutted.
“No.”
“Or to a run?”
“No,” Redmond said. “Because she’s going to sit there on my porch and we watch everything. And if something comes over the lot line, she’s going to eat it.”
“With all due respect, that’s irresponsible,” I stated solemnly, firmly.
“I do not think it’s irresponsible,” Redmond insisted. “She’s not leaving my property.”
“If you know you’ve got a predatory dog…” I began my thought.
“Oh, no; it’s not predatory,” the Supervisor interrupted.
“[If] you’ve got a predatory dog, then you should control,” I restated my point with emphasis.
“It is controlled. It’s right on my property all the time,” the Supervisor defended herself. “It sits on my porch, and it doesn’t go more than 100 feet away from my front door. She’s old. But if a varmint comes walking by, she’s all of a sudden becoming [unintelligible from the audio transcript].
The exchange, quite obviously, went nowhere. And after about ten minutes, the Town Board moved on to other sections of the proposed Dog Law. But before we did, Town Clerk Mary Cornell, with whose licensing oversight canine control belongs, offered an observation:
“If there’s no fences that you can see, and the animal or a person is being chased onto somebody else’s property, that’s a little different,” Cornell stated to push back a bit on the Supervisor’s hardline position. “They’re (that is, the intruding dogs or cats are) not entering that property willingly. So I think there’s a little vagueness in here too for what you’re saying, versus, you know: An aggressive dog is chasing a kid, and that dog is trying to protect your kid and they end up on your property, and they get attacked anyway.”
“This is not an attack on a kid. This is an attack on an animal,” Councilperson Lemke reminded the Town Clerk. “There’s no way that I could control my dog. You think a cat is a cute little thing. My dog has not seen a cat. They’re not around cats.”
“They’re food,” Redmond chimed in for anyone with the stomach to keep listening.
“How am I supposed to train them that a cat is different?” Lemke asked.
“Keep them under your control,” I offered with a pointed, ready answer.
“Well, if my mouse runs onto your property, and your cat eats it, I want you to train your cat so it doesn’t eat that mouse, because it was my mouse,” Redmond reacted with a whine, our Town Supervisor offering us logic that’s bound to escape the reasoning of anyone beyond the age of five.
Clerk Cornell will seek attorney Krogh’s interpretation as to whether the Town Board can carve out an exception to owner liability for animal attacks by one’s own dog on one’s own land. And if the exception complies with state law, the Town Board’s majority will likely embrace it at a later meeting.
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[Observation: As Councilperson, I must obey the dictates of Enfield’s 2017 Civility Resolution, as I expand its reach beyond that of our public meetings. I must also honor consultant Ronald Mendrick’s recommendations on public officer propriety, advice that our Town Board endorsed and paid-for dearly with your taxpayer dollars three years ago. Accordingly, I will restrain my words here and at least at the moment and for the sake of civility assign the comments of Supervisor Stephanie Redmond the degree of respect they should receive as those of our Town’s chief elected administrative officer.
That said, I am deeply troubled by those remarks. I question the callous, flippant, uncompassionate treatment of animal predation that our Supervisor had expressed during her public comments of July 31, as I likewise do her dismissive neglect of common human sensibilities. I find equally disturbing the casual, lighthearted acquiescence of the Supervisor’s opinions given by some of her colleagues on our Town Board. Their acceptance provides express or tacit endorsement of what the Supervisor had said. We deserve better; a wiser, more critical group of thinkers.
The Enfield I know is a community of neighbors. We are a place where neighbors care about their neighbors, including about their pets. The cat that the Supervisor so willingly and casually acknowledges her uncontrolled dog routinely devours, if only on her property, could be a young child’s cherished friend, or an older adult’s lone companion. It could be an otherwise-conscientious resident’s confined housecat that somehow slipped through an unlatched door or a torn screen. And as our Town Clerk, Mary Cornell, pointedly referenced during our discussion, it could have been a pet chased onto the Supervisor’s property by a predator from someplace else.
Accidents happen, of course. Animals die by chance, just as people do. In Councilperson Hinkle’s own admitted case, the Animal Control Officer or the Town Justice—as well as, one would hope, the deceased cat’s owner—should in such an instance demonstrate compassion and understanding, forgive Hinkle for the tragic incident, and waive any penalties otherwise imposed.
But reckless, irresponsible pet ownership constitutes behavior of a different sort. What Supervisor Redmond—and to a large extent, other Town Board members—have defended here is a perverse, twisted misinterpretation of the “Castle Doctrine,” a construction that uses the metes and bounds of one’s property line to circumscribe a personal fortress. It sets a boundary within which no other person or pet may venture under penalty of death.
If Supervisor Redmond’s own standard of human liberty and permissible animal conduct has truly become the new norm within Enfield, it has made ours a community I do not know and one in which I hold no desire to involve myself further within its Town Government. Nor, for that matter, should I live here.]
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There’s more to Enfield’s revised Dog Law, besides the liability issue and a slight uptick in fees.
Most notably, any residence with five or more dogs would now carry the designation as a “kennel,” to which certain requirements would attach. For kennels, all animal food would need to be kept in sealed containers, and all animal waste removed daily.
Female dogs would need to be confined when in heat. Leashing requirements when a dog is not on its owner’s property remain under Town Board review.
The Board will likely continue its study of the revised Dog Law at its August 14th meeting. A second Public Hearing could come as soon as September.
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Update; Aug. 10, 2024: At the request of Town Supervisor Stephanie Redmond, and in relation to the issue of Owner Liability, Guy Krogh, Attorney for the Town of Enfield, wrote Redmond August 5th that her and other Board members’ concerns about the reach of the liability provision could be addressed by stipulating in the proposed Dog Law that the Board could provide that as “an affirmative defense to any such charges or liability that the dog was at the time of the incident upon the dog owner’s property.”
Expect the liability issue to be addressed again when the Town Board reconvenes August 14. / RL
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