Enfield Board elaborates on Bostwick Road’s continued closure
by Councilperson Robert Lynch; September 23, 2026
At a special meeting Wednesday, September 23, one convened primarily to present the 2027 Tentative Town Budget, the Enfield Town Board adopted and released its first extended public statement on the sudden and unforeseen delayed reopening of Bostwick Road. The road was closed in early-July to facilitate the installation of a large, concrete culvert to carry Enfield Creek beneath it.
The culvert installation was supposed to be largely complete by now. Bostwick Road between South Applegate Road and NY Route 327 was to have reopened shortly thereafter. It won’t meet that deadline.
Acting on his own initiative, this Enfield Councilperson, Robert Lynch, drafted and submitted to the Town Board the Resolution detailed below. After given one amendment—a revision on which this Councilperson dissented—the resolution secured unanimous Town Board support.
The adopted Resolution and its attached Public Statement follow:
****
Resolution authorizing a public statement regarding the Bostwick Road Culvert Replacement Project
Whereas, the Town of Enfield has commenced construction on replacement of a stream culvert under Bostwick Road in the Town, construction forcing a portion of that road’s temporary closure; and
Whereas, unforeseen circumstances have prompted the Town to continue Bostwick Road’s closure for an indefinite period, closure continuing until further notice; and
Whereas, full transparency demands this Town Board provide the public adequate information as to the project’s status; therefore be it
Resolved, that the Enfield Town Board hereby authorizes the following Statement regarding the status of the Bostwick Road Culvert Replacement Project; and be it further
Resolved, that the Clerk is directed to post this Statement on the Town website.
****
Statement by the Enfield Town Board on the status of the Bostwick Road Culvert Replacement Project
September 23, 2026
For the past three years, the Town of Enfield has undertaken an effort to replace the aging and undersized culvert that carries Enfield Creek under Bostwick Road and improve the adjoining streambed. The project will allow for better stream flow during storm events and reduce risk to critical infrastructure and adjacent properties in the Cayuga Lake Watershed.
In February 2024, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) awarded the Town of Enfield a Water Quality Improvement Projects (WQIP) grant of $693,866. This grant money will finance the majority of the project’s cost. During the two years that followed, the Town commissioned engineering studies, purchased a replacement concrete box culvert, and awarded a construction contract for culvert installation and stream realignment of Enfield Creek adjacent to Bostwick Road.
Fisher Associates of Rochester and Ithaca, NY performed the culvert’s engineering design. Jefferson Concrete Corporation, Watertown, NY, supplied the concrete box culvert at a cost of $471,600. JB’s Excavation, Apalachin, NY, performed the installation and stream repair. Jefferson Concrete and JB’s Excavation were each low bidders for their respective products or services.
The Town of Enfield has been assisted in this project by staff from the Tompkins County Soil and Water Conservation District and a professional engineer with the Tioga County Soil and Water Conservation District, the latter serving as the Town’s engineering consultant.
A revised budget for this project carries a total cost of $1,100,696. In addition to funds from the WQIP grant, the Town of Enfield would provide $406,830, principally through in-kind services by its Highway Department. The Town Board has budgeted money for these expenses. Final cost totals remain subject to change.
On July 6, 2026, Bostwick Road between South Applegate Road and Enfield Main Road, New York State Route 327 was closed to enable the culvert’s replacement. Site work proceeded throughout the summer. On August 14, 2026, placement of the multi-section concrete culvert began. Its placement in the stream was completed shortly thereafter.
Initial schedules had contemplated that site work would proceed to enable substantial completion of the project by late-September of this year, with the reopening of Bostwick Road upon that completion.
On September 14, 2026, the Town of Enfield announced that “Due to unforeseen circumstances, Bostwick Rd between South Applegate Rd and NYS 327 will continue to be closed until further notice.” Accordingly, as of the date of this Statement, Bostwick Road in the affected area remains closed. A reopening date cannot be predicted at this time.
Continued closure and temporary cessation of construction operations comes at the recommendation of the Town of Enfield’s engineering consultant, in consultation with the Town Board and Enfield’s Highway Superintendent. At its meetings of September 9 and again this date, September 23, and acting upon its engineer’s recommendation, the Town Board retained the services of two firms: the project’s design engineer, Fisher Associates; and also ATL Engineering, P.C. Both firms will perform inspection services that the Town deems necessary to ensure the integrity of the culvert replacement project.
Further questions about this project and Bostwick Road’s closure should be directed to Enfield Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy” Rollins at 607-272-6490.
The Town of Enfield and its Town Board will attempt to inform the public in a timely manner as best it can as to the continued status of this project. The Town pledges to reopen Bostwick Road to the public as soon as practicable. The Town apologizes for any inconvenience this continued closure may have caused.
The Enfield Town Board
****
Addendum: The amendment on which this Councilperson dissented would have provided information that was publicly shared at the Town Board’s earlier meeting, September 9. The shared information had expressed the willingness of the project’s on-site installation contractor, JB’s Excavation, to install a temporary, alternating, one-way bypass road that would carry traffic across Enfield Creek at the crossing site for the closure’s duration. The Town’s consulting engineer had indicated September 9 that JB’s Excavation would install the bypass at little or no cost.
The paragraph’s deletion came September 23 as Enfield Highway Superintendent Barry Rollins, who holds authority to decide whether to accept or reject the bypass, expressed objections to the bypass amid concerns over safety, maintenance, and the potential for additional costs that might be borne by the town. The deleted paragraph would have invited public comment regarding the bypass option.
One closing note: During the past two weeks, multiple members of the Enfield Town Board have exerted withering pressure on this Councilperson to write or say nothing about the Bostwick Road extended closure other than to recite the terse, one-sentence closure announcement posted September 14 on the Town website. Even verbatim reporting from relevant portions of the Town Board’s September 9 meeting was deemed forbidden. (You can find them beginning at 52 minutes into the September 9 meeting’s Audio Minutes.)
Standing on principle works most times. In this instance, our collective best interests would not have been served by waging a First Amendment food fight. Sorry, they wouldn’t have.
Councilperson Robert Lynch
###
Snap inspection cites Enfield fire house flaws
Company President builds case for pricey capital upgrade
by Robert Lynch; September 18, 2026
Quite frankly, some of the infractions were pure Mickey Mouse. In the equipment wash bay, the inspector found that “a spray bottle containing a pink substance was not labeled.” She called it a “serious” violation, potentially punishable by a fine. The alleged “container of hazardous chemicals” she’d found held only car wash soap.
But New York State will do as New York State chooses. The Enfield fire service must stoop to obey. And because of a sudden inspection early this summer by the New York State Department of Labor (DOL), the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) and the Fire District that oversees it must answer a ten-point citation, correct its misconduct, or face fines which could reach into the thousands of dollars per day.
Yet by mid-September, EVFC leadership had rolled one of those ten compliance mandates into the foundation for a $350,000 capital project that would remortgage the Enfield fire station just five years away from having its present, long-term mortgage paid off.
EVFC’s remortgaging plans came up at the September 15 meeting of the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners. And at least one member of that five-person board didn’t like the idea one bit and made his point known publicly. The board took no action.
But let’s first step back to the inspection, and learn what the fire company may have to do to fall into line.
Kelly Otis, of the Department of Labor’s Public Employee Safety and Health Bureau, conducted her impromptu inspection of the Enfield Fire Station July 2nd. Otis’ supervisor, Luke Parga, issued the EVFC the department’s “Notice of Violation and Order to Comply” August 13. The Fire District and Fire Company had or have until various dates in August and September to “abate” each alleged violation.
Fire Company President Dennis Hubbell said it’s the first time the DOL has inspected the Enfield fire house since 2000. Fire officials believe the July inspection was prompted by an anonymous complaint, likely from someone within the Enfield fire service.
The state citations first surfaced publicly at Commissioners’ August 18 meeting. Commissioners’ Chair Greg Stevenson recited the allegations one by one. He did not welcome them. Stevenson was controlled, yet decidedly critical. In the chairman’s view, Kelly Otis and the DOL had overstepped their presumptive regulatory authority.
“A Department of Labor examiner doesn’t know his or her way around” a fire station, Stevenson asserted.
The chairman cited one of the alleged offenses; failure for the fire company to provide annual, training in the workplace use of standard-issue fire extinguishers, a rule far more applicable in an ordinary business than in a fire station.
“You can drag hose into a burning building, but don’t touch that fire extinguisher because you haven’t been trained,” Stevenson vented sarcastically. I guess we have to “dumb down the audience and treat volunteers like they’re kindergarteners,” he said.
Several of the violations alleged lack of training—or more properly stated, the lack of documented proof of that training.
“In my opinion, she (Otis) doesn’t have the authority to decide what training is,” the board chair insisted. “Training is training. It’s not within her purview.”
“The way she was conducting herself on her first visit, she was acting though the only training was that delivered by the State,” Stevenson complained. “If it wasn’t State training, it wasn’t any good.”
One citation faulted the EVFC for having “failed to provide annual pump operation training to all drivers.” That could lead to manpower shortages behind the wheel.
“Some of our drivers can’t drive if they don’t take the training,” Fire Chief Jamie Stevens warned.
And there was another picayune violation inspector Otis found. In the Maintenance Bay, a few fire extinguishers were “placed on the floor and not properly mounted or identified.” No, they weren’t rolling around where somebody could stumble over them. They just weren’t in a rack.
Chief Stevens said they’ll build “a secure crate.” But until they do, the extinguishers have been strapped to the wall with bungie cord.
What raised Stevenson’s ire the most was what may physically tax firefighters the greatest. Violation One alleged—and properly so—that the EVFC had not provided “bailout ropes” for emergency escapes from high-rise buildings nor trained firefighters in the ropes’ use.
Bailout systems serve little purpose in Enfield, where few, if any, buildings stand more than three stories tall. But because Enfield offers mutual aid to Ithaca on rare occasions, DOL rules require volunteers train on the ropes and carry them attached to their gear.
At their September first meeting, Commissioners authorized spending $6,500—money probably better invested elsewhere—to buy 13 of the bailout sets at $500 apiece.
Stevenson, a retired Ithaca firefighter, one who’s trained on bailout ropes, implied that the state insistence stemmed from a New York City tragedy where firefighters got trapped on upper floors and in his words, “had to jump, and a lot of them were killed.” (Ironically, Stevenson reported, New York City stands exempt from the state bailout requirement.)
“How a firefighter gets in trouble is by doing dangerous things,” the commissioners’ chair asserted. And to him, training on ropes poses more risk of injury than does the outside risk of not having one during an Enfield fire. After the meeting, Stevenson related the experience of one firefighter who had varicose veins, trained on ropes, and bled profusely afterward.
If the DOL wanted to get picky, it could assess Enfield $200 per day for each of eight of the violations, that is, unless they’re corrected; $50 per day for the other two. Fire officials indicated that the “Serious” soap bottle infraction was remedied by tossing away the bottle, likely on the day of the inspection. A number of the other violations have also been abated. A few of them carried an August 30 or September 9 compliance date. Others among the ten must be corrected by September 30.
For infractions difficult to quickly remedy, deadline extensions are likely, EVFC President Dennis Hubbell indicated.
“Personally, I didn’t think it’s all that bad,’ Commissioner Barry Rollins, who also serves as Enfield’s Highway Superintendent, said of Kelly Otis’ ten-point laundry list. Rollins was the only commissioner to voice amy sort of optimism.
The infraction that will cost Enfield the most money—and may trigger the spending of a whole lot more cash—is the inspector’s finding that eight overhead doors on the fire station lack safety sensors that’ll kill the door’s motor when an obstruction—like a person—stands in its path. The fire station was built in 1988, well before sensors became common on overhead doors. At their mid-September meeting, Commissioners learned a safety retrofit would cost $30,000. In price, bailout ropes pales by comparison.
“I can’t see putting $30,000 in doors that are 40 years old,” Company President Hubbell told Commissioners September 15. “The doors are not efficient; the weather stripping’s ripped out.”
Hubbell would replace the old doors with new ones and spend the extra money to do so. As you’d expect, any sensors bought to retrofit existing doors wouldn’t work with any new ones. Should new doors be bought, the $30,000 becomes money wasted.
Yet the company president wasn’t through. Hubbell has for months complained about cracks in the fire station’s parking lot. He’d like the lot repaved, front and back. Two years ago, he’d priced new blacktop at $100,000. The cost has likely jumped since then.
Before Hubbell had finished his appeal at this most recent meeting, the doors, the blacktop, and some drain work in the apparatus bays had turned into a $350,000 capital project. And because the EVFC gave away its fire trucks and equipment to the Enfield Fire District—a separate legal entity—after the Fire District took over governance three years ago, the EVFC looks broke on paper and would need to secure a mortgage to perform the upgrades.
Any mortgaging costs would be passed on to Enfield taxpayers through increased lease payments to the EVFC-owned Enfield Fire Station. This year’s lease payment totaled just under $100,000. It’ll likely remain the same for 2027.
Donald Gunning, one of two fire commissioners—along with Rollins—who’s not a firefighter, pushed back hard on Hubbell’s capital agenda. He questioned the wisdom of mortgaging $350,000 of new money.
“We’re looking at want compared to need,” Gunning reproved the Fire Company president. “And the ‘want’ shouldn’t exceed the ‘need,’ because that’s what the taxpayers are disgusted with.”
The exchanges between Gunning and Hubbell got heated. Gunning questioned the need to replace all of the blacktop, particularly in the rear of the fire station where heavy trucks seldom go. Gunning offered that the rear lot, where the pavement is now the most broken, might more economically be covered with gravel.
“Are we going to drive through mud?” Hubbell questioned Gunning at one point.
After the meeting, Gunning qualified that the fire station’s front lot should remain blacktop. As for door replacement, Gunning said he hadn’t yet decided.
The EVFC remortgaged its building debt 15 years ago, Company President Hubbell explained after adjournment. It’s five years from closing it out. Were $350,000 added now, the outstanding total would swell to $595,000, according to estimates shared at the meeting. Hubbell said the EVFC’s favored bank would charge 4.30 percent interest (a figure given prior to the latest rate hike by the Federal Reserve).
Commissioner Robyn Wishna encouraged the EVFC to seek grant money to finance its capital improvements. “I’d like to see you look at that before you make a 15-year loan for 350,” she advised Hubbell.
Because of the way finances are structured, only the fire company can borrow the building improvement funds, not the quasi-governmental fire district—that is, unless the Fire District took ownership of the fire station, as it has with EVFC’s trucks. Experts advise against a building transfer.
During the course of the September 15 discussions, Dennis Hubbell took more than a passing swipe at past Enfield Town Boards, those that blocked any effort by the EVFC to save money for repairs and improvements. It was back when the Town Board contracted directly with the fire company rather than delegated oversight to a fire district.
“We were living paycheck to paycheck,” Hubbell complained about former times, those before most, if not all current Town Board members had taken their seats. “If we had $2,000 in money ending at year end, the Town reduced our budget by $2,000.”
“I was in favor of moving to a fire district,” Hubbell made clear, “so we got away from that bullcrap.”
“I want to be together with you people, and we want you to be together with us,” the company president told commissioners, urging some kind of meeting of the minds on money. Commissioners should treat the fire station in the same way as it respects apparatus, he said.
But “apparatus is the district’s responsibility, not the building,” Rollins reminded Hubbell.
****
Nothing really got settled at last Tuesday’s meeting regarding whether—if at all—the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company and Enfield Fire District would proceed toward cooperation on capital improvements. That matter was left for a later day, a later meeting.
Right now, there’s an issue more pressing. The district must answer, point by point, citation by citation, the Department of Labor’s suddenly-sprung complaint. Door sensor compliance will likely earn an extension, for now. The car wash bottle is gone, we’re assured. That’s the easiest of the ten.
###
Akumfi’s “Course Correction” Budget
Administrator’s plan would hike taxes 12%, preserve programs and people, but delay expanded EMS
Reporting and Analysis by Robert Lynch; September 5, 2026
The document runs 592 pages. It begs for that “AI Assistant” to compose some kind of summary. One doubts artificial intelligence would do a very good job. Administrator Korsah Akumfi gave the task his best shot last Tuesday before the Tompkins County Legislature.
What Akumfi presented—and what legislators then scrutinized at length—was the County Administrator’s proposed $307.8 Million 2027 Tompkins County Budget.
For taxpayers, the news is good or bad, depending how you look at it.
The proposal, product of a half-year process that began last spring, includes the largest one-year property tax increase in recent memory, a levy hike of just under 12 percent. But it could have been worse. Without legislators having tapped $1.6 Million from a reserve fund later that night to help soften the blow, the levy would have risen by 14.78 percent.
What’s more, had all departmental requests been blindly accepted by Administration, a rate increase of as high as 29 percent had been floated. Something as high as that is now clearly off the table. An increase of 11.96 percent stands high enough.
“This budget asks for a very difficult, but necessary course correction,” Akumfi began his presentation of the recommended budget to the Legislature September 1. “It preserves essential services, recognizes commitments already made, and begins restoring structural balance after several years of relying on one-year revenues to suppress the tax levy.”
And that restoration of “structural balance” stands at the heart of why Tompkins County’s tax levy under the Administrator’s budget would increase so much—assuming, of course, that lawmakers embrace Akumfi’s priorities.
In this, his second year on the job—and with this, his second budget—the administrator Tompkins hired away from Schoharie County in late-2024 shows himself as a deficit hawk. Tompkins County is far from broke, far from dangerously in debt. But Akumfi doesn’t want it to become that way.
Long before Korsah Akumfi arrived, the Legislature revised its fund balance policy. Under the December 2023 revision, legislators directed County Government to retain in unspent cash a full 25 percent of prior year’s expenditures. The previous policy had set aside 18 percent of past year’s revenues. Last year, Tompkins County fell short of its current goal. The Administrator wants to move toward reaching it.
In his written introduction to the budget document, Akumfi wrote, “Of the 11.96% levy increase, approximately 3.58 percentage points, or $2.4 million, are attributable to the elimination of the one-time fund balance subsidy used to support the 2026 budget.” He explained, “This portion of the increase represents a one-time ‘catch-up’ to the levy rather than an ongoing cost increase.”
Overall, as the Administrator recommended, the budget would raise $6.8 Million more in property taxes next year than in 2026. It would raise the total levy to $63.67 Million. Had legislators not drawn $1.6 Million from a reserved “Tax Stabilization Fund,” their government would have needed $65.27 Million in property taxes to support operations.
And while those $270.9 Million in projected general fund expenditures cut some departmental requests—a few of them severely—the outline the Administrator offered Tuesday was by no means an austerity budget. Payrolls would increase. Staffing levels would only slightly reduce from those at present. Akumfi gave no hint of any layoffs.
Still, never put too much stock in what a county administrator places before the Tompkins County Legislature this early in the budget cycle. Korsah Akumfi is not an elected county executive. And this is not a place like Syracuse. County legislators here do not acquiesce; they micromanage. They chip away and expand a budget. (More often they expand it.)
Here’s what’s ahead: Legislators, gathering collectively as a committee-of-the-whole, will convene as many as eleven budget review sessions—generally two per week—from now through mid-October. Two such meetings have already been held.
The Legislature plans to vote on a tentative budget October 20, hold a public hearing on it one week later, and then adopt a final budget in November. Speed always yields to contemplation. And in terms of tax rates imposed and pet projects supported, what finally emerges from those many meetings often looks far different from what the Administrator first envisioned.
On July 21, legislators authorized application to the New York State Dormitory Authority for a half-million dollar grant that, if approved, would upgrade the Tompkins County Rapid Medical Response (RMR) emergency medical service to a limited-schedule, paramedic-level, Advanced Life Support operation. Coupled with that application was a commitment to match the grant money with nearly another half-million in local funds to help staff the service.
At the July meeting, Akumfi indicated the local matching money would be included, at least in part, within the 2027 budget. But under what he presented the legislature this past Tuesday, it won’t.
The Administrator hardly referenced RMR expansion in his presentation Tuesday. But in an online meeting with local municipal leaders two days later, Akumfi confirmed that the RMR funding was not included for now and most likely will be delayed until 2028. The money could be wrapped later into a more ambitious initiative to expand county EMS.
“At the point when the legislature decides which direction we want to go, we will then amend the budget,” Akumfi assured local officials on Thursday. “If it affects ’27, we will amend the budget to that effect. But if it doesn’t affect ’27, then we will be able to budget that for 2028,” he said.
Raising the tax levy by 11.96 percent “is not presented as an ideal outcome,” Akumfi admitted to the legislature September 1. Rather, he said, “It is presented as a starting point after substantial administrative reductions.”
“The recommendation is built around three commitments,” the Administrator stated: “Preserve our progress and core services; restore fiscal stewardship by aligning occurring expense with recurring revenue; and protect people who rely on County services and employees who deliver them.”
“Preserving Our Progress, Protecting Our People” earned itself bold italicized text in the Administration’s budget document. Its treatment resembled that of a campaign slogan. But notice that nowhere in that alliterative bumper sticker is serving the taxpayer credited.
Korsah Akumfi is a journeyman. No one will ever vote him out of office. Our 16 legislators face the electorate every few years. They who survive only at the ballot box’s mercy tend to balance program survival and fiscal frugality differently. Last Tuesday, some did.
Newfield-Enfield legislator Randy Brown has argued that Tompkins County government’s employment roster is too fat. Brown noted that the current workforce of 857 full-time-equivalent employees is 110 more than it was in 2022.
“That just seems like a lot,” Brown told Akumfi at the legislature meeting, “and it’s why we are where we are today.”
And a couple of other workforce issues plague the County Administrator’s budget draft.
Customarily, the budget tamps down payroll costs by assuming that some positions will go for a time—perhaps all year—unfilled. But whereas Akumfi acknowledged there’ll likely be a “vacancy rate” of about three percent as employees come and go, his budget assumes all jobs would be filled and compensated all year. The vacancy adjustment saved nearly $1.9 Million in the current year’s budget.
Greg Mezey, a legislator skeptical of raising excessive revenue just to warehouse it in government coffers, weighed in.
“I guess I’m a little disappointed that we look to growing something that we don’t necessarily need to grow this year and not utilizing a vacancy factor which actually is a more accurate way to budget what we really will be spending on our personnel costs,” Mezey said. He said the budget should not artificially inflate expenses “in a time when it’s so difficult for the average resident of Tompkins County to afford living here.”
And there’s also the issue of fringe benefits. The Administrator’s budget projects a 16 percent, or $4.4 Million, rise in fringe benefit expenses. Driving that increase is an expected 17.6 percent rise in state-mandated retirement costs and what is forecast as a 16-18 percent rise in health insurance premiums.
But the insurance number may rely on old data. The County’s immediate provider, the Greater Tompkins County Municipal Health Insurance Consortium, (upon one of whose committees this Enfield Councilperson sits) has in recent weeks advanced a higher premium boost, 19.5 percent, as a more likely increase. It’ll likely go before the Consortium’s Board of Directors later this month. If the higher number gets approved, Akumfi has budgeted too little for health costs.
On another matter, the Administrator’s budget assumes that Tompkins County will pick up $740,000 in heightened administrative costs for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—once referred to as “food stamps”—that’ve been offloaded to states and localities by the federal government. Congress’ “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” adopted last year, cut federal reimbursement for SNAP administration in half. Akumfi’s budget would “backfill” that cost, rather than cut staff expenses within the Department of Social Services.
Not all like that idea. “I’m not prepared to have county taxpayers backfill for the federal government,’ Republican Mike Sigler reacted. “That’s an incredible amount of money that I don’t think our people have it to pay for it.”
Ulysses-Enfield legislator Rachel Ostlund reminded Sigler that the heightened SNAP costs came through federal legislation and that New York is among ten states that pass the program’s administration down to counties. Sigler challenged the enforceability of the mandate and questioned what would happen should his county simply refuse to shoulder the burden. Legislature Chair Shawna Black intervened to block what could have become an inter-party, multi-legislator squabble.
Some county departments asked for more money than Akumfi recommended they receive. With little explanation, the Administrator’s budget cut the Tompkins County Public Library’s request from $538 Million to $269 Million. Fleet purchases of $1.36 Million were sliced nearly in half. And Airport operating expenses were reduced by more than $245,000. Expect those rejected requests to make their way back to the Legislature in review meetings to come.
Tompkins County’s proposed Downtown Center of Government doubts to become an issue in this year’s budget. The project may top $50 Million. But most obligations will fall in later years. Only about $200,000 would be budgeted for 2027.
But it’s the fund balance issue whose resolution will likely pit tax-conscious legislators against a deficit-wary Administration that fears Tompkins County’s eight-figure rainy day reserve may someday run dry.
“Fund balance can bridge temporary disruption. It cannot permanently fund wages, benefits, or continuing programs,” Akumfi advised the Legislature last Tuesday.
The Administrator asserted that from 2021 through the current year, lawmakers tapped over $12 Million in fund balance to “defer” otherwise-required tax increases. The fund balance currently stands at just over $44 Million. Under a 25 percent fund balance policy, the total should stand at $59.8 Million.
“Using additional unassigned fund balance for recurring operations,” Akumfi warned, “will widen that gap and weaken our ability to respond to emergencies, revenue disruptions, and ratings’ concerns.”
It’s true that a fatter fund balance helps Tompkins County snag lower rates on whatever debt it bonds. But is it wise to leave a full $59 Million of taxpayer money lying idle, unspent, in Tompkins County’s checking account, some might ask? Isn’t $44 Million sufficient? And barring another Great Depression, what kind of emergency would require that plush a fiscal cushion?
In the end, money is fungible. And one could argue Administration’s dogged devotion to fund balance compliance is pursuit of a policy for policy’s sake. The December 2023 fund balance policy was only a policy, not state law. If today’s Legislature thinks a 25 percent reserve is too lofty, it can ratchet it back. And Randy Brown maintains that if the fund balance target returned to 18 percent, Tompkins County would come close to meeting it right now.
What’s more, Greg Mezey questioned Akumfi’s multi-year analysis. In three of the recent years cited by the Administrator, Tompkins County actually collected more money than it spent, Mezey claimed. Fiscal shortfalls were illusory. Mezey said Akumfi had used budgeted estimates, not real revenues. He analogized the discrepancy to setting aside $10,000 for car expenses but only spending $7,000 of it.
“I understand we used it (fund balance) to balance a budget, but did we actually write the check out of fund balance to pay for operations?” Mezey asked.
Yet some on the Legislature like accumulating rainy-day savings just in case.
“You can’t draw reliably from savings forever,” legislator Judith Hubbard informed colleagues. “You run out and they leave you in a worse situation than you were in the first place.”
“We’re all freaking out” about the tax increase, Budget Committee Chair Deborah Dawson observed of the projected 11.96 percent levy rise. She said it computes to $168 annually for the median ($290,000 house) Tompkins County homeowner. That’s $14 a month; “which is a couple coffees at Starbucks, not your first born,” she said.
After the more than hour-long Administrator’s presentation and legislative back-and-forth had ended, lawmakers got to work. They drew down the $2.8 Million Tax Stabilization Fund by $1.6 Million to prevent the Administrator’s recommended tax increase from creeping any higher. Using $1.6 Million leaves less than half of the fund’s total for future years.
Mike Sigler would have used all of it right now. Sigler proposed an amendment to drain the fund completely. The amendment failed. Only fellow Republican Lee Shurtleff of Groton joined Sigler in his effort.
“We’re just too early in the process to pull this lever,” Mezey said of drawing down the fund to zero.
“If we need it, we can do it later in the year,” Randy Brown said of Sigler’s go-for-broke initiative.
###
Fatal plane crash spares neighbors; homes
Enfield Fire Chief lauds first responders’ efforts
by Robert Lynch; September 3, 2026
One neighbor described the sound like the slam of a truck’s tailgate. “I’m kind of shook up, but I’ll be OK,” he assured me three days after a small airplane fell from the sky near his Enfield home last Sunday afternoon and killed its two occupants. Nevertheless, the man recognized, the crash was “pretty dramatic.”
Dramatic—and also in its own way, fortunate.
That neighbor and several others reside within a few hundred feet of where the aircraft went down. They and their homes were spared injury or damage. But it was a close call. One double-wide stands very close to where the wreckage landed. I’m told multiple people were present inside the home. They declined to be quoted for this story.
Sunday, August 30, the Tompkins County Sheriff’s Department responded to the 100 block of Applegate Road North, Enfield. At the right-angled bend of “Chain Drive,” a private driveway leading past several residences, a 1977 Lake LA-4-200 plane—a “Cessna-style aircraft,” as the Sheriff’s Department described it—had crashed.
The plane’s owner and pilot, 52-year-old David Kornreich, was found dead at the scene. His passenger, 31-year-old Andrew R. Harrell, was alive and extricated by first responders. Harrell later died of his injuries at Cayuga Medical Center.
Media reports identify Kornreich as an adjunct physics professor, who taught at both Cornell University and Ithaca College. Kornreich was also chief instructor at Ithaca’s East Hill Flying Club.
Harrell, it’s reported, lived in Cortland and was studying for his master’s degree in aviation sciences. He aspired to become a commercial airline pilot.
According to a Sheriff’s Department news release, a preliminary investigation “revealed that the plane was cleared for takeoff from the Ithaca Airport at 11:24 AM (Sunday), and the last contact with the tower was at 12:02 PM.”
The craft crashed in the semi-wooded area off Chain Drive about a half-hour later.
Applegate Road resident Craig Hammond was first to arrive at the scene.
“It’s something I never want to see again,” Hammond told me three days later, late Wednesday afternoon, as we talked briefly outside his home.
Hammond pointed to a tree line north of his house. Hammond said he heard the plane’s engine cutting out. The aircraft then disappeared behind that line of trees and crashed. “I called 911, jumped into my car and headed out,” Hammond said. When he arrived, Hammond said, he saw no others around the wreckage.
To the best of knowledge, there were no eyewitnesses at the moment of impact.
“The responders were so fantastic,” Hammond said of emergency personnel. “Their response was excellent.”
“I never heard it,” Salvatore Inserra, a retired motorcycle mechanic, whose home and former shop lie at the end of Chain Drive, told me. His home was within a few tenths of a mile from where Kornreich’s plane went down. One friend had left Inserra’s house and traveled down the driveway shortly before the crash. A second friend, “Don,” was on his way to visit.
Don saw all those police cars following him down Applegate Road, Inserra recounted. The vehicles, lights flashing, turned with him onto Inserra’s long private drive.
Don said he’d thought he’d done something illegal, Inserra related his friend’s reaction. Only at that point did Don phone Inserra to advise him of the crash.
The mid-seventies-aged Inserra discounted any risks to his own safety that day. My attitude is, “I can help them; I run toward them,” he said of how he treats accident victims. “Maybe it’s because I grew up in Brooklyn,” he remarked jokingly.
Most other neighbors spoken with late Wednesday declined to be quoted by name or on-the-record. Their request for privacy deserves respect. But most brushed off the thought that there’d been any risk to themselves the day of the crash. And three days after the tragedy occurred, they sounded prepared to move on.
Enfield Fire Chief Jamie Stevens served as command officer during the recovery efforts. Two days later, Stevens briefed the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners as he returned from an after-incident meeting at the Tompkins County Department of Emergency Response.
“We did the best we could for the situation,” Stevens described the effort undertaken Sunday afternoon. The chief reported that 34 units—each unit is a fire truck, ambulance, or other emergency vehicle—participated. Stevens estimated 50-60 firefighters were at the scene.
Each person had a job to do, Stevens said. They were “like a lot of little ants all around doing their thing,” he described their activity that day.
Stevens reported it took about 45 minutes after arrival for responders to extricate both bodies from the wreckage.
“A lot of credit goes to the (Enfield Volunteer Fire) company, and the chief and the officers,” Board of Fire Commissioners Chair Greg Stevenson said after Stevens gave his report. This is a “low-frequency, high-risk kind of operation,” Stevenson, a firefighter himself, assessed Sunday’s effort.
Expect Fire Chief Jamie Stevens to provide a further update of the incident to the Enfield Town Board when it convenes on September 9.
Sunday’s marked the first plane crash within 25 years in Tompkins County, Stevens told fire commissioners. And it was the first fatal plane crash that any who’d worked at the scene that day had ever encountered.
In addition to Enfield, responding agencies Sunday included Trumansburg, Mecklenburg and Ithaca fire departments. Bangs Ambulance, Tompkins County Emergency Response, and the Tompkins County Airport Rescue and Firefighting (ARFF) service also sent equipment and manpower.
Chief Stevens gave special credit to Airport Deputy Director and ARFF Chief Josh Nalley and Nalley’s deputy chief, Jeremy Puterbaugh.
“If it weren’t for Josh, we would have been so far behind the 8-ball,” Stevens acknowledged to commissioners. “So much had to be documented. It was not an ideal situation,” Stevens said.
As Chief Stevens briefed commissioners, a large tractor-trailer was scheduled to arrive at the scene late Tuesday from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Washington DC. That night, NTSB personnel were to load the wreckage onto the truck, transport it back to the nation’s capital, where Stevens predicted it would rest in a warehouse for about a month and then be disassembled, piece by piece, to ascertain a cause for the crash.
By the following day, Wednesday, any vestiges of a plane crash were gone from the scene.
A determination of cause takes months, sometimes a year or longer. Yet based on the engine sputtering that witness Craig Hammond had heard, engine malfunction stands as the most likely explanation.
“An event of this severity tests every facet of our local emergency response system,” Chief Stevens wrote in a statement, issued one day after the fatal crash had occurred. Stevens’ statement continued:
“From the initial 911 dispatch calls to the long hours on scene in the 100 block of N. Applegate Road, the professionalism, technical skill, and interoperability displayed by our dispatchers, neighboring fire departments, EMS, law enforcement, county coordinators, and community members were exceptional. We are deeply grateful for the overwhelming support brought to our district during this extended operation.”
On a personal note, the Fire Chief added, “The Commissioners, Officers, and Members of the Enfield Fire District extend our deepest condolences to the families, friends, and loved ones affected by this heartbreaking loss.”
Remembrances of Andrew Harrell, and particularly David Kornreich, extended to the Tompkins County Legislature, which met the same night as Chief Stevens addressed Enfield fire commissioners.
Lansing legislator Mike Sigler is a pilot. He owns a plane. And he knew David Kornreich well.
“I looked at my logbook today of the flights I took with Dave, and I’ve probably flown with him for over 20 hours,” Sigler estimated. Mike also knew Kornreich through roller derby, an activity in which both David and two of Sigler’s daughters participated.
Roller derby “was a big part of his life,” Sigler recalled. “I didn’t want that to go unnoted,” the Lansing legislator stated, “that you lose people in a community that has such a large impact.”
Legislature Chair Shawna Black added her condolences. “Our thoughts are with their families, friends, and everyone who knew and loved them during this incredibly difficult time,” Black said of Kornreich and Harrell.
And Ithaca lawmaker Veronica Pillar knew Kornreich as a fellow instructor. She credited him with having passed on her name to the Newfield Central Schools, which then hired her for a one-year job teaching physics.
By Thursday, September 3, a GoFundMe page had been set up to benefit the families of Kornreich and Harrell.
###
At What Price Progress?
Enfield renews call for expanded IDA as agency grants SouthWorks PILOT
by Robert Lynch; August 24, 2026
By coincidence, both actions happened the same day. And given that one was so predictable and the other such a reporter’s long drive from Ithaca, neither got much media attention.
By the unanimous vote from six of its members, all seated in Legislative Chambers, the Tompkins County Industrial Development Agency (TCIDA) August 12 approved the expensive—and increasingly controversial—Payment-in-Lieu-of-Tax (PILOT) agreement to benefit Beacon Communities LLC, the firm that would develop vacant land near Ithaca’s former Morse Chain/Emerson Power Transmission factory into affordable housing as part of the SouthWorks economic revitalization.
Then, that evening, miles away, the Enfield Town Board granted its own unanimous consent. Enfield’s action, only peripherally-related , urged New York Governor Kathy Hochul to sign legislation that would enlarge the TCIDA’s Board of Directors’ membership and attempt to make the agency more diverse and responsive to community concerns and its decisions less automatic.
The Enfield resolution reaffirmed the Town Board’s desire to enlarge IDA Board membership from seven to nine. Expansion requires New York State’s endorsement. The hope among Enfield’s leaders is that one of those added seats would go to a representative from our county’s smaller towns. Ithaca City School District (ICSD) officials and their teachers’ union also want a seat in the IDA.
“We didn’t have much of a voice back when the big solar project came to pass,” this Enfield Councilperson, Robert Lynch, reminded the Town Board at its meeting. “And there probably will be other solar projects in the future; and who knows, maybe a data center might request a PILOT agreement… And so you want to have local input in these decisions.”
The Enfield resolution to urge Hochul’s signature passed with little additional discussion. It reaffirmed a position the Town Board took in January 2025 before the enabling state legislation pressed its way through Albany’s legislative meat grinder..
State Senator Lea Webb and Assemblymember Anna Kelles introduced the companion bills that year. The measures cleared the Senate, but died in the Assembly that June. This spring, they passed both houses. Before year’s end, the final bill will wind its way to Governor Hochul’s desk, and she’ll have just a few days to sign it.
Once the bill becomes law, the Tompkins County Legislature would decide whom to fill those two extra seats. Expect the Ithaca Board of Education and the Ithaca Teachers Association to lobby hard for one designated member. Rural municipalities may do the same. A City of Ithaca Common Council member already occupies one of the seven current TCIDA positions.
Ithaca Alderperson Ducson Nguyen was among the six who cast votes in favor of the SouthWorks-related PILOT agreement August 12. (The seventh TCIDA member attended only remotely that day, and agency rules dictated he couldn’t vote.)
Discussion of the PILOT agreement to Beacon Communities that day was relatively brief and definitely one-sided. No one on the TCIDA Board raised a serious reservation to a tax abatement that over its 30-year term is valued at $17.5 Million.
The pair of Beacon projects—the smaller one in the City of Ithaca near the former factory’s main entrance and the larger one in the Town of Ithaca, on vacant land south of the plant—would add 230 units of so-called “affordable housing.” The PILOT agreements approved at the meeting would not affect the decaying factory itself.
“This is an easy one to point to; everybody loves a villain,” Tompkins County legislator and IDA Board member Greg Mezey told the meeting. But don’t hate the PILOT, he said, “This is not something to be vilified. This is something that is a mechanism of government that we can do to get the type of things that we want in our community.”
At the first of two public hearings July 29, several Ithaca Board of Education members and Ithaca Teachers Association President Kathryn Cernera urged the TCIDA to give Beacon’s PILOT further scrutiny. In their view, the combined developments, when tax abated, would deprive the Ithaca City School District of too much revenue. Meanwhile, they said, the projects would burden the school system with perhaps 150 additional students to teach, pupils drawn from the families who’d move there.
“I am here today to urge the IDA to strongly consider the impact the tax abatement the developers of the SouthWorks project are requesting would have on our schools and our community as a whole before making any decision about this project,” Cernera told the industrial development agency that day.
School officials made it clear they didn’t necessarily oppose the SouthWorks redevelopment; only that they were cautious and wanted a “pause.”
There will be no pause.
That 150-student estimate is the product of “back-of-the-envelope calculations that, quite frankly, have no basis,” TCIDA Board member Jeff Gorsky, a business consultant, asserted at the meeting. To the contrary, Gorsky claimed Ithaca student enrollments are falling. It’s part of a national trend, he said. People are having fewer children.
Demographics dictate Ithaca City School District enrollments will continue to fall “leaving continued capacity,” TCIDA Board Chair Deborah Dawson—a County legislator—stated.
“The project doesn’t pencil out without the abatement,” Dawson asserted. Affordable housing projects, she and others argued, don’t pay for themselves without tax breaks. If developers don’t get abatements, they build upscale, “market rate” apartments instead.
Legislature Chair Shawna Black, also on the TCIDA Board, questioned why this one, particular SouthWorks housing initiative has generated so much public resistance, both from the school district and from others.
“For me, the optics are a little bit off,” Black stated. “Whenever we talk about affordable housing as a community, we know we need that desperately. And then the one project that we actually hear from people is the affordable housing.”
Beacon Communities’ 230 unit endeavor, Gorsky pointed out, is only the “first part of a much larger SouthWorks redevelopment of an industrial site that we all know and need to happen.”
“We only have so many levers in the State of New York to pull,” Mezey advised. “Property tax is one of them.” And to Mezey, population growth on South Hill—young and old—would not be a bad thing. “We need to bake bigger pies,” he said.
What confuses some is the seeming redundancy. Two years ago the TCIDA awarded SouthWorks an $85 Million, 20-year tax abatement on its nearly half-Billion dollar venture, old factory included.
As Dawson described it at the latest meeting, that earlier abatement was an “umbrella” of sorts. Smaller segments of the development—in this instance, Beacon’s two housing clusters on old parking lots and brushland—stand under that umbrella. Understandably, the tax-conscious among us grow cautious. What’s next?
And for them, a fresh, contrarian voice on the Industrial Development Agency—either from a board of education member or from a rural town board leader—would infuse a breath of fresh air; someone to ask tough questions and not treat his or her publicly-facing role as that of Big Development’s reliable rubber stamp. That’s where Enfield’s resolution of mid-August might work to do some good.
****
The Enfield Town Board had expected to proceed August 12 to set a September Public Hearing on a proposed Local Law that would impose a one-year moratorium on any new data center that might propose building in the town. But the board held off action, postponing the process for at least a month and pushing off any hearing and the law’s adoption until October at the earliest.
The moratorium’s initial draft had been modeled after a law adopted in Newfield July 9. The Enfield moratorium’s text had undergone two successive rewrites between July and the mid-August meeting. Town legal counsel Guy Krogh had recommended many changes. The document had grown from three pages to eight. And in the weeks ahead it may expand still further.
Councilperson Jude Lemke, an attorney herself, had spoken with Krogh earlier on the day of the meeting. Krogh had lingering concerns.
There are “many infirmities with their moratorium,” Lemke quoted Krogh’s observation of the Newfield law. Newfield’s counsel (Tom Smith) “is not a municipal lawyer,” Lemke cautioned.
Lemke also relayed Enfield counsel’s worry that should TeraWulf ever build its major data center in Lansing, as it’s proposed, “satellite data centers” could pop up around it, potentially in Enfield.
For months, Councilperson Lemke has urged adoption of a permanent ban on data centers in Enfield, but she has yet to bring a script to the Town Board.
“Why are we nitpicking so much?” this Councilperson, Robert Lynch, asked. “This is a moratorium. This is not a permanent prohibition.”
Others on the board said they’d welcome a prohibition. All agreed to confer privately with Krogh before their next meeting in September and to seek Krogh’s direction.
“Let me just state for the record, I will oppose an outright ban,” Lynch stated, his having previously observed that prospects of a data center in Enfield stand next to nil and that he’d prefer heavy regulation to blunt prohibition.
“I believe that supporting an outright ban on data centers ties our hands and opens us up for litigation,” this Councilperson warned colleagues.
Other items addressed by the Enfield Town Board August 12:
- Highway Superintendent Barry ‘Buddy” Rollins brought good news. Ending a year-long—and sometimes contentious—debate over whether to purchase a new mower tractor and whether to purchase new or used, Rollins announced he’d ordered a new machine, but for considerably less than the $165,000 budgeted this year. Rollins reduced the purchase price to $110,000 by foregoing purchase of a new rear mower and instead retaining the Highway Department’s current rear mower, which the superintendent said remains in good condition. This Councilperson commended Rollins for achieving savings.
- In response to concerns raised during the Enfield Planning Board’s recent review and subsequent approval of a new Verizon cell tower off Van Dorn Road N., the Town Board directed its planners to draw up new, more rigorous standards for the approval of future communications towers. (Details are provided in separate reporting.)
- The Town Board set its schedule toward adoption of a next year’s budget in the weeks ahead. The timetable calls for the proposed 2027 budget to be made public at a special meeting September 23. Several work sessions would follow. The budget would go to a Public Hearing October 28.
- The Board made final arrangements to proceed with the testing of drain water at the Enfield Highway Garage. The analysis is required toward securing a permit to resume use of the Ithaca Area Wastewater Treatment Facility (IAWWTF) as a repository for garage floor effluent. The IAWWTF has barred Enfield from using its Ithaca plant for nearly a year. The decision has forced the Town to contract for costly transport of drain water to Schenectady. Once testing by a Cortland-based laboratory is complete, the Town will know better how it must remediate the effluent—if at all—to make it acceptable to Ithaca. The test will cost just over $2,300.
- And midway through its meeting, the Town Board retreated for a private, closed consultation with attorney Dan Cohen to discuss long-stalled negotiations toward renewal of Enfield’s cable TV franchise with Haefele Connect. The old contract expired in late 2022. And in April 2024, the Town Board’s majority retained Cohen’s firm for $8,900 to negotiate a renewal. After the 20-minute, mid-meeting conference, the Board made no statement about the progress of talks toward a new franchise agreement.
###
Tower permit spurs Enfield law rewrite
Verizon’s money-saving relocation secures planners’ grudging consent
by Robert Lynch; August 18, 2026
They’ll stand like Tweedledee and Tweedledum; two, nearly 200-foot tall communications towers on the east side of Van Dorn Road, only a few football fields apart. And once things shake out, the newer of the two may be laden with cellular antennas, while the older one may stand there nearly naked.
But that’s the way of business. And that’s also the way of Enfield town government. It’s a government whose Planning Board determined this month that legal compliance coupled with lax regulation gave it no choice but to permit the new tower to go up.
“We don’t have no zoning and we don’t have no money, and big companies come in here and they look at us and (it becomes) 100 percent an easy target; that’s what Enfield is,” Planning Board member Rich Teeter remarked near the close of planners’ August 5 meeting. It was one at which the Town Planning Board granted agents for Verizon Communications permission to erect a new, 170-foot free-standing tower at 217 Van Dorn Road North.
Verizon would hop its antennas to the new tower from an existing one that stands only a few tenths of a mile away. And it would do so for only one reason: to save money.
That said, expect the rules to change. Because Enfield officials concede that the current paucity of regulation constrains their ability to deny a tower outright or to impose wise, common sense limits, they’ve instructed the Planning Board to recommend—and for the Town Board to subsequently consider—amendments to the town’s Site Plan Review Law. The changes would not halt this latest structure. But they could curtail excesses when the next tower applicant comes along.
In a resolution adopted unanimously at its meeting August 12, the Enfield Town Board directed the Planning Board “to draft and recommend appropriate amendments to the Town of Enfield Site Plan Review Law that would establish new and heightened standards of review for the approval of communications towers and other commercial development within the Town.”
The Town Board’s Resolution adds that “such standards (are) to include, but are not necessarily limited to, those of structural height, lot line setbacks, lighting, liability insurance, and tower decommissioning.”
The Town Board’s resolution called upon the Planning Board to hand up its recommendations within six months.
Back in early February, Tony Phillips, Director of Zoning and Permitting for Verizon’s Agent, Kendall Communications, first approached the Enfield Planning Board about building a new cell tower. Phillips also represents Harmoni Towers, the firm that would construct and own the new tower and lease tower space to Verizon.
Phillips and his nationwide carrier made no apology about their motives. Verizon already serves that section of Enfield adequately. The only beneficiary from jumping towers is Verizon’s bottom line.
“Their rates are going up and up and up exorbitantly on the existing tower,” Phillips complained August 5 about the current tower’s owner from which Verizon leases. “They charge you every time you touch the tower. You want to do any kinds of upgrade on your equipment, the rent goes up,” he said.
Phillips described construction of this new, second tower, as part of Verizon’s “High Rent Relocation Program.” Phillips had no precise figures for planners August 5, but he at first suggested that the site move could save the carrier a half-million dollars over Verizon’s 30-year lease. Then he estimated annual savings might be as much as $50,000 to $100,000. His numbers were guesses.
Verizon’s builder would place the new tower on a large lot owned by Michael and Jamey Kartychak at 217 Van Dorn Road, just north of Hayts Road. Initially, Phillips and his companies had planned to put the tower close to the road. But under Planning Board pressure last winter, the Harmoni site was moved to a spot behind the Kartychak house and shed, close to the owners’ rear lot line.
It took months for Phillips’ company and Verizon to get their paperwork together. Finally, on August 5, the public got to speak and the board to act.
“We’ve already got a tower that’s right next door to me,” Kathleen Smith of 253 Van Dorn Road, told the Planning Board at the early-August Public Hearing. “This is the first I’ve heard about it,” Smith complained. She’d only learned of the plans after the applicant had days before the hearing mailed out the required written notifications to neighbors within a half-mile radius.
Of any neighbor who addressed the meeting, Smith was most passionate.
The tower “can affect property values up to ten percent,” she insisted. “It can affect health concerns, environmental concerns, and noise,” she alleged. Smith maintained that the existing tower emits “humming and beeping noises,” to which she added, “and they don’t come fix it for months.”
“Why do we need one right after another, right next to each other?” Smith questioned. “I think they’re taking advantage of a poor rural location, thinking that nobody will say anything; we’ll just shove in another one,” she asserted. “I highly object.”
This Enfield Councilperson, Robert Lynch, also weighed in. Living nowhere near either tower, but having followed every step of the process, this writer questioned the alleged “hardship” Phillips had claimed his client suffers.
“What we’re dealing with here is not a matter of hardship,” this writer stated. “We’re dealing with corporate greed, and that’s what’s going on here… This is about money. And it’s also about playing Enfield as a patsy.”
The Councilperson cited published figures reporting that Verizon’s current CEO, Danial Schulman, earned $34.3 Million in 2025. Schulman’s predecessor, Hans Vestberg, earned $31.18 Million that same year and $24.16 Million the year before. Lynch also noted that when Schulman was lured away from PayPal last October, he crowed that his strategy was to “reduce our cost to serve” and to “deliver sustainable long-term growth for our shareholders.”
“What the CEO of Verizon makes is totally irrelevant to this conversation,” Phillips later countered. “Nobody questions what other CEO’s make for other companies or your president or anybody else,” the agent maintained. “For them to make their property profitable should be congratulated,” he insisted.
“If trying to make money is bad, then I guess I’m living in the wrong place,” Phillips remarked.
About a half-dozen Enfield residents addressed the Public Hearing in-person or online. Some raised questions. Others were ambivalent. “I don’t use Verizon,” Janice Wetzel remarked, “so I have no interest in Verizon putting the tower up.”
Kevin and Wanda Fenton own property closest to where Harmoni would build. If the tower tumbled straight over, it would land in the Fenton’s’ vacant woodland.
“You want to put a tower on it, have at it, buddy,” Kevin Fenton told Verizon’s agent. “As long as you keep it off my property,” he warned. He’d found surveyors’ stakes close to his boundary. “If this tower falls on me, I’m going to sue somebody, anyway,” Fenton said with half a chuckle. He walked out.
The Kartychak’s, owners of the newly-approved site, did not attend the Public Hearing. Nor have they attended any prior proceeding.
Even before the Town Board adopted its Resolution of August 12—one week after the Planning Board had granted Verizon’s request—Planning Board Chair Dan Walker had offered how he’d amend the rules. Walker would add to the Site Plan Review Law the new stipulation that:
“All towers or structures greater than 50 feet tall shall be set back a minimum of the structure height from the lot line of adjoining parcels including road Right of Way lines.”
The current Site Plan Review Law demands that any new commercial or industrial building provide at least 50 feet of clearance to a neighbor’s lot line. But in reviewing prior applications for new towers, Enfield planners had traditionally advised applicants to provide an additional “fall zone” equal to the height of the tower. The fall zone would assure that were a tower to tip over, yet remain intact, all debris would rest on the applicant’s own land and not on somebody else’s.
In this instance, the latest Verizon proposal fails the fall zone test. To fit the tower between homeowner Michael Kartychak’s buildings and his rear lot line, the new tower would barely clear the 50-foot requirement, let alone the 170-foot fall-zone allowance. The applicant’s engineers predict that were their tower to fall, it would crumple upon itself.
“I don’t think it’s great being on a small piece of property the way it is,” Planning Board member Teeter acknowledged. “But unfortunately our laws only restrict us to do so much without putting the Town itself into a legal predicament,” he lamented. I’d prefer it in a field, he said.
“But we are where we are,” Walker answered.
And that’s the dilemma Enfield Planning Board members faced. The “fall zone” precedent is not yet grounded in the law. When planners in recent months had raised the fall zone issue to the cell company’s agent, the agent had balked. Tony Phillips had asked Walker to cite the regulation he sought to enforce. Walker could not. Planners came to realize that “going rogue,” enforcing rules that don’t exist, carries the risk of litigation.
“In a situation like this, where a planning board in a town that has no specific regulations saying that something can’t be done, it seems to me that we have to have some kind of pretty solid, weighted evidence to deny something happening that doesn’t go against any of our policies,” Planning Board member Michael Carpenter observed August 5. “Legally, we’re bound to follow the law,” he concluded.
Carpenter at one point asked whether planners could employ “Section 18” of their mandated environmental review, the evaluation of whether a tower is “consistent with community character.”
“Is it inconsistent with community charter there?” Walker rebutted as to the permit just approved. “There’s another cell tower 2,000 feet away. So that’s the community character.”
“I’m sure that if you took this tower into two thousand towns in upstate New York you would not get approval in every one of them,” Carpenter predicted. Some would say “community character” dictates one tower as sufficient; but two towers as “way out of line.”
The Planning Board had already voted. The matter was dropped.
Carpenter tossed out another thought. If Verizon’s saving so much money, could it rebate some of those savings to neighbors as compensation for their sacrifice, as a “gesture of good will?”
Phillips brushed aside the idea. “That’s not something they normally would do,” he said.
Planners admitted to themselves that Enfield’s lack of zoning—restrictions members made clear they have no desire for the Town to enact—cripple their ability to stem the proliferation of cell towers.
“We have an open field in Enfield,” Board Chair Walker surveyed the regulatory landscape.
“Should towers be approved just to save corporations money, or should they be approved on an as-needed basis?” Board member Henry Hansteen asked.
“Unfortunately, that’s why you have one gas station on one corner and another on the other corner,” Rich Teeter answered. “It’s a necessary evil.”
Tony Phillips predicted construction of Verizon’s new tower wouldn’t happen for at least a couple of months. But it will likely occur before winter; if not by then, then in the spring. And should all carriers vacate the existing Van Dorn Road tower and migrate to the newer, cheaper one, Enfield rules make no provision for the old tower coming down.
“I know it’s not good to look at,” Tony Phillips admitted about a cell tower at one point during the discussion, “but eventually you don’t even notice that it’s there,” he insisted.
We’ll see. Tweedledum will soon join Tweedledee.
###