Storm Lookback: Lessons Learned

by Robert Lynch; July 23, 2024

How well did Enfield and Tompkins County cope with the sudden, violent mid-July windstorm that downed countless trees, snapped more than a score of electric poles and left thousands locally without power, some for days?  It may depend upon whom you ask and what questions you pose.

“We did an excellent job last night,.” Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) President Dennis Hubbell informed Enfield’s Board of Fire Commissioners Tuesday evening, July 16^th, about 24 hours after his volunteers had swung into action after the high winds and rain tore through his town. 

“I want to extend my thanks and gratitude for the exemplary performance demonstrated by our 911 Center personnel,” John Halaychik, Assistant Director-911 at the Tompkins County Department of Emergency Response stated in a news release July 18^th.  He said dispatchers at Tompkins County’s Emergency Communications Center handled 455 calls for service within the county during the severe weather event that began late that Monday and lasted for the next two days.

“I believe the 455 calls for service is the highest single-day volume we’ve experienced in the last 10 years, if not ever,” Halaychik said.

No one in Tompkins County died from the storm. There were no reported injuries.  A few freezers and refrigerators of spoiled food became the event’s principal casualties.  But lessons were learned.  And for those wise enough to heed them, they deserve to be remembered.

The P.R-sanitized message from Tompkins County government that week stood somewhat in contrast with what Fire Commissioners heard in Enfield that Tuesday night, as power for many remained out.

The Tompkins County view: “The way situations, communications, and notifications were made and handled was top notch,” Assistant Director Halaychik stated in his department’s news release. “Everyone involved is to be commended for their professionalism and actions, both in the 911 Center and those first responder personnel in the field, who—in their feedback to us—were extremely grateful of the effort and coordination.”

The Enfield view:  “When we tried to report lines down last night, they told us we’re no longer taking calls,” Enfield Fire Chief Jamie Stevens told the Board of Fire Commissioners.

Chief Stevens related to this writer that the Call Center got overwhelmed and told fire departments to stand in place in their respective stations and answer calls for their community as they saw needed.  The Call Center relied on the “CAD System,” a computerized notification program.  Operators would post to the CAD System, and departments could use that resource to respond.

But in Enfield, there was a problem.  For reasons that Chief Stevens never completely explained during the Commissioners meeting, EVFC volunteers are presently unable to fully and properly receive CAD messages at the fire station.  The night of the storm, Fire Chief Stevens said, an EVFC volunteer who also serves the Ithaca Fire Department had to view CAD from his downtown vantage point, photograph its messages on his phone, and then relay them to Enfield’s fire house.

Without using the exact words, Stevens said such a jerry-rigged notification practice is unacceptable to him.  What he needs, the Enfield Fire Chief said, is a large-screen monitor and a computer specifically dedicated to the CAD system.  A simple, cheap fix, it would seem, albeit a necessary one.

Armed with Stevens’ newly-disclosed request, this Town Councilperson related it to the Enfield Town Board the following night.  I asked whether any remaining funds from the federally-backed American Rescue Plan (ARPA) could be spent for the purpose.  Town Supervisor Stephanie Redmond informed us that the last bit of ARPA money had already been spent in renovating the Town Clerk’s office.

What about the 911 Call Center’s overwhelming number of calls?  Enfield Fire Commissioners were told it’s the third time that’s happened this year.

“The radio traffic is what overwhelmed them,” Company President Hubbell said of the bottleneck that confronted those at the 911 Call Center. “Some fire departments, all they want to do is talk,” Hubbell complained, clearly referring to other emergency crews in the county.  “They want to talk about what color the trees are.”

Part of the reason Chief Stevens and President Hubbell said the things they said was to encourage set-asides in the next Enfield Fire District budget for the extra equipment that would make the volunteer response quicker and keep Enfield safer.

Board of Fire Commissioners Chair Greg Stevenson had a better idea:  Encourage Tompkins County to pony-up.

“We should push the County to do as much as they can do.”  Chairman Stevenson said.

Greg Stevenson, a former Tompkins County legislator and Enfield Fire Chief, also had operational criticism of the County-run dispatch system.  It’s not the way it used to be, the Board Chair told the meeting.  The people are different.

“Now it’s a civil service job,” Stevenson remarked.   All you need to do is pass a typing test.  “You don’t know the system.”

“In the past, fire dispatchers were mostly fire company members (not necessarily Enfield members, but local fire service experienced folks),” Stevenson wrote in an email to this writer July 17th, expanding on his meeting remarks.   “Now, with the combination of many emergency services agencies being dispatched from the 911 center, that fire service familiarity is sometimes there and sometimes not.”

The Monday afternoon storm left as many as 5,992 customers in the Ithaca area without power, T.F. Winderl, the designated spokesperson for NYSEG’s Ithaca Division, stated during a conference call with local municipal officials July 16^th.  By one day later, the outages had been reduced to just over 1,000.  Power to most people was back on by Wednesday night of that week.

And also by that Wednesday, NYSEG had made bottled water and dry ice available to those who wanted it.  Supervisor Redmond obtained a supply of those materials and offered to distribute them to Enfield residents during and before the Town Board’s meeting Wednesday evening.  After the two-hour session had ended, Redmond reported one or two people had come for the bottled water.  No one had requested the dry ice.

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The Signal You Send

Posted July 19, 2024

On Tuesday, July 16, the Tompkins County Legislature had placed on its agenda consideration of a committee-endorsed Resolution: “Implementation of Higher County-Wide Minimum Wage with Local Law Establishment.” 

Its title somewhat misleading, the measure would not have immediately established a higher local Minimum Wage, but rather have directed County staff and “community stakeholders” to collaborate and “develop an effective and sustainable minimum wage policy.” County staff would then “draft a local law outlining the specifics of the policy.” Ithaca legislator Veronica Pillar authored the Resolution.

Judging from comments voiced at a committee session the prior week, this Councilperson had expected a strong turnout of labor and “Living Wage” advocates to speak in support of such a go-it-alone Minimum Wage initiative.  They never showed.  But I did.  I spoke from the heart.  Here’s what I said:

****

Good Evening.  Robert Lynch, Councilperson, Town of Enfield.  I’m here representing myself tonight.  I think I’m also here representing a forgotten man and woman in a debate that you’re going to be having tonight.  And that forgotten person is the person who writes the paycheck.

As I drive down from Enfield to go to the City of Ithaca in the middle of the day, I drive down West State Street.  I’m always looking to the right of me to make sure that those gates at Cayuga Lumber aren’t locked forever.  It’s tough, I’m sure, a small business like that making payroll with the minimum wage as it is.  I go a little farther, to Ithaca Agway, a small business.  I betcha’ they have a hard time competing against ‘Big Box Billy’ down the road.  If they had to pay a $24, $28, maybe $30 Tompkins County Minimum Wage, I’m sure they would go under.

Just coming down from Enfield, I drive along Bostwick Road.  There’s Alfred Eddy’s farm.  He raises produce.  If he had to pay $24, $28, or $30 an hour to his people, I bet you his produce stand would close.

I buy pizzas at Little Venice in Trumansburg.  I buy Friday fish fry at the Royal Court on Meadow Street, small businesses.  They’re going to struggle.  They struggle already.  And they’d struggle more with a higher Minimum Wage.

I know what people have said: that this is only a start; that the Resolution you have tonight does not establish a minimum wage, it does not call for a Local Law, it just studies it.  But if you’re starting there, where do you end?  And you end probably with something that snowballs into something that would kill small business in this town.

Big business, they can absorb it.  They probably look at Ithaca like Congressman Tom Reed once did; oh, “Extreme Ithaca Liberals.”  We’ll just use other stores to subsidize the labor expense at our stores in Ithaca.  Or, they may close, and we’ll all have to go… drive to Big Flats like we used to have to do before the Fairgrounds projects were built.

It’s a bad thing to think about going it alone.  It’s probably not legal under state law to start with.  So you’re wasting taxpayer money on legal expenses.  I know our County Attorney worried about the cost of that.  But you’re also sending a signal, a bad signal to the small businesses of this community that you really do not matter that much to us.

I want to see those businesses; those Cayuga Lumber’s, those Agway’s, those Little Venice’s, survive.  And I think it’s best we just lay that proposal on the table, forget about it, and move on with our other County business…. 

****

To this Councilperson’s surprise, legislator Greg Mezey, Chair of the Housing and Economic Development Committee, minutes later pulled his committee’s Local Minimum Wage Resolution from the July 16 Agenda.  It will return to the floor on August 6th. Mezey requested postponing its consideration for three weeks “so that we can have additional experts here to speak on the topic,” he said.

Mezey explained some of those who’d wanted to speak had “scheduling conflicts” that night.  Later news reports indicated there’d been a union rally on the Cornell campus that day.  Cornell leaders of its United Auto Workers union local were among the most prominent advocates of a local Minimum Wage at the committee’s meeting July 8^th.

Also of note: During a municipal leader’s speaking privilege that night, Ithaca Common Council member Patrick Kuehl, apparently misinformed, had implied that Ithaca Agway was not a small business, but rather was owned by the Ace Hardware chain.  He is incorrect.  A spokesperson at Ithaca Agway informs this writer that although Ithaca Agway is affiliated with Ace Hardware as a franchisee, the firm remains independently owned. / RL

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Town Board green-lights SkateGarden concerts

[Update; July 20, 2024: In an email circulated to Town Board members July 19, Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond said she’d been informed by the Town’s insurance agent that Daniel Woodring’s nonprofit, SkateGarden Inc, would need to purchase its own event insurance to make the concerts happen.]

by Robert Lynch; July 18, 2024

Best you imagine the Downtown Ithaca CFCU Summer Concert Series, only in miniature.

With visionary concepts largely confined to its creators’ imaginations and with vital logistical and liability questions begging for answers, the Enfield Town Board’s majority Wednesday night gave the tentative go-ahead to the “Enfield SkateGarden Benefit Band Series,” a weekly, Thursday night music event to be held at the under-construction Enfield SkateGarden site across from the Town Hall.

By a four-one vote, the Board approved granting SkateGarden designer Daniel Woodring and Stone Bend Farm events center owner Terry Bloom permission to proceed with their concert plans, conditional upon resolution of “insurance issues.”

As authorized, the weekly events would begin on August 8^th and conclude on Halloween.  Concerts would initially run from 6 PM until sunset.

Councilperson Robert Lynch (this writer) voted against the Band Series authorization, saying there are “too many unanswered questions.”  During earlier discussions, Lynch quoted an unnamed confidante, one he placed outside of Town Government, who’d counseled him that what the Board was approving was “a disaster waiting to happen.”

Also Wednesday, the Town Board unanimously granted approval for Woodring’s latest design for this year’s first phase of SkateGarden.  The revised plan would construct a simple “half-pipe” recessed, concrete skateboard ramp at the northern end of the Town-owned property in Enfield Center.  Woodring had initially proposed a more elaborate, heart-shape skateboarding bowl, but he cast it aside on grounds it was too complex for beginners to skate.

Although the current design envisions a central amphitheater and seating area, this year’s efforts would confine the amphitheater’s work to its excavation only.  Pouring of a concrete pad at the performance area would be left to later project phases, subject to additional available funding.

Town Supervisor Stephanie Redmond assured the Board that no Town taxpayer funds have been or will be expended for this year’s construction.  A $5,000 Tompkins County Parks grant will fund Phase 1 expenses.  The Enfield Highway Department has supplied wood chips and concrete slabs to SkateGarden designers.  Woodring informed the Board that “over 150 hours of volunteer labor” has been donated so far.

A Thursday midday walk-through of the size-limited SkateGarden site revealed the prominence of those wood chips.  They’re just about everywhere; except, that is, in the place where the skating bowl is planned to be poured.  And where the bowl will be poured, slabs of broken concrete proliferate.  Woodring will use the boulders somehow in the ramp’s construction.  It strains one’s imagination at the moment to envision how a well-attended, well-organized concert could be held at the site.

For one thing, SkateGarden lacks permanent electrical power, and the Town has no plans to install it.  And the site has no restrooms.  But Woodring thinks he has a work-around.  He advised the Board that he may be able to borrow portable toilets used by Trumansburg’s GrassRoots Festival.  They’re reportedly kept at the T-Burg Fairgrounds year-round.

Only the thorny issue of liability insurance lingered in Redmond’s mind as the otherwise-supportive Supervisor called for the Band Series’ authorization.  In March, Enfield’s municipal insurer had quoted the Supervisor a relatively low, $330 annual rate for insuring a municipally-owned skateboard facility.  But the quote never covered liability for music concerts such as those now planned.

Redmond and others in the Board’s majority left the insurance-related contingency of their authorization somewhat open-ended.  At one point, the Supervisor said there’d need to be no increase in premiums.  At other points in the discussion, she held open the possibility to a minor rise in rates.

Councilperson Lynch dissented on the final vote after first attempting, but failing for lack of a second, to postpone approval for two weeks to enable the Supervisor to get an answer to the insurance question.  The Town Board reconvenes July 31 to address unrelated matters.

Terry Bloom’s tie-in with SkateGarden would involve his providing his events company’s food truck to supply pizza for concert-goers.  He’d also likely book the musical acts that would provide weekly entertainment. 

Asked by Lynch whether the scheduler envisioned booking performers like the “Gunpoets,” a band that frequently performs at the downtown Ithaca concerts, Bloom said a group at that level of popularity would likely stand at the upper-end of  what’s likely to play at SkateGarden. 

Concert organizers suggested event proceeds would pay the bands that perform.  Neither Woodring nor Bloom indicated that Town Government would be charged.

As part of Woodring’s vision, he requested the Town create an “Enfield SkateGarden Committee,” a quasi-public group to manage events and maintain the facility.  Woodring would have preferred the Town Board have authorized the committee at Wednesday’s meeting, or at least that it do so before concerts begin.  But the Board delayed action, in part, citing the need to get legal advice first.

Questioned by Board members about electrical power, Woodring suggested he’d use a “quiet generator.”  Pressed to explain how the event would address safety issues and crowd control, Woodring responded he’d recruit “volunteers.”

The Benefit Band Series’ primary purpose is to raise money to underwrite SkateGarden’s maintenance and its later phases of construction.  Little was stated at Wednesday’s meeting about whether the concerts would charge an admission fee.  Yet according to a Town official, the small print in one SkateGarden exhibit indicated a $10 per person charge was anticipated.  Another flyer noted plans for “50/50 Raffles.”  Asked by Lynch whether such activities are legal on Town property, Bloom responded he thought they were.

The broader question of event security became Councilperson Lynch’s central concern.  He reminded colleagues that one of the most important principles drilled into newcomers at Town Board training school is that municipal governments have “deep pockets”—namely, the tax base—and that towns become a favored target for trial lawyers.

Others on the Town Board, however, showed limited concern for the liability issue.

There’s also the issue of lighting.  Woodring initially said he’d end all concerts at sundown.  Then Lynch reminded him that the sun sets as early as 6 PM in October.  Organizers immediately pivoted, with Bloom suggesting he could supply solar-powered, pole-mounded lamps to illuminate late-autumn events.

****

The Enfield SkateGarden has proven itself to be an ever-evolving project, seemingly expanding in scope with each Town Board meeting. 

When Daniel Woodring first approached the Town Board in March, he’d proposed construction of a modest, plywood-built, skating ramp; perhaps portable and no more than 100 feet long.  Then plans changed, the County Parks grant came in, and Woodring’s vision expanded… and expanded yet further.  In one respect, maybe the best case—or maybe the worst—it plunged the Town of Enfield into the municipal parks business.

Now, Enfield may find itself in the municipal concert business too.  But we must, as a town, recognize our limits:  Enfield Center is not the Ithaca Commons.  And the Enfield SkateGarden—at least as it looks right now, wood chips and all— is not the Bernie Milton Pavilion.

[Expect additional reporting on this story.]

Writer’s note:  Based on legal advice, Enfield Town Board members are directed not to promote Enfield SkateGarden fundraising events, even in their private capacities. Nothing written here should imply such promotion.

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Enfield’s “Canopy” Controversy

“When I drive up the tree-lined and heavily-canopied winding road that is 327, I always know I’m coming home….”

One who commented to the Enfield Town Board on Rockwell Road pruning, June 26.

Reporting and commentary by Robert Lynch; July 14, 2024

Personal preference:  I like driving Pennsylvania’s back roads.  There’s an undisturbed, understated quality to the experience.  Many of their surfaces remain gravel, with ruts and potholes graded away once yearly by equipment pulled from the 1950’s.  Roads seldom run straight.  Intersections become anyone’s guess.  And most notably, the trees and stone fences crowd incredibly close to the driving lanes.  Take it slow and you’ll be OK.  The roads may fall short of what New York highway engineers at a Cornell School for Highway Superintendents would call “state standard.”  But, then again, the Keystone State is not the Empire State.

Nor, apparently, is it the Town of Enfield.

Since mid-June, residents of our town’s Rockwell Road have voiced concerns about the overly-aggressive tree-pruning policies of the Enfield Highway Department, headed by Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy” Rollins.  The Town Board authorized Rockwell and adjoining Porter Hill Roads to receive “Permanent Improvements” earlier this year, and did so at Rollins’ request.  The Superintendent views tree management as essential to the improvements he’s making.

“This is my job, and I put my heart and soul and family in it,” Rollins told a roomful of residents at a quickly-convened emergency Town Board meeting June 26^th, a session prompted by impassioned emails to Board members urging Highway staff halt their aggressive pruning.

What bothered residents most was that Rollins’ policy would remove any “canopy” that roadside trees extend to overshadow the roadway.  Rockwell was being given a “buzz cut,” its right-of-way opened brightly to the sky.

“I think it was over-pruned,” John Friedeborn of Enfield’s Bostwick Road, informed the Board.  “I’ve never seen pruning like that,” Friedeborn maintained.  “Bad pruning results in decay and problems down the road.”  (He intended no pun.)

John Friedeborn ought to know.  He’s the former owner of Cascadilla Tree Care and a one-time City Forester for Ithaca.

“The basic rule of thumb is 20-25 per cent is about the max that you would prune in terms of foliage on a given tree,” Friedeborn said his experience has taught him.  Removing a greater proportion would weaken the tree and more likely kill it.

But to Superintendent Rollins, a roadside tree deserves less concern that does the safety of the driving public, and to some extent, the convenience of his maintenance crews.

“I’m sorry, but it’s a public road; it’s not a private road,” Rollins told one woman that night, in her case responding to concerns about major excavation of Van Ostrand Road by Enfield crews in recent weeks. “And that’s what I’m gonna’ do,” Rollins said, “is make them (the roads) safe for the public, over all public.”

“It only takes one tree and one limb to come down on a car or a person; it only takes one tree to lay across the road for somebody to run into it,” Rollins told the meeting.

Rollins’ policy regarding trees, the Superintendent said, is to clear the right-of-way; both at roadside and overhead.  The state grants towns a 49.5-foot right-of-way, he said.  So when his department renovates a road, crews measure 24 feet each way from the centerline, mark the distance, and cut just about anything that stands inside the marker, both on the ground and above.

State law may permit such a rigid, no-exceptions approach.  But just because you can do something, does it also mean you must?  That’s the central question dividing the Superintendent from his critics.

“When I drive up the tree-lined and heavily-canopied winding road of (NY Route) 327, I always know I’m coming home, and I mean home in the greater sense of the word,” Rockwell Road resident Julie Magura read into the meeting’s record.  “As soon as I make a right turn onto Rockwell, I am always blown away by the dappling light coming through the maples when the sun is setting to the west,” Magura continued.  “It’s striking, like something you would see in an old New England calendar.”

Many of those maples Magura loves on Rockwell’s eastern end may meet their fate, falling to the chain saw, if Rollins’ strategy prevails.

Northern Porter Hill Road has already received the Rollins clean-cut treatment.  Magura doesn’t like it.

“When I drove down Porter Hill… I was absolutely stunned,” Magura stated.  “To me, it feels like a massacre.”

About 14 people, aside from Rollins, spoke at the Town Board’s meeting.  Most were critical of the Superintendent’s by-the-book policy.  One or two were neutral.   Only Dennis Hubbell, President of the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC), endorsed current practice.  Hubbell said his company’s 13-foot-high fire trucks need clearance.

“When we’re going on a call, we’re not really looking at those tree branches hanging out,” Hubbell cautioned.  Worst case, he said, a truck’s driver could have a “knee-jerk reaction,” heading toward the shoulder with a massive fire engine lying “up on the ditch flopped over and people hurt.”

But Hubbell’s was clearly the minority opinion.  Concern for bucolic beauty prevailed.

“We just moved up here in February,” Hines Road resident newcomer—yet long-term Ithaca visitor—Andrea Sutton told the Board, “and I’ve always loved it because of the trees.”  Trees form a “beautiful canopy” that blankets Hines at her house, Sutton said, and she volunteered to clean up any debris that may fall.

“It scares me to see Porter Hill and Rockwell,” Sutton said.

At present, Porter Hill Road has been trimmed at its lower section, but not its upper portion.  Rockwell’s pruning has just begun, mainly on its western end.  Rollins said cutting toward the east may commence in the fall.

Rockwell Road’s Charlie Elrod and his wife, Lori, also brought their concerns to the meeting.  Charlie shared a PowerPoint.

“This is one of the most beautiful and enchanting places, the Town of Enfield,” Charlie Elrod stated.  “I’ve traveled the world around, and this is the place I come home to; it’s just an incredible place,” he added. 

Elrod had met with Superintendent Rollins days before the meeting.  The resident expressed his concerns.  He said the meeting did not go well.

 “He said he is legally required to clear the roads in the manner that they do,” Elrod reported Rollins as saying.  “He said he can do whatever he wants to.”

“The idea that there is no authority, no accountability from an elected Town official is quite distressing,” Charlie Elrod remarked.

And from a legal standpoint, there lies the problem.  State law grants an elected Highway Superintendent sweeping authority over the maintenance of Town roads.  Aside from the power of the purse, granted through its annual appropriation, a Town Board holds minimal operational oversight.  Town Supervisor Stephanie Redmond made that point clear at the meeting’s start.  Most complaining residents acknowledged the limitation.  They just regret they can do little to change it.

“In other places, the folks who do the actual work are accountable to somebody,” former Ithaca forester John Friedeborn remarked.

But Friedeborn may be thinking of Ithaca, not Enfield.  Ithaca has a Department of Public Works, accountable to an elected Common Council, rather than a Superintendent who’s independently elected. 

In 2020, former Enfield Supervisor Beth McGee sought to place her Town’s Highway Department under direct Town Board control and appoint a Superintendent.  Amid cries of “Keep Enfield Elected,” (words that this Councilperson had echoed), McGee’s initiative, put to a referendum, lost badly.

Then there’s the question of advance warning.  Some who complained at the meeting said they weren’t given sufficient notice until their trees were already gone.

In the Ithaca City, workers nail notices onto trees prior to cutting.  Some towns spray colored dots onto tree trunks.  Rollins has said he often doesn’t do that for fear it incurs municipal liability.

“It feels like this isn’t my road, it’s somebody else’s” the complainant from Van Ostrand Road (later identified as Madonna Stallmann) told Rollins.  “You work for us.  Why can’t we all talk and get these things resolved before the damage is done?” she asked.

Rollins said he does talk.  He claimed he contacts property owners in advance of cutting.  Highway Department crews start early, but end at mid-afternoon.  The Superintendent maintained he stops by some homes after-hours.

“No one came to our house,” one woman interrupted.

A heated exchange ensued, one that reopened old wounds.  Its accusations are best confined to the audio archives.  It’s “all your way or no way,” the complainant described Rollins’ attitude.

The session’s second hour proved less combative than its first.  Complaints still aired; but constructive dialogue began.  Charlie Elrod said Rollins had earlier warned that he’d abandon the Rockwell Road improvement if he couldn’t cut the trees.  I polled attendees.  They said they wanted improvements done. 

John Friedeborn suggested the Town retain an arborist to guide Rollins chain saw on future projects.  The Board made no promises, but Redmond said the idea warranted consideration during budget time this fall.  I’d suggested Enfield create a conservation advisory committee to recommend best pruning practices.  Those in the room and others on the Town Board expressed interest.

Perhaps most importantly, Rollins and Rockwell’s residents agreed to talk more openly and frequently before additional trees get cut.

One of the reasons Rollins cited for his aggressive tree pruning is to hasten snow removal.  Tree canopies, he maintained, keep sunlight from reaching the pavement and melting the snow and ice that’s accumulated.

 “The ideal… procedure is cutting out everything over the road, even the higher limbs,” Rollins said.

“There will be sun on the road; there’s no leaves on the trees in winter,” Gray Road’s Thomas Reyer rebutted. 

Rollins disagreed.  He said bare branches do impede sunlight.

“Well so what?” Reyer shot back.   “Just because it melts a little faster, that’s no reason to destroy a whole canopy… That’s destructive and insane to destroy nature like that… That’s crazy talk.”

The Van Ostrand excavations also drew concern.  “It is just shocking,” Madonna Stallmann complained.  “It’s not only trees that were taken out, fully healthy trees that were holding the roadside… the soil was removed, truckloads and truckloads and truckloads, days and days and days of soil pulled away….”

Van Ostrand’s “a single-lane road and it’s a traffic hazard,” Rollins answered her.  “A road is supposed to be 20-feet wide… water was always washing that hill down.”

For what it’s worth, the Van Ostrand Road hog-out was never listed among the “permanent improvements” the Enfield Town Board funded back in January. 

Our Town’s 2020-adopted Comprehensive Plan states, “Enfield residents value and wish to maintain the rural character of the Town.”  In that same paragraph, the Plan discourages changes that would “adversely affect Enfield visually or otherwise degrade the Town’s rural nature.”

And maybe those words get to the heart of what June’s meeting was all about.  To many, Enfield should cling to its “backroads Pennsylvania” character, canopy and all. 

One of Enfield’s two state highways, NY Route 327, retains its canopy.  Rollins told the meeting that its canopy remains only because New York State lacks time and resources to prune it back.  But I question that explanation.  Rt. 327 serves as the gateway to Robert H. Treman State Park.  I have to believe there’s support shared among persons of influence to keep the road park-friendly.

In my opinion, a pruned-back Rockwell Road looks ugly and bald.  By contrast, the road’s untouched canopied portion remains inviting.  Residents have valid reasons to be concerned.  Highway Superintendent Rollins’ opinions warrant consideration; his authority deserves respect.  Yet still, in the final analysis, public consensus should prevail.  That’s the democracy Enfield deserves.

“Now when I drive through Enfield, all I can wonder when I see a beautiful maple, walnut, oak or other hardwood tree is when is that one going to be cut,” Julie Magura worried aloud to our Town Board that night in June.  Come to think of it, I’m having the same thought myself.

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Baby-steps toward a stand-alone Minimum Wage

Reporting and analysis by Robert Lynch; July 9, 2024

How does a $24 an hour Tompkins County Minimum Wage strike you?

It’s not the law yet.  It may never be.  Albany may not allow it.  But a committee of the Tompkins County Legislature, all Democrats, took initial action Monday toward enacting a local law that would set our county apart from the rest of Upstate New York and establish a county-wide Minimum Wage set at some level higher than the $15 an hour that state law now mandates.  Action came at the prodding of workers’ rights groups, Cornell’s service employees’ union and the most liberal of the Legislature’s 14 members.

“This Resolution is not the policy itself; it is not the law itself,” that legislative sponsor, Ithaca’s Veronica Pillar, qualified to her colleagues Monday, “but it is a necessary step, because to craft something that works requires investment of time, both community engagement and legal and other types of research on the back end.”

With one member—an important member—absent, the County Legislature’s Housing and Economic Development Committee supported adoption of Pillar’s proposal, four votes to nothing.  The Resolution encountered no pushback whatsoever.  Had the committee’s fifth member, Republican Mike Sigler, attended, no doubt the afternoon’s debate would have turned far different.

Heavy on aspirational platitudes, yet lean on substantive impact, Pillar’s initiative falls short of its stated title:  “Implementation of Higher County-Wide Minimum Wage with Local Law Establishment.” The Resolution’s text fails to state what a Tompkins County stand-alone minimum wage might be, when it would take effect, how it would be calculated, or most importantly, who’d enforce it.

As Pillar worded the Resolution, it “directs the County Attorney, County Administrator, and other county staff as needed to collaborate with community stakeholders to develop an effective and sustainable minimum wage policy and draft a local law outlining the specifics of the policy, including the calculation methodology, annual adjustment mechanism, enforcement provisions, and any exemptions or special considerations deemed necessary.”

Yes, that’s quite a mouthful of wiggle-words.

The recommendation could go before the full County Legislature for a final vote as soon as July 16^th.

“The minimum income to survive in Tompkins County is considerably higher that (in) many counties in Upstate New York,” Pete Myers, Director of the Tompkins County Workers’ Center, told the committee.  “So the cost of living here is out of control, and we don’t need to belabor that point.”

Monday’s committee discussions and the advocacy that preceded it muddled the important distinction between a governmentally- mandated “minimum wage” and the “living wage” that advocates argue should constitute the true floor of compensation.  A Living Wage provides a paycheck that covers the necessities of life, at least as some might calculate them.

“It’s kinda’ looking like the Minimum Wage (actually, the Living Wage) will increase to around $24 an hour range in November of this year,” Myers said with a wince, his prediction a shocking revelation in itself.  “And potentially we’re looking at a $24 an hour range right now,” Myers cautioned, “and that would be the cost of housing that’s really raising that more than anything.”

Locals traditionally rely on the local Living Wage calculations that Alternatives Federal Credit Union makes annually.  Critics have faulted the Alternatives methodology as being too worker-generous.  Yet no one so far has chosen a different benchmark.

Alternatives last calculated the Tompkins County “Living Wage” at $18.45 per hour last November.  The Living Wage stood at $16.61 the year before.

To people like Myers, the “Living Wage” should stand as the floor.  So should Tompkins County withstand any legal challenge and enact its stand-alone Minimum Wage, expect activists to set $24 as their goal, if not a higher rate.  $24 an hour would stand 60 per cent above New York’s current wage requirement for Upstate.  (New York’s Upstate Minimum will rise to $15.50 next January, and then to $16 per hour in 2026.)

The Workers’ Center Director brought allies with him to the committee meeting.  As many as four of the five he invited were either leaders of Cornell University’s principal employees union, the United Auto Workers, or UAW union officers.  Some 1,200 Cornell service and maintenance workers are covered by the union local.  Contract negotiations come up this fall.  That fact was not lost during Monday’s meeting.  Indeed, Cornell workers’ grievances found themselves inextricably intertwined with the committee’s wider policy deliberations. 

Christine Johnson, Local 2300 UAW President, complained that her Cornell job pays only $28.17 an hour, and yet she’s forced to drive 55 minutes to get to work.  (Note than Johnson’s wage is almost twice New York’s current minimum.)  She said her partner earns just over $20 an hour at Cornell Dining.

“We struggle financially, and do without a lot of extras,” Johnson said.  Speaking for those she represents, Johnson added, “We need a reset on what is just, fair and good for people who work full-time jobs, pay taxes, and also vote.”

“People are not asking for a lot, they’re just asking to be able to live,” Lonnie Everett, the UAW’s Regional Service Representative, told the committee, “because I watch a lot of folks who are not able to live, and there are folks who are all right with that.”

In line with Everett’s remark, and at Pete Myer’s request, the committee played and streamed to the public—somewhat reluctantly—a four-minute, UAW-produced, Cornell-critical video that stopped nothing short of “Ezra-bashing.”  At least one former Tompkins County official has termed the video inappropriate and biased and argues it never should have been aired before the committee. 

Michael Demo said he works at an (unidentified) local hardware store.   He also joined Pete Myers at the meeting.  “It takes a lot of time and energy when you’re trying to get by on such low wages as we have right now,” Demo complained.  “People have much better things to be doing with their time,” he said.

Demo mentioned a friend, an “accomplished crochet artist” who “would like to sell more of her work on the side.”  Another would like more time to spend with her children. 

Of course, Demo never brought up the fact that if his hardware store were to close because a higher minimum wage made it impossible  to make payroll, his own less-than-desirable job would disappear, and his pay would drop to zero.  But statements like that never get raised by people like him at events like these.

Yes, the committee meeting demanded Mike Sigler’s input.

But there’s another argument, a legal one; a position that makes all that transpired that day about a local minimum wage perhaps little more than academic.  State law may not allow Tompkins County the freedom it seeks.

There’s a pesky little case called “Wholesale Laundry v. City of New York.”  Tompkins County Attorney Maury Josephson told the committee the case was litigated in the 1960’s and remains Good Law today, reaffirmed as recently as 2006.  The Court of Appeals had held that New York State pre-empts localities from setting their own, higher, minimum wages.  State Government reserves the power all to itself.

“If adopting a local Minimum Wage, keep in mind that that effort would involve, if challenged… an effort to overturn long-standing precedent,” Josephson warned.  Tompkins County, he said, “would be sort of at the vanguard of obtaining this reversal, which is an uncertain prospect.”  Winning such a case, Josephson told legislators, “would involve a substantial expenditure of effort,” both by his office and by County Administration.

Nevertheless, expect some lawmakers, particularly liberal Democrats, to kick the tires of a local minimum wage, if for no other reason than to prove their good intentions.

“It is my duty to help to bring this forward,” Ulysses-Enfield legislator Anne Koreman remarked after seconding Pillar’s initiative. “People deserve to have that right to be able to have a job that pays for your basic expenses and working 40 hours a week to do that and not to have to work two or three jobs.”

Committee member Travis Brooks likes a stand-alone Minimum Wage as well, yet would first want to know “is this something that can be done before we spend a lot of time figuring out what that looks like.”

“This is not a partisan issue, it’s an issue of justice; of being fair to everybody,” former Ithaca Town Supervisor Herb Engman said at the start of the meeting.

Committee Chair Greg Mezey stressed the tentative nature of what his group that day was passing forth to the full Legislature—and then, maybe on to the experts. 

“This is really just sort of hitting the ball off the tee, and this is not knowing what course we’re playing, what the par is, or what anything is ahead of us,” Mezey reminded everyone.

Without a contrary opinion, a committee of legislators and their friendly allies in the gallery can say and do just about anything.  And that’s what happened in legislative chambers on Monday.  As said, the moment needed Mike Sigler.

###

Factions form as ICSD Board rebuilds

Reporting and Analysis by Robert Lynch; July 2, 2024

Monday, July first, was a terrible day for Todd Fox to be out of town.  Fox, one of two, newly-elected Ithaca School Board members—and arguably its most conservative—couldn’t attend his first Board of Education meeting and be sworn into office.  Moreover, he couldn’t participate in the leadership elections and have his voice heard and his vote counted in the choice for Board President.  As it turned out, Fox could have altered the outcome, and probably would have.

Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell, the two-year incumbent Board President, emerged from Monday’s lengthy session to serve as President for yet another year.  But Eversley Bradwell barely prevailed.  He only won on a third ballot, of sorts.  When the incumbent’s name was placed into nomination, the school board split down the middle, with five votes required, but only four votes secured.  Next, Jill Tripp’s name was placed into nomination.  It, too, produced a four-four split. 

Only when frustration took over did two Board members cross-over to support the incumbent President on his second attempt. 

Similarly, deadlock befell the Board in its ballot for Vice-President.  Adam Krantweiss and Garrick Blalock, sitting side-by-side, competed for the honor.  First, a four-four tie for Krantweiss occurred; then the same for Blalock.  The Board considered postponing its decision until a later meeting, one when Fox could attend.  But instead, it voted again… and again.  Krantweiss eventually prevailed.

Such as it went Monday morning in Ithaca High School’s York Lecture Hall.  An organizational agenda, one 30 pages long, but customarily to be raced through at lightning speed, got drawn to a crawl by a leadership stalemate.  The meeting convened shortly after Nine AM, but didn’t adjourn until 20 minutes before Noon.

Still, what a keen observer found as this newly-reconstituted Board hammered out its business were incipient coalitions forming.  Whether those bonds will last, only time will tell.  But with taxpayers having what some would call a temper tantrum back in May, turning out two of the more progressive incumbents in a seven-way race for three Board seats, one senses new philosophical and attitudinal alliances taking hold; one forming on the Board’s traditional ideological Left, the other to the more taxpayer-friendly, pragmatic middle. 

Yes, had he been there, Todd Fox might have made a difference.  Dr. Jill Tripp, the newfound hero of some tax-conscious ICSD budget-cutters and a staunch advocate for spending compromises in recent months, might have been elected the Board of Education’s President had Fox attended.

“What’s the salary for this job?” Eversley Bradwell quipped, after newly-sworn Board member Emily Workman had peppered him with probing questions.  Workman quickly distinguished herself at the meeting’s outset as a particularly inquisitive newcomer.  (By the way, a seat on a Board of Education carries no compensation.)  Workman probed the management style of the incumbent President as if he was in a job interview.  Eversley Bradwell responded with what would later stand as the closest thing to an acceptance speech:

“I hope that I have demonstrated compassion, empathy, understanding, an ability to reach out to further having conversations, taking walks, having coffee, being yelled at, all those things,” Eversley Bradwell answered Workman and her colleagues.  “I hope that I maintain that level of… humanity and compassion for the community.”

The Board had not yet voted when Eversley Bradwell said those words.  The day’s awkward organizational agenda encouraged only one member’s name to be placed into nomination at a time.  Jill Tripp cried foul.

“It’s not feeling like a fair process,” Tripp complained when only the incumbent president’s name was moved, and no one else’s name invited.  “There’s clearly a huge advantage to going first,” Tripp said.

That’s when things changed.  The incumbent’s was still the only name on the floor, but the Board drew to nearly an hour the back-and-forth between competing candidates Eversley Bradwell and Tripp before casting its twin series of failed votes and then finally picking Eversley Bradwell as its choice.

“Do I want to be Board President?  Yes and no,” Tripp said bluntly. (She’s known to be blunt.)  “The ‘yes’ part,” Tripp said, involves communication within the Board itself and with District Administration.

“I’ve been watching and listening closely for two years,” Tripp added, “and I feel like all too often, lately every week the Board finds out about important decisions that have been made that we weren’t informed of.  This is a real concern to me.”

“This is the Board of Education.  This isn’t some satellite advisory board of a special interest.  It is the Board of Education,” Tripp emphasized.

A retired Ithaca Schools’ psychologist, Jill Tripp said she’s sat on five boards, and chaired some of them, during the past 30 years.  Yet she said she’d never before experienced  the “level of isolation” she feels sitting on the current school board nor the “disconnect between the Board and what’s going on.”

(By the way, Jill Tripp never got to the ‘no-side’ of her self-stated dilemma.)

With its first school budget roundly defeated in May, a revised budget approved one month later only after major reductions, a school superintendent declining a long-term contract extension, and two middle schools cited by New York State for their poor performance, one could see the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) in crisis.  Jill Tripp signaled Monday that her elevation to President could help turn the page.

“I think we’ve gotten a clear message that was a long time coming before it was expressed so cleanly on the Board’s first budget votes,” Tripp stated.  “I think to start fresh with someone not so clearly aligned with the current Administration would be an excellent path to take for this Board at this time.”

And what about management style?  As always, with Dr. Tripp, bluntness reigned.

“I’m who I am,” Tripp told those who might choose her.  “I’m pretty vocal.  And I generally let people know what I’m thinking.  And I would continue to do so as Board President.”

Eversley Bradwell acknowledged he’s held biweekly, one-on-one, agenda-setting meetings with Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown.  Tripp would prefer Eversley Bradwell’s role clearly be defined in those meetings as that of Board President, and that members like her at least be provided the courtesy of an after-meeting report.

“I’ve been surprised way too often this year by decisions that have been made without any real Board discussion,” Tripp told the incumbent President.  “And I think that needs to change.”

Board member Katie Apker entered the debate:  “There were some times in the last year that I felt surprised by things,” the second-year Board member remarked.  “Did I miss a memo?  No.  Did I not read through everything? No,” Apker said she’d found herself asking.  To Apker, Eversley Bradwell’s precision and meeting efficiency has come at the price of “open dialogue.”

After a fashion, the roll was called.  Hands were raised.  Eversley-Bradwell lost on the first ballot, four-to-three, with Workman abstaining (an effective dissent).  Then Tripp’s name was raised.  The same four people who’d opposed Eversley Bradwell supported Tripp, and vice-versa.

With the Board at an impasse, Erin Croyle, an Eversley-Bradwell supporter, called for a revote.  She started with her favored candidate.  It broke the deadlock, six-to-two in Eversley Bradwell’s favor.  Jill Tripp and Adam Krantweiss remained in opposition.

Battered though victorious, Sean Eversley Bradwell called the hour’s conversation (maybe, grilling) “necessary and fruitful.”

But sandwiched between deadlock and decision flowed remarks well worth one’s taking note.

Emily Workman, to Sean Eversley Bradwell: “The biggest concern that I’ve heard about you being President is your relationship with the Superintendent…. What would you say to people who have a lot of concerns about the ability to be both objective and a friend to the person that you basically are the boss of?”

Sean Eversley Bradwell defended his independence and his ability to separate friendship from professional duty.

“I would not jeopardize my professional and community standing as if I’m not able to do what’s in the best interests of young people,” Eversley Bradwell insisted.  “And folks in the community can tell you, and I know Dr. Brown can tell you, that when he’s wrong, I am probably one of the first people to call him, hopefully not with cuss words, but to say ‘no, no.’”

Erin Croyle, to the Board: “I think that there’s a fine line between people saying they don’t want—they want new Board representation and the color of someone’s skin.  Let’s be real here, Okay?” (Both Eversley Bradwell and Dr. Brown are African-American; Jill Tripp is white.) 

Croyle referenced recent hate messages and death threats received by the Board President and Superintendent following the recent, perceived racially-exclusive, Students of Color Summit at Ithaca’s schools. “My God, the stuff that they’ve had to hear and we’ve heard part of,” Croyle told colleagues.  “I have no idea how it is to walk in that world, but the hate that they get, and yet Sean still wants to do the job?” Croyle asked rhetorically.

Yes, a pair of coalitions glued together that Monday morning; alliances adhering based on Board members votes and statements:  The traditionally liberal-leaning Ithaca School Board spoke through President Eversley Bradwell, Erin Croyle, Karen Yearwood, and Garrick Blalock.  A more moderate faction led by Tripp, drew in Adam Krantweiss, Katie Apker, and Emily Workman.  This latter group may view Board service as being more critical of the status quo.  Over time, those factions may hold.  Or maybe, they won’t.

More work had yet to be done.  Though she’d earlier expressed interest in serving as vice-president, Jill Tripp was never nominated for second in command.  Instead, Tripp advanced Adam Krantweiss for vice-president.  Like in the race for President, the Krantweiss nomination failed in a tie.  Garrick Blalock was nominated by the other faction.  Again, a tied vote ended in deadlock.

The vice-presidential “impromptu job interview” went quicker than its presidential forerunner.  Blalock at one point questioned whether a “difficult working dynamic” might arise with Krantweiss, a Tripp supporter, working with a Board President he’d opposed moments earlier. Blalock called it a “mix and match” kind of leadership.

Krantweiss allayed Blalock’s fears.  “I don’t feel that (my vote) was a referendum on me thinking that Sean is a bad actor and that I couldn’t work well with him,” Krantweiss replied.

A second round of voting for Vice-President ended the same way as did the first.  Discussion devolved.  Options got floated.   Could the Board have two vice presidents?   Could the vote for Veep be tabled until Todd Fox’s return?   But impasse ended at Garrick Blalock’s initiative.  He crossed over to nominate and vote for Krantweiss.  The resulting five-to-two vote (with Eversley Bradwell abstaining) finally put leadership matters to rest, after nearly two protracted hours that seemed all too long.

What was left of Monday’s reorganizational meeting avoided the indecision that had crippled what had preceded it. 

• Almost routinely, the Board of Education authorized formation of a “Resource Exploration” committee.  Its primary objective, as Jill Tripp had proposed in late-May, is to squeeze up to $10 Million annually from Cornell University as payment to the Ithaca School District in lieu of taxes.

• The Board delayed, probably futilely, the designation of The Ithaca Journal as its official newspaper for publishing legal notices.  As with other units of local government, ICSD members complained about the Gannett paper’s lack of local news coverage, and even its inability to mail its papers to residents on time.  State law may require the designation, nonetheless.

• And the Board of Education continued for another year, but agreed to revisit within months, the long-standing, albeit controversial, policy of providing district-paid cell phones to select school employees.  “This has been kind of an annoyance to me for a while,” Jill Tripp complained.  “I believe that the cell phone expenditure in the district is unwarranted and redundant,” Tripp said.  Expect the policy to undergo review in committee this fall.

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Updated: Enfield barn-apartments burn; occupants safe

by Robert Lynch; June 30, 2024, updated July 1, 2024

[Note: As of Tuesday evening, July 2nd, Enfield Fire officials could not yet officially determine the fire’s cause.]

A major fire on Hines Road at mid-morning Saturday fully engulfed and destroyed the converted barn-turned-residence of John Rancich, a prominent Enfield property owner and landlord.  The cause of that fire remains under investigation.

Flames from the mid-morning blaze spread quickly as firefighters from Enfield and multiple departments labored futilely during a severe rain and wind storm, hampered in part by limited supplies of water. Rancich and residents of three apartments in the building escaped uninjured.  One firefighter battling the blaze sustained injuries serious enough to require brief hospitalization.  Two more firefighters were treated for their injuries at the scene.

The leveled property is at 363 Hines Road, Enfield.  Rancich was reportedly not at home when the fire was first detected.

In an updated statement issued late Sunday, Enfield Fire Chief Jamie Stevens reported, “The hospitalized firefighter was transported to the hospital for minor treatment and released from the Emergency Department shortly after.”  The Chief continued, “All personnel with reported injuries were cleared to return to work before Enfield cleared the fire scene.”

“At 10:41 (AM), Enfield Fire and Bangs Ambulance were requested to a reported fully involved structure fire,” the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) reported in a statement posted late Saturday.

“Deputy Chief, Bailey Stevens, was the first to arrive on scene followed shortly thereafter by 661 Fire Chief, Jamie Stevens. 661 Fire Chief was notified by dispatch while en route that the police officers on scene reported a fully involved structure fire.” Chief Jamie Stevens stated in his Sunday update.  

“The Chief requested mutual aid from Trumansburg, Newfield, and Mecklenburg,” the Fire Chief continued.  “Upon arrival Deputy Chief, Bailey Stevens, confirmed the fully involved structure fire and requested mutual aid specifically water supply/tankers from Danby and West Danby. All companies listed were present after request.” 

Stevens also corrected earlier anecdotal reports that had suggested a tenant’s puppy may have first alerted sleeping victims to the danger and that the animal was later lost to the flames.

“The tenants reported that a son had woken to the smell of smoke and woken the father,” Chief Stevens said late Sunday.  “That is when they began evacuating. No puppy was reported to EVFC until later in the day.”

“We were informed that the puppy was last seen running into the field nearby and thus unaccounted for during our operations by the puppy’s owner,” Chief Stevens later statement reported.  “A Facebook post made Sunday stated the puppy had returned unharmed,” the Chief related.

Fire officials did not name the building’s owner or tenants.  However this writer, based on his personal knowledge and his on-scene inspection, confirmed Rancich as the building’s owner and its principal occupant.  Names of the tenants were not immediately disclosed.

The EVFC’s statements declined to indicate the cause of the fire or whether it might have been affected by the stormy weather.  One neighbor said fire investigators remained on the scene until at least 1 AM Sunday attempting to identify the fire’s origin.

Social media postings Sunday indicated firefighters were hampered by bad weather in fighting the Rancich fire, as they were by the need to haul water to the scene. Noxious fumes emitted by some of the building’s burning contents also complicated firefighting efforts.  The barn’s metal roof posed problems as well.

“Having a good water supply in rural areas simply isn’t guaranteed,” Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners Chair (and former Enfield Fire Chief) Greg Stevenson said Sunday.   “It takes knowledge and hard work to supply many thousands of gallons of water for a large fire.  I appreciate all of the companies and their members that came together to make this work,” Stevenson added.

Newfield, Trumansburg, Mecklenburg, Danby and West Danby Fire Companies provided mutual aid to assist Enfield firefighters Saturday morning. 

Enfield’s Fire Company also credits Bangs Ambulance, the Red Cross, the Tompkins County Sheriffs’ Department, the Tompkins County Fire Coordinator and the Tompkins County Highway Department. 

The Rancich residence, visited by this Town Councilperson in recent years during his various campaigns, was well decorated with a rustic interior.  It contained stuffed game and other memorabilia.  Neighbors report a large concrete vault on the barn’s premises reportedly protected some of Rancich’s possessions.

The Saturday fire totally destroyed the barn-apartment complex and all its remaining contents.  It also destroyed one vehicle seen Sunday parked outside.

How to help: Enfield neighbors have begun efforts on social media to secure clothing and other items to aid the displaced victims.

A donation table has been established for clothing and food supplies at Stoneybrook townhouses in Enfield Center.  Donations may be dropped off at the Stoneybrook office or at the apartment of BrennySue Worrell Riley, apartment #11 in the complex. “They lost everything, so food items could help (as well as clothing),”  Riley stated Saturday.

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Posted Previously:

CMC’s $1.5 Million “Mission Impossible”

Tightened deadlines and Albany’s roadblocks may redirect County cash

by Robert Lynch; June 24, 2024

Cayuga Medical Center (CMC) the largest recipient under Tompkins County’s Community Recovery Fund, faces a likely loss of $1.5 Million in grant money after a legislative committee Monday gave the hospital corporation a drop-dead deadline it will likely fail to meet.

And should CMC push past the newly-set, late-August date for securing required New York authorizations, the federally-supported funds surrendered could be gobbled up by other applicants, principally by those that lost out in prior funding rounds, including two applicants from Enfield.

“They have optimism that they can get their necessary state permission by the end of the year, but it’s far from a sure thing,” County Legislature Chair Dan Klein, who also chairs the Legislature’s Community Recovery Fund Advisory Committee, informed his committee Monday.

But year’s end is not August.  And August 30^th was the deadline the Advisory Committee set later in Monday’s meeting for CMC to secure the necessary approvals to allow its project to proceed.

“I think there is virtually no chance that they will get permission from the state by August 30^th,” Klein acknowledged, his assessment based on a meeting he’d attended with CMC officials one week earlier.  “I just think there’s virtually no chance,” Klein said.

Standing as the most ambitious—and expensive—endeavor among the more than 50 that snared Community Recovery funding through legislative action in December 2022, the CMC project, officially requested by CMC’s umbrella group, Cayuga Health Systems, would establish a “Crisis Stabilization Center” in vacant space at the Shops at Ithaca Mall.

As represented to funding officials in its application, the Stabilization Center would “provide 24/7 mental health and substance use crisis support and safe, effective, evidence-based care in a non-restrictive environment.”

But CMC has encountered problems persuading state bureaucrats to approve what it wants.  In an opaque, jargon-laced presentation to a legislative committee last September, Cayuga Health CEO Martin Stallone suggested that what Albany preferred was something more akin to a “full-blown psychiatric emergency room,” as opposed to a crisis stabilization center. Stallone then made it clear to the committee that the two are not the same.

Neither Stallone, nor anyone else representing Cayuga Medical Center or its parent organization attended the Monday committee meeting.

The Recovery Fund Committee’s late-August deadline comes amid the realization that federal rules which govern Recovery Fund distribution dictate that all awards are to be “obligated”—that is, contractually finalized—by this December 31^st.  The funding source, Washington’s American Rescue Plan (ARPA), dictates the deadline.

Imposing a similar—though not identical—stipulation, the Recovery Fund Committee also Monday conditioned a much-smaller $74,000 grant to Khuba International, a communal farm in Danby, to the requirement that Khuba secure preliminary site plan approval from the Danby Town Planning Board by late-August, and then advance to final site plan approval by October 31^st. Khuba may need a zoning variance too.

The goal behind both deadlines is to prevent Washington from clawing back from Tompkins County any unspent ARPA cash.  County administrators cautioned they need time—preferably several months—to reallocate any forfeited grant awards.  And the larger the forfeited amount, the more time they’d need.

Two so-far unsuccessful Enfield applicants, the Enfield Community Council (ECC) and the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC), vigorously tendered applications in earlier funding rounds, but always fell short of receiving any Recovery money, of which $6.5 Million was allocated. 

Under their most recent revisions, the Community Council sought $146,000 to replace a dilapidated modular addition to its Community Center with a “Mental Health and Community Services Wing;” and the Fire Company has proposed a minimum $50,000 for various capital improvements.  The Fire Company fell just under the cut-off  line in the most recent funding round.

While there’s no assurance that either the ECC or the EVFC would secure funding should CMC (and/or Khuba International) fall from the current list, that possibility remains.  And should Cayuga Health forfeit its more significant amount, either Enfield agency’s hopes would brighten considerably.

Yet repurposing the CMC grant could challenge legislators, committee members, and the County’s consultant.

“If we have to reallocate $74,000 from Khuba, that’s one process,” Klein told the committee.  “If we have to reallocate $1.5 Million (from CMC’s application) in two months, that’s a different process,” he warned.

“I do hope they come through with it, but I think the timeline’s tough,” Newfield-Enfield legislator Randy Brown, a committee member, said of CMC’s effort to win state support.  Brown had opposed the Stabilization Center’s funding during the late-2022 awards.  He said Monday he’d done so, in part, for fear of the turmoil that a circumstance like the present one might create for those frozen out of the process.

As to current CMC negotiations with Albany, “It’s a little complicated,” Dan Klein observed, his thought cut short by a power failure that prompted a five-minute suspension of the meeting.

After the break, Klein continued:

“Cayuga Health Systems may have some other plans of what they want to do with the Crisis Stabilization Center, and I’m not sure that that’s public information,” he cautioned. “I’m not sure it’s relevant, exactly,” he added.

“What we do know is that they don’t have permission from the State yet for the project that we authorized,” the Legislature’s Chair said of Cayuga Health’s approval status.  “And they’re optimistic that (CMC) can get it by the end of the year, but we’re maybe a little less optimistic,” Klein conceded.  “And either way, we should put in a safety rail in case they don’t get (approval) in time.”

Nevertheless, CMC’s failure to meet its time-sensitive federal deadlines may not spell the Crisis Stabilization Center’s demise.  Cayuga Health pegs the Stabilization Center’s total cost at $9 Million. Funding will flow from other sources, although CMC has regarded County Government support as an essential component.  At least one committee member hinted Monday that he’d be open to some other form of County subsidy later.

“This is desperately needed,” Lansing Republican Mike Sigler said of  the Stabilization Center.  “Whether we give it to them now or give it to them later, I think it has to get done.”

As inevitably occurs when more than four dozen applicants all feast at the same table, a few walk away.  And a relatively meager amount of cash has found itself washing out of the awards process in the past few months.  The fallout stands at just over $26,000 at present, much of it forfeited by the Alcohol and Drug Council when it went out of business. 

The committee set up a procedure Monday to reallocate the unspent funds.  It’s a process that will involve the full Legislature voting in August.  In fact, the EVFC, as one of the five runners-up, will be asked if they can make the small sum work.

Meeting federal deadlines with room to spare stood out as a key concern of the Recovery Fund Advisory Committee Monday.  Although ARPA rules don’t require financial books to close until December 2026, the committee directed applicants to spend their awards by April of ‘26 and voucher the bills by that August.

True, 2026 is an eternity away.  And what’s more immediate in the minds of many is writing those contracts and securing key approvals—like the one CMC presently lacks—by the end of this year, or preferably sooner.

As far as the Enfield Community Council is concerned, timing should be no problem, providing, of course, that someone downtown puts ECC on the funding list.

“If we’re approved, I’ll have that modular addition leveled in 48 hours,” Cortney Bailey, President of the ECC, told this writer months ago when CMC’s problems first came to light.  Said Bailey, “That’s how long it takes to order the dumpster.”

###

School Budget Crises Averted

Ithaca, Newfield approve revised budgets; ICSD bus prop. passes too

by Robert Lynch; June 19, 2024

Some might say “What a difference a month makes.”  Others might put that differently: “What a difference a tax cut makes.”

In revote referendums Tuesday, voters in both the Ithaca and Newfield School Districts reversed earlier defeats of their respective next year’s budgets and approved both.  In Ithaca, the lopsided margin of victory registered even stronger than the landslide defeat given a higher-priced, higher taxing budget back on May 21^st.  In Newfield, a budget that had lost by 18 votes in May, won by more than 100 votes after educators trimmed it down by some $71,000.

Ithaca’s school voters also endorsed spending $1.6 Million from a reserve fund to purchase four school buses plus a few other vehicles.  Two of those buses would be electric.  In Newfield, the school board chose not to resubmit a once-defeated transportation proposition, one that might have included an electric bus.

As for the budget vote, the Ithaca City School District’s (ICSD’s) retooled proposition passed Tuesday 4,979 votes (74.1%) in favor to 1,736 (25.9%) opposed.  The Ithaca outcome marked a stunning reversal from the seven-to-three margin of drubbing voters had given the first-submitted budget in May.

The ICSD bus proposition passed Tuesday, 4,593 votes (68.6%) in favor, to 2,104 votes (31.4%) opposed.  The bus purchase option was exactly half as costly as the $3.2 Million proposition advanced a month earlier.  The first measure would have bought eight buses, not just four. In each instance, half the purchased buses would be electric.

In the Newfield District, figures released Tuesday night showed its revised budget passing 387 votes (59.7%) to 261 (40.3%).

Boards of Education in each district will meet Thursday night to certify their school systems’ respective results. Each meeting is expected to be short and perfunctory.  Had budgets failed, the boards might have agonized—potentially for hours—over how to cut spending in line with the “Contingency Budgets” that state law would have mandated each adopt.

A Contingency Budget is, effectively, an austerity budget by a different name. Whenever school budgets fail in a second referendum, state law mandates the Boards of Education cabin spending so that the forthcoming year’s tax levy does not surpass the one for the current budget year.

In Ithaca, administrators had warned that a Contingency Budget would have forced $9 Million in spending cuts compared to the budget first placed before voters in May.  By comparison, the so-called “Re-vote Budget,” adopted Tuesday in Ithaca, will prompt cuts of only $5.9 Million.

True, teaching and administrative positions will be lost in the trimmed-down budget adopted by Ithaca voters Tuesday.  But most cuts, administrators have predicted, will come through attrition.  Had a Contingency Budget been mandated, personnel rosters would have been cut much deeper with layoffs possible.

The Newfield budget just-approved, accomplished much of its economies through the elimination of a single, now-vacant instructional position, a “technology” (shop) teacher serving the upper grades.  Newfield administrators had eyed other teaching vacancies for elimination, both at the elementary/middle school levels as well as in music education, had contingency budgeting become necessary.

What likely enabled passage of the ICSD budget was the tax levy.  It plummeted from that of the budget that was rejected in May. 

The May budget had calculated a year-to-year tax levy increase of 8.4 per cent.  The “Re-vote Budget” voters ratified Tuesday would have raised the levy by only 2.92 per cent, an increase slightly below the (arguably arbitrary) “tax cap” that Albany accountants set.  Since the revised budget stands tax cap-compliant, its passage by the electorate required only a simple majority, not the super-majority necessary when districts ask voters to override a tax cap.

The adopted budget in Newfield will increase the tax levy next year by 2.5 per cent.  The earlier-rejected budget would have hiked that levy by 3.5 per cent.

The tax levy, as opposed to the tax rate, is viewed as the better gauge of a budget’s taxpayer impact.  With property assessments rising, a tax rate can remain stable—or even fall—while actual tax bills rapidly rise. 

With Tompkins County residential assessments climbing markedly this year, watchful homeowners warned that raising the tax levy too much could price them out of the community.

The adopted Ithaca Schools’ budget totals just over $163 Million dollars.  The plan rejected in May had totaled $168.9 Million.  A budget draft first advanced by administrators over the winter and early-spring would have climbed spending to as high as $170.9 Million and hiked the tax levy by 12.14 per cent.

Still undecided—and left undiscussed in these latest deliberations—is the fate of a $125 Million, decade-long Ithaca School District capital investment initiative that was also rejected at the polls in May.  By law, according to administrators, the capital spending cannot be submitted for a revote until 90 days after its defeat.  Tuesday’s stunning budget turn-around could prompt the Ithaca Board of Education to resubmit the capital plan for voter reconsideration later this summer or fall.  Board members could trim the plan and its total before they do.

“Contingency would be catastrophic,” Ithaca School Board member Erin Croyle told a Board committee meeting one day after voters had rejected the May budget.  Croyle was never truly happy with the compromise, cut-down, revised version eventually resubmitted voters.  But she saw it far better than the state-mandated contingency alternative.

There’d be “nothing after-school except sports,” should the contingency alternative have come to pass, Croyle warned at a later meeting.  It’s a “terrifying process,” she said at the time.

Newfield budget crunchers had said at their own budget meeting that the district’s entire sports program might need to be eliminated should its district resort to contingency.  Alternatively, perhaps, there might have been no instrumental band.

Taxpayer-conscious Ithaca School Board member Jill Tripp can be credited with pulling various factions together to support the ICSD $163 Million compromise that secured voter approval this week.  She also backed the half-as-large proposition to buy the electric buses.

“It’s not a perfect budget,” Tripp acknowledged at the Board’s June 3^rd session.  “It doesn’t have everything I want,” she stated.  But, “we’re heading in the right direction “ 

Each district’s Board of Education could have imposed a Contingency Budget by its own initiative, thereby bypassing a second referendum.  But neither board chose to do so.  No doubt, based on Tuesday’s results, most of their respective members are glad they’d remained optimistic.

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Back from the Presumed Dead

Enfield resurrects extended terms-of-office laws

by Robert Lynch; June 13, 2024

One would have thought a landslide defeat three years ago had buried the issue once and for all.  It did not.

With one Councilperson voicing a strongly-worded dissent, the Enfield Town Board Wednesday moved to a July Public Hearing a revisited trio of local laws that would extend new terms for the Town Supervisor, Town Clerk and Highway Superintendent from two to four years.  If approved by the Town Board following the hearing, the measures could be placed onto this fall’s General Election ballot, with the longer terms taking effect at the start of 2026, voters willing.

“I think it’s worth looking at again,” Town Clerk Mary Cornell told the Town Board Wednesday.  It was Cornell’s suggestion, advanced in an email to Town Board members only Monday afternoon, which launched reconsideration of the three local laws.  Cornell’s initiative had never been placed onto the Town’s agenda or website prior to the meeting’s start.

“There’d be less campaigning,” Cornell said in defending the longer terms for those three Enfield offices.

“I second that,” Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy’ Rollins shot up.  Rollins remarked that candidates like him dislike petitioning in the dead of winter, and that some have told him they’re reluctant to run for Town offices when the terms to which they’d be elected remain so short.

The Town Board voted four-to-one to advance the terms’ measures to a July 10^th Public Hearing.  Supervisor Stephanie Redmond supported the initiative.  So did Councilpersons Jude Lemke, Cassandra Hinkle, and Melissa Millspaugh.  Councilperson Robert Lynch (this writer) voiced strong opposition.

“Insanity,” Lynch said, “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.”  Moreover, he said, resubmitting the laws to lengthen the terms is “tremendously disrespectful” to Enfield’s electorate, who’d dispatched identical measures to the dustbin by wide margins just three years ago.

A ballot proposition in 2021 to extend the Town Supervisor’s term from two to four years lost 238 votes (34.2%) to 458 (65.8%), a 32 per cent spread. 

By slightly slimmer—though still substantial—margins, the proposal to similarly lengthen the term of the Highway Superintendent failed 301 votes (43.2%) to 395 (56.8%).  And the Town Clerk’s term extension lost 292 votes (41.9%) to 405 (58.1%).

Councilperson Lynch reminded colleagues of those lopsided margins and of the troubling message he believes this year’s resubmission sends.

“The political class” says it didn’t like what the voters said the first time, Lynch proclaimed as what he saw was the majority’s message.  So it will ask those voters again and again until they provide the outcome politicians prefer, he said.

“I have mixed emotions,” Councilperson Lemke said as the issue first hit the meeting floor.  Once elected, it’s hard to remove an unwanted person from office, she acknowledged.  Therefore, shorter terms, Lemke said, serve a purpose.  Nonetheless, Lemke added her vote to the Town Board’s majority to move the local laws to a hearing.

 “You may get a different vote this time,” Lemke suggested, defending her support.

To get the three local laws onto November’s ballot, the Town Board would need to approve them at the same July meeting as the Public Hearing is held, unless a special session were to be called.  Clerk Cornell had informed Town officials Monday that the Board of Elections must receive the adopted laws by August 5th to qualify them for the General Election.  After July, the Town Board is not scheduled to meet again until August 14.

And because Supervisor Redmond will be in flight, returning from a vacation during the July meeting, an otherwise unanimous agreement among remaining Board members will be required for the laws’ adoption, given Lynch’s staunch opposition to them.  Deputy Supervisor Greg Hutnik will preside at the July session, but New York law bars a deputy supervisor from casting a vote.

As Wednesday’s debate proceeded, Redmond expressed unqualified support for the longer Supervisor’s term, just as she’d done three years ago when the laws were first advanced.

You come in with “somebody else’s budget,” Redmond remarked concerning the steep learning curve an incoming Supervisor must face in office.

And to Redmond, campaigning door to door is not only an inconvenience to the candidate; it’s also an annoyance to the constituent.

“People are private here in a rural environment,” the Supervisor insisted.  They don’t like people coming to their door, distracting them, and seeking their signature.

Lynch said he’d never heard residents complain about his knocking on hundreds of doors during his prior campaigns.  Redmond countered that she’s heard those complaints, even against Lynch, himself.

“The first two years were scary,” Councilperson Cassandra Hinkle said, reflecting upon her initial months as Councilperson. “Two years is a very short time of it,” Hinkle observed of Enfield’s current election cycles for its Supervisor, Town Clerk, and Highway Super.

And a state-mandated wrinkle will make those forthcoming terms shorter still.  The New York Legislature last year altered election law to transition most terms of local office to even-numbered years.  Should Redmond, Rollins, and Cornell seek reelection next year—or even should they not—their two-year terms would shrink by a single year for just one election cycle to wedge them within the new law.  Their following elections would fall in 2026.

Town Councilpersons’ terms, by contrast, run for four years. Those terms would fall back to three years, but for just one cycle, whenever a Councilperson’s next term of office begins.

As Cornell and Rollins duly noted at Wednesday’s meeting, the local laws they’d endorsed would provide them some limited relief.  If adopted this fall, the extended terms for which they’d run in late-2025 would span three years, not just one.

What about the ‘remove the scoundrels’ argument that Lemke briefly broached in a shorter term’s defense.

“If they’re that bad, you can kick them out,” Rollins countered concerning an unfit office-holder.  Lemke cautioned expulsion is more difficult than it first sounds.

Since the suddenly-advanced terms of office initiative had received not one ray of sunlight prior to the opening gavel of Wednesday’s meeting, public reaction to the Board’s majority action has yet to be gauged.  In the weeks ahead, no doubt, it will surface.

His own opposition aside, Councilperson Lynch stressed he harbors no animosity against Clerk Cornell for having resurrected the terms of office laws.  But he’ll continue to oppose them.

“I will vote against this resolution,” Lynch promised Wednesday night. “I will vote against them in November… and I will likely campaign against them this fall.”

“There was a time when things like this made me angry,” this writer-Councilperson observed after Wednesday’s meeting had ended.  “But now I’m just sad; sad that the will of the electorate has been so ignored.”

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