Commissioners mull Enfield Fire Service “no-rider” rule
By Robert Lynch; August 2, 2026
For Enfield’s Fire Chief, it’s Damned if you do; Damned if you don’t.
On the last Saturday in July, Chief Jamie Stevens headed out to the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) annual summer picnic at the fire house. He wanted to bring a guest. But to comply with a recently-adopted rule restricting ridership, Stevens took his personal vehicle, not the fire company’s “Command Vehicle,” the SUV permanently assigned to the top line officer for “official use.”
As the picnic began, an alarm came in. Dispatch needed Enfield firefighters to provide mutual aid in battling a house fire in Ulysses. Stevens would supervise Enfield’s response. Problem was, his protective clothing—his “turnout gear”—was locked away in unit 647, the Command Vehicle, parked in his driveway, miles away.
“I had to grab some gear off the wall,” Stevens informed the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners three days later, July 28. He’d borrowed a coat, hat, and boots from the rack, gear assigned to some other volunteer who wasn’t present. Stevens then jumped into a fire truck—and not his personal vehicle—and rode to the scene. The gear might not have quite fit. But it worked in a pinch.
Yet for Stevens, the problem demands a fix. A fire chief needs both the machine and its contents at all times, he insists. Fires can occur when least expected, even when a chief’s attending a social event or running a personal errand. Wives, children, and girlfriends are a fact of life. You need and want to be with them at times. Maybe you’re on call as a firefighter 24/7, but you also have a life.
Chief Stevens brought his concern to the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners at a special meeting on the Tuesday following the Ulysses fire. The meeting was hurriedly-called, yet had been planned even prior to the picnic-day incident. Its agenda listed discussion and possible action on policy changes and also a closed “executive session” to discuss a “personnel related matter.”
Chief Stevens stayed for the executive session. No public action on the personnel matter was taken after the closed discussion had ended.
But the 40 minutes of public debate prior to the closing of doors addressed head-on the policy matter prompting Stevens’ concern. The Chief spoke forcefully and passionately. The one action that Commissioners took that night never dealt directly with Stevens’ complaint. Action may come at a future meeting, although not necessarily.
“The car needs to be available all the time,” Stevens pleaded with the commissioners. “On Saturday, it’s plain why you let your family to ride in it,” he said.
Until recently, the Enfield Fire District’s “Standard Operation Guideline” (S.O.G.) authorized the Fire Chief to unilaterally waive what might be called the “no-rider rule.” It’s a prohibition on non-Enfield fire or EMS personnel from riding in Fire Company vehicles. In its prior form, its language would have precluded the chief’s need to seek anyone else’s permission to pile family or friends—or even strangers—into car 647.
But on May 19, the rule changed.
On that night, after a 45-minute executive session, the Board of Fire Commissioners unanimously revised the ridership policy.
“Non-fire personnel are not allowed to ride in emergency vehicles without approval of the Board of Fire Commissioners,” the revised adopted policy stated.
Asked after the May meeting’s adjournment as to why the rule had changed, Commissioners Chair Greg Stevenson would only state that, “It’s an issue.” Stevenson declined to give particulars.
The Commissioners Chair did offer a hypothetical example. It would later become reality when the board subsequently authorized Enfield’s participation in the Newfield Old Home Days parade. Commissioner Alan Teeter, an EVFC volunteer, would drive a parading fire truck. He’d like to seat his grandchildren as passengers. Under the new policy, Teeter would need to—as he did—secure advance Commissioners approval.
But the issue obviously involves more than kids in parades. Removing the chief’s authority for granting waivers zeroes attention on the vehicle he most frequently drives.
“Nobody should be riding in the vehicle who’s not in the fire company,” Fire Commissioner Donald Gunning asserted during the July 28 meeting.
“I’d like to get in one of those big trucks and go,” Gunning, not a firefighter, said of hopping into any of Enfield’s larger engines or pumpers and then riding to a fire. “Is the command car any different?” Gunning asked.
Well, to Chief Stevens, it is.
“The command car does a lot of stuff other than going to a fire,” the chief challenged Gunning’s comparison. “There’s time you’re tied up,” Stevens said. “You go get supplies.”
“There are hundreds of errands a chief has to run,” Stevens explained. “Stuff happens.”
“If you’re in the middle of the day doing something,” Stevens said, “that’s how you keep the home life happy.”
Chatting informally with this writer two nights later in the fire company’s apparatus room, the chief gave an example. Suppose he needed to travel to Syracuse to pick up some firefighting equipment or parts. Why not take a spouse or girlfriend along and buy her lunch?
And with Board Chair Stevenson, as with Chief Stevens, the Enfield Command Vehicle is just as much a 24/7 necessity as is a flameproof coat and pants.
“A command vehicle is not just something the guy who bids up for Fire Chief gets as a perk,” Stevenson remarked during a separate conversation that Thursday night in the apparatus room. “It’s a tool the Chief needs to rely on in the protection of the life and property in our district.”
Stevenson related a tale he’d once shared at a prior meeting. There’d been a serious accident. It occurred years ago when Stevenson, himself, was Fire Chief and Enfield lacked a command vehicle.
A car had pinned against a tree; its driver trapped. As it was, Highway Superintendent Barry Rollins arrived before firefighters did. Rollins peered through a sliver of the mangled hood and saw a battery cable that could be severed to kill the engine and prevent a fire. Rollins phoned Stevenson and asked him to race to the scene with bolt cutters. Stevenson explained he didn’t have any.
But the Enfield Command Car carries those cutters now—and much more.
At the July 28 meeting, Chief Stevens cited another reason for relaxing the no-rider rule. Suppose there’s a wrecked car, and only two of its eight passengers are hurt, he said. “I could put the six non-injured people in the command car” and transport them, he said, so long as the rule gained some flex.
The only action the Board of Fire Commissioners took July 28 was to tighten the chain-of-custody restrictions for the Command Vehicle during the Fire Chief’s absences.
A 2022 policy within the Standard Operation Guidance had directed that, “If the member assigned the District vehicle is out of service for a period exceeding 72 hours, the vehicle may be reassigned for that period of absence by the Fire Chief.”
By unanimous vote, Commissioners shortened that period of permissible absence to 48 hours. The revision also provided that during such extended absence, the vehicle will be assigned “to the next highest ranking line officer or be available at the station.”
Recently, Chief Stevens took a multi-day vacation on short notice. But Jamie Stevens assured this writer that during that time, the EVFC Deputy Chief, Bailey Stevens, Jamie’s son and second-in-command, had custody of Unit 647.
“It hasn’t been unavailable,” Commissioners Chair Stevenson said in a written statement after the Tuesday meeting as to the command vehicle, “but, in the opinion of the BOFC, its use, possession and the logistics need more oversight. We are working on that.”
Still, for Don Gunning, giving the Fire Chief full-time possession of the command vehicle parks it in the wrong driveway.
“I’d like to put the Chief’s car in the bay,” Gunning told the Tuesday night meeting. Keep it at the fire house, he said. “First person who gets here, gets it.”
But that “defeats the purpose of timely response,” Greg Stevenson countered.
Fellow Fire Commissioner Robyn Wishna sought compromise. She proposed that if family members or friends find themselves in the command vehicle when the Fire Chief gets a call, any non-member stays with the vehicle for the emergency’s duration.
“I want you to use the car all the time,” Wishna assured Chief Stevens. Nonetheless, she added, “It’s important to me that people not get out of the car if there’s a call.”
Once can easily understand Wishna’s rationale. There are insurance matters to consider, and the legal liability of one’s proximity to a fire.
Robyn Wishna would amend the S.O.G. to make the ridership restriction clear. Her amendment must await action at a future meeting.
Enfield’s even having a fire service Command Vehicle carries a tortured past.
The $41,000 SUV’s purchase four years ago drew controversy during the Enfield Town Board’s October 2022 budget hearing. At the time, the Town Board controlled fire service budgeting. It would be another year before EVFC oversight would transfer to an independently-elected Board of Fire Commissioners governing a newly-formed Enfield Fire District.
In 2022, the Fire Company had effectively bought the command vehicle “off-budget,” purportedly tapping sale proceeds from donated property. Yet at the hearing, some Town officials, notably Supervisor Stephanie Redmond and Councilperson Jude Lemke, had questioned EVFC fiscal priorities in purchasing the SUV at the same time that the fire company was seeking extra tax money to buy turnout gear.
Although they took criticism, fire service leaders never sold the command vehicle. Nevertheless, the controversy may have led to the fire service’s later efforts to sever its ties with the Town Board.
With the Command Vehicle now a permanent fact of life, the questions remain: Who uses Unit 647; where does it rest; how much does it get used; and when it does, who rides with whom?
“It’s not just about the car,” Chairman Stevenson told fellow fire commissioners July 28. “It’s the person in the car and the equipment in the car,” he said. “I’m a big proponent of the command vehicle.”
“The command car gives the district the ability to put a senior fire officer enroute to an emergency quicker than without said vehicle,” the Chairman said in his written statement of Tuesday night. “Considering the specialty equipment carried in the vehicle, along with a trained and experienced senior Chief, lives and property can be positively affected by the use of this tool.”
That said, during that night’s meeting, the chairman qualified his support: “It’s not a grocery-getting car. It’s to respond to emergencies.”
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ICSD urges pause to South Hill housing abatement
by Robert Lynch; July 29, 2026
Coincidence or not, I instantly sensed the odor. As I walked up the first flight of stairs to the Tompkins County Industrial Development Agency (TCIDA) suites within the Seneca Street high-rise that used to house the Tompkins Trust Company’s back-end offices, I smelled what any retired “chain pounder” can recognize from first day on the job until death—“quench oil,” the petroleum derivative used to cool links of chain in the heat treating process. I recall it from when my late father, Morse Chain’s one-time electrical foreman, would sneak me into the factory occasionally on weekends back in the sixties. The unmistakable fragrance permeated the place. How the smell wafted its way into the Seneca Building stairwell this more recent morning I’ll never know.
But appropriate it was. I and a handful of others, including at least two from the press, were there for a public hearing. It’s the kind of legally-required testimony-taking session the TCIDA often holds with little if any attention.
But indeed, there was attention this time. And most of the comment wasn’t all that nice. A developer wants to build apartments on part of the long-vacant Morse Chain/Emerson Power Transmission site on South Hill. And it wants a TCIDA-approved tax abatement to boost profitability.
What’s made controversial the 230-unit development by Beacon Communities, LLC—a subset of the larger SouthWorks undertaking—is the recent intervention by the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) and specifically its Board of Education along with its instructional union, the Ithaca Teachers Association.
“Ithaca has a need for the development of safe, affordable housing for our working families,” Teachers Association President Kathryn Cernera acknowledged as she addressed the TCIDA’s July 29 hearing. Yet, she added, “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.”
Wednesday’s hearing came two days after the ICSD Board of Education released a more than 600-word, bullet-pointed letter to the agency, urging it to “pause this project until the (letter’s many) questions can be investigated.”
“I’m not for or against this project,” Ithaca School Board member Garrick Blalock, a prime architect of the letter, testified at the hearing. “I’m for making an informed decision with properly studied numbers.”
The proposed Beacon Communities housing project comprises only a small slice of the giant “SouthWorks” redevelopment of the Morse Chain/ Emerson Power Transmission site. Local developer David Lubin, partnering with a Philadelphia-based development firm, has planned for more than a decade to transform the sprawling industrial site into a mix of housing and light industrial uses.
Retrofitting portions of the old factory will likely come later. Building new housing on portions of the factory’s unused former parking lot and open areas, one would judge, becomes the more expedient—and lucrative—first step. It’s the lowest fruit that hangs around old Mr. Morse’s plant right now.
What Beacon and the TCIDA propose is a 30-year abatement of property taxes. Approval of the requested Payment-in-Lieu-of-Taxes (PILOT) agreement would be coupled with agency-authorized relief on sales and mortgage recording taxes.
Following the 40-minute hearing’s conclusion, the agency took no action. But it could make decisions as soon as its next regular meeting, set for August 12.
TCIDA filings price the ten-building, 230-unit housing project at $177 Million. Its development would cluster on two portions of the SouthWorks site, known operationally as “The Woods” and “The Gateway.”
“The Gateway” would construct 100 apartments in two, low-rise buildings within the City of Ithaca. “The Woods” would place 130 additional units in a cluster of eight, townhouse structures, located in the Town of Ithaca. Both Beacon developments would target tenants earning 50 to 80 percent of average median income. The projects therefore meet the definition of “affordable housing.”
Beacon Communities sent no representative to the TCIDA hearing. No description of project details was offered hearing attendees other than the legal notification read by Agency officials. Only three of the TCIDA’s seven members attended Wednesday’s hearing, each sitting at the board table along with agency Interim Executive Director Kurt Anderson and the agency’s clerk.
Six people, several of them prominent in the community, addressed the TCIDA in-person at the Wednesday hearing. All but one of them questioned granting Beacon Communities its requested abatement without further study. Two of the five were Ithaca Board of Education members. A third board member, Sara Garner, attended the hearing, but chose not to speak. Those who spoke said they represented themselves.
Eight more people submitted written comments. Each letter was either critical of the abatement or sought answers to questions. Those at the board table took turns reading the letters.
Ithaca Board of Education member Jill Tripp referenced the letter sent the agency by the full Ithaca Board. “I believe it shows that the information you’ve been provided by the developer is not sufficient to make this scope of a decision on the project,’ she stated.
Tripp cautioned the agency that the 30-year abatement’s duration “is approximately or close to three generations of school children.”
“That is a lot of people over a lot of time to go forward when you don’t have what you consider to be sufficient numbers to explain exactly how much that (the abatement) will cost the Ithaca City School District and the Ithaca School District taxpayers,” Tripp testified. Approving the abatement without knowing the facts first, she said, would be “irresponsible.”
As discussed more extensively at a Board of Education meeting July 20, the ICSD’s elected leaders worry that a PILOT agreement to Beacon Communities—and more generally to SouthWorks overall—starves the school system of revenue while likely importing more students for the district to teach.
Nobody’s put a firm number on how many additional pupils might enter the district. Not every one of the 230 newly-arriving “Woods” or “Gateway” tenants would bring with them one or more children. What’s more, in some instances, families would relocate to Beacon’s housing from other homes in the district.
At the July 20 meeting, school board member Blalock quoted colleague Todd Fox, a housing developer himself, as estimating Beacon could bring “150 kids” into the district.
And as Blalock projected that day, assuming each student requires approximately $25,000 to educate, 150 new students would cost the district nearly $4 Million additionally each year.
“So this is a deal that’s going to generate $4 Million a year of added expense to us and bring in basically no revenue,” Blalock told school board members July 20.
Speaking to the TCIDA hearing Wednesday, Blalock kept projections more open-ended.
‘What are the right numbers and why don’t we have the right numbers in front of us?” Blalock asked the IDA. He noted that the school board and IDA officials met as far back as December 2024, albeit regarding the larger SouthWorks venture. And when they did, he said, all of the questions that are being asked now were also asked back then.
At the hearing, no one provided exact figures as what the 30-year PILOT agreement—as compared with normal, by-the-book taxation—might cost the Ithaca district in terms of lost revenue.
However, the ICSD Board’s July 27 letter projected that were the Beacon Communities’ project left without an abatement, the project would generate about $180,000 annually in school taxes, whereas a PILOT agreement “would presumably result in school taxes well below the $180k.”
“[W]hereas most TCIDA projects migrate to full tax bills after 7 or 10-year abatement, this project would pay little to no taxes for 30 years,” the Board’s letter asserts.
The Morse/Emerson factory has long stood vacant. Morse-Borg Warner first sold off the aging plant to Emerson Power Transmission when it consolidated operations at Borg Warner’s newer, Warren Road facility in Lansing. Emerson moved out of the South Hill plant in 2011.
Rich John recently retired as a Tompkins County legislator. As that legislator, he’d served the Industrial development Agency as its chairman. Speaking as a private citizen Wednesday, John offered the only meaningful support for the Beacon-SouthWorks PILOT agreements of anyone in the room. He was a minority of one.
“Get this derelict property back on our tax rolls. We spent a substantial amount of time studying this,” John reminded the hearing board. “We did our homework,” he said. “This is a great project.”
In the opinion of the former TCIDA chair, SouthWorks will bring jobs, job training, environmental remediation, economic revitalization, while “creating a brand new neighborhood in our community.”
“It’s very easy to say you support affordable housing,” John stated. “Everybody does, right?” he remarked. “But it’s ugly how it gets built,” he asserted. “And yes, taxpayers subsidize it. That’s the only way it will happen.”
“And if you want affordable housing for 30 years, you need a 30-year PILOT,” John insisted. “Otherwise, the developer doesn’t have to rent it as affordable, anymore.”
That said, what the majority of Wednesday’s speakers—and those who wrote the agency—want is better numbers, not necessarily to stand in the housing project’s way.
“I would just ask you not to buy what my grandparents referred to as a pig in a poke,” school board member Tripp told the agency. “And take a careful look at the real numbers that can be found out for this proposal.”
Wednesday’s hearing was efficient. Kurt Anderson kept speakers close to their strict three-minute time limit. The IDA had set aside an hour for public comment. The hearing adjourned 20 minutes early.
And as we left, I remarked to Rich John about the smell in the stairwell. He’s toured the Morse site more recently than have I. And yes, despite all the cleaning that’s been done, he says a faint whiff of that quench oil lingers. Old Morse Chain dies hard. It’s still fighting.
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EMS upgrade may bring a tax bite
State grant approval could ramp Medical Response program up a notch
by Robert Lynch; July 25, 2026
For more than a year, leaders of Tompkins County’s Rapid Medical Response (RMR) program and its supporters in municipal government have talked about expanding RMR’s service with the addition of ambulances. What the Tompkins County Legislature authorized this past Tuesday night would not take RMR’s expansion quite that far.
Yet what the action would provide—assuming state authorizations and grant funding come through—is a mid-level step-up in what RMR has done these past two years. It would elevate a single one of the service’s flycars—and only one of them—to offer patients treatment more like what a Bangs paramedic administers, rather than what a fire company volunteer can legally do.
With the support of all 15 of its members in attendance (Iris Packman was excused), the Legislature retroactively authorized County Administration to file an application with New York State’s Dormitory Authority for a $500,000 grant that would, in part, buy and equip a new, fourth emergency unit, That unit would provide paramedic-level care, 24 hours a day, Monday through Friday.
“I feel like we’re just sort of continuing the trajectory at a natural pace,” Mike Stitley, Director of Tompkins County’s Department of Emergency Response (DoER), told legislators July 21. “We’re not trying to add transport ambulances. We’re just trying to do this in baby steps and continue to provide a foundation.”
But the service’s incremental upgrade would carry a cost. You’d likely see it on your property tax bill. This RMR enhancement, albeit limited, could hike next year’s Tompkins County tax levy by a full one percent.
As stated at an earlier June 23 meeting of the Legislature’s Public Safety Committee, State Senator Lea Webb has recommended that the Dormitory Authority award RMR the half-million dollar grant under its Capital Grant Program initiative. Given Webb’s legislative clout, local officials feel confident that the authority will approve the award.
At the June committee session, Department of Emergency Response leaders admitted they’d already filed the application paperwork so as to meet Dormitory Authority deadlines. The significance of what the Legislature adopted Tuesday is that it more or less commits Tompkins County to match the authority’s grant money with a nearly equal $490,000 drawn from the Tompkins County treasury.
“We’re pushing one percent with the property tax levy by moving forward with this resolution,” Groton legislator Lee Shurtleff, a former Director of Emergency Response, cautioned during the committee’s June discussion.
“Absolutely, yes,” County Administrator Korsah Akumfi acknowledged to the committee. Yet that day Akumfi added, “So we would not be budgeting for the full amount in 2027 if we are awarded the grant, but it will actually hit the budget really in (the) 2028 budget that we will develop in 2027.”
Inexplicably, one month later, when the full Legislature took up the matter, no one talked about a one-year budgeting hiatus. Instead, expectation focused on imposing the first recurring taxpayer burden within the 2027 budget, set to be adopted this fall.
At this Tuesday’s meeting, Newfield-Enfield legislator Randy Brown put Akumfi on the spot.
“So Korsah, here we are adding a half-million dollars to the budget next year. And how do you feel about it?
“I feel neutral,” Akumfi said, giving his safest of answers. Legislators laughed.
“You’ll get that response once,” Brown amusingly rebutted.
“And you’ve already used it,” Brown’s colleague, the fiscally cautious Deborah Dawson interjected.
Akumfi waded back in. He acknowledged that a one percent increase in the tax levy is “something that we need to pay attention to.” Yet he also said that “the fact of the matter is” that “in most municipalities there’s more calls on (County Government) to step up with emergency management,” to “close gaps” in service. And what DoER proposes is one way to do that.
“There are some of our services that are hanging by the thread,” Akumfi cautioned the Public Safety Committee back in June. “So it is essential that we be ready in an event where (local services) need support from the county government to step in.”
Calls for action, however, come more from some places than from others.
Additionally, a paramedic-level upgrade of the Rapid Medical Response system—and especially its ability to bill patients and their insurance companies for paramedic service—hinges on the State Health Department’s grant of a “Certificate of Need,” an authorization Tompkins County has sought from the agency, yet has not yet received.
Tompkins County’s Rapid Medical Response program launched on April 2, 2024. It started with three pickup trucks and SUV’s. Responders patrolled the county Monday-Friday, 7 AM until 7PM. It offered Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) level “Basic Life Support.” It’s remained that way ever since.
RMR’s initial goal was to fill daytime service gaps left by dwindling numbers of local fire company rescue responders. Fewer EMT’s step up. And those who still serve often have day jobs.
Yet since RMR’s creation, municipal advocates, especially those in Dryden and Trumansburg, two communities that operate their own paid ambulance services, have lobbied for RMR’s expansion. Dryden and Trumansburg find their ambulances increasingly drawn beyond their service areas to gap-fill when Ithaca-based Bangs Ambulance finds itself unable to keep up with call volumes.
And primarily because of that imbalance, Dryden and Trumansburg have urged Tompkins County to enhance RMR. Their advocacy led DoER officials in spring 2025 to propose adding one or two ambulances to RMR’s fleet. A consultant’s report, presented last fall, essentially suggested the same.
But what Mike Stitley now calls the latest “baby step” would yield only a measured expansion.
Stitley and RMR Program Manager Joe Milliman would employ the $500,000 Dormitory Authority grant to buy new vehicles. Each would stand equipped to offer “Advanced Life Support (ALS),” the kind of care that only paramedics can provide. Paramedics would staff one of those vehicles—a so-called “flycar”—all day and night, but only on weekdays.
The remaining three vehicles, although new and better-equipped, would remain providing what they’ve been providing, namely EMT-level “Basic Life Support (BLS).”
There’d remain no County-run RMR service on weekends, ALS or BLS.
New York State regulations provide an exhaustive list of medical interventions that on the road only a better-trained paramedic can deliver.
Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT’s) can perform bed lifts, take vitals, administer oxygen, splint fractures, remedy anaphylaxis, reverse narcotic overdoses, operate AED defibrillators, and a few other tasks, according to the “Scope of Practice” Policy Statement, issued by New York’s Bureau of Emergency Medical Services and Trauma Systems.
Paramedics, on the other hand, can do much more. In many ways, they serve more like Emergency Room nurses. They can administer and monitor IV medication drips, provide higher-level “cardiac arrest management,” administer controlled substances, intubate patients, and manage a wide variety of medical conditions “within their scope of practice and skills used in a pre-hospital setting.”
The state’s “Scope of Practice” reports an EMT requires 180 hours of training. It takes 1600 hours to become a paramedic, nearly nine times as much study.
“I can say that on a daily basis, our staff is reporting back to us that had there been an ALS provider, they would have been able to start care for the transport agency, to kind of get the ball rolling,” Milliman informed the Public Safety Committee in June.
“Half or a third of the time?” legislator Shurtleff asked.
“At the very least, yes,” Milliman answered.
Stitley told the Legislature this week that he already has paramedics on staff. And even were the Dormitory Authority grant money to come through and the RMR program to expand, some paramedics would continue staffing the BLS units.
“Why not elevate those with the training to be able to perform at the level they’re capable of?” Dryden legislator Greg Mezey asked.
“It really comes down to budgeting,” Stitley responded. Read the director’s words to imply that paramedics command higher salaries.
“There is still a need for Basic Life Support,” the director maintained,” because a lot of our calls are at that level,” he said.
The decision to supplement the newly-sought $500,000 Dormitory Authority capital grant with a nearly equal half-million dollars in taxpayer money was a choice made by locals. In the committee June 23, Akumfi conceded that the state’s rules don’t require a dollar-for-dollar local match.
“This does not require a match,” the Administrator informed the committee. But “we need to demonstrate to (the Dormitory Authority) an appetite of expansion,” Akumfi advised. He said it’s a local buy-in that funders expect. .
There’s no current talk of imposing upon rural municipalities emergency cost-sharing assessments, as had been discussed in the past. So the tax burden would fall countywide, despite the fact that benefits would not spread equally. People in the City and Town of Ithaca generally get quicker responses from nearby Bangs, and a paid Ithaca Fire Department stands ready to respond to calls it deems sufficiently urgent.
“If we put to our constituents that we’re going to be raising taxes so that when they or their kids or their family members need somebody qualified to show up for an emergency that they’ll have somebody who can show up, I’m hard-pressed to think that any of our constituents are going to object to that,” legislator Irene Weiser commented at Tuesday’s meeting.
But Weiser hails from Caroline, a town at the far edge of Bangs’ service area. Ambulance wait times are long there. Judith Hubbard represents a City of Ithaca district.
“Do we have to do both things?” Hubbard asked, seeking to shave the local cost. “Do we have to add a vehicle to get the ALS services, or could we get this ALS vehicle and put on hold one of the other ones?”
“I think that’s an option,” Stitley answered.
And then there’s scheduling. Why no weekend service? And why the emphasis on weekdays, seven to seven?
“I just have my instinct,” Dryden’s Greg Mezey stated. “Those hours seem like they fit the business model rather than, like, when (are) our calls,” he said. “Every neighbor I’ve ever seen that had an ambulance show up, it’s been at night.”
“The spirit behind the RMR program was to augment the volunteer services,” the Emergency Response Director answered. “Our hope is that in the evening hours that those volunteers will be able to cover those hours and cover the hours on the weekend.”
Still, daytime-limited, weekday-only scheduling may seem a little too “cushy civil servant” for some. And Saturdays and Sundays, when RMR’s ALS flycar would stand down, no volunteer paramedic would likely be stationed at a fire house to fill the void.
****.
Thursday, July 23, two days after the County Legislature approved the resolution, the Tompkins County Council of Governments (TCCOG) convened. TCCOG, and particularly its Emergency Preparedness subcommittee, has proven particularly vocal in promoting Rapid Medical Response enhancement.
Politely evicted in January from legislative chambers after its membership declined to be bound by the cumbersome New York State Open Meetings Law, TCCOG now convenes only online and in an obscure corner cubbyhole of the County Administration’s webpage.
TCCOG has preferred secrecy in tackling the emergency services issue. It will likely continue to demand it. TCCOG decided Thursday to devote part of its next meeting, September 24, to a closed “Executive Session” that’ll further explore emergency medical problems and solutions.
“There are issues that concern me,” Trumansburg Mayor Rordan Hart said to TCCOG membership July 23. “You can’t publicly say all that we know,” he added.
Best we “downplay it so we don’t scare the public,” Ulysses Supervisor Katelin Olson concurred.
No, we don’t know publicly what that was all about. We may never know. TCCOG these days closes its doors to casual curiosity. But the state of who arrives at your door—and how soon—when you call 911 with chest pains likely has something to do with it. So, too, did the resolution our County Legislature adopted this week. We must await the results.
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More Learning; Less Drama
Recast ICSD Board orders tighter student cell phone rules
by Robert Lynch; July 23, 2026
For starters, know this: The words played to sympathetic ears. The six Ithaca Board of Education members who late Monday convened and voted to revise the district’s smartphone policy were those who’d called for the hurried, special meeting only three days earlier. They wanted change. And the three who’d declined to meet and revisit the guidelines either didn’t attend the July 20 session or else had left before the vote.
School Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown wasn’t there either. Neither were students. And aside from this writer, no one from the general public bothered to show up. Everyone in the room was either an elected representative or a district employee, including the president of the Ithaca Teachers Association. So how Monday’s decision will play to the broader community remains for later discovery.
But here’s what happened. After a rambling, sometimes circular talkathon that lasted almost two hours, the Board of Education directed the Superintendent of Schools to tighten—and toughen—the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) one-year-old regulations that were supposed to sever students from their cell phones during classes… but never really did.
By a vote of five-to-nothing, with one abstention, the Board adopted a Resolution this week. It “direct(s) the Superintendent to revise the practice of the Ithaca City School District to require that students’ phones are inaccessible during the school day.”
Additionally, the adopted Resolution “direct(s) the Superintendent to revise disciplinary approach to have the immediate removal of phones from students who have them out during the school day.”
“Teachers are not teaching; they’re policing,” Board member Todd Fox framed the problem that day.
Newly-elevated Board Vice President Jacob Shiffrin, a prime architect of Monday’s resolution, put it this way: “You’re less likely to drink alcohol if you don’t have it on you, ” he said, equating youthful, never-ending cyber-addiction to worshiping the bottle.
“We are allowing students to have addictive devices on their person,” Shiffrin asserted, “which I think, teachers aside, that sucks for kids.”
“Get the cell phones out of the hands of the kids,” Sara Garner told colleagues at the meeting, her voice rising to make a point. “I don’t care if they go in lockers. I don’t care if they go in pouches, or in an office that’s locked for the day,” Garner said. “How much time is wasted from teachers’ micromanaging the situation, which is not why they became teachers?” she asked.
And that’s the problem as a newly-formed majority of the Ithaca school board views it. All too often this past year, instructors have become smartphone traffic cops. And when they’re enforcing edicts, they can’t be imparting knowledge. Instructional momentum gets lost when the teacher must command, “Emma, put away your phone; you know the rules.”
In January 2025, Governor Kathy Hochul proclaimed a bell-to-bell ban on student smartphone use throughout New York State. The Senate and Assembly quickly gave the edict legislative weight. Forced to comply, the ICSD purchased on short notice $20,000 worth of Velcro phone pouches for each of its secondary students to keep and use.
Once inside the pouch, a phone supposedly cannot receive incoming calls or data. But loosely-interpreted district policy still allowed students to place their safely-pouched phones within their backpacks, pockets, or lockers. Where else could they go? Compliance hinged on the honor system, supplemented, of course, by teacher oversight.
The Biblical admonition of, “Lead us not into temptation” quickly informed self-discipline.
Shiffrin condensed present policy to bumper-sticker simplicity: “Hey, students, do a socially unacceptable thing, which is to put your phone in this stupid pouch, keep it in your backpack, and resist the temptation for eight hours. I think that’s unreasonable to expect of students.”
To the board vice president, putting trust in the peer-pressured, cyber-habituated Gen-Z high schooler’s self-restraint overstates expectations.
Emily Workman would elevate enforcement over logistics. The one change Workman would prioritize, she said, is “holding the people who are supposed to be holding students accountable to not using their cell phones to actually holding them accountable.”
And to Workman’s point, lack of accountability is where this school board’s new working majority believes current policy has fallen into a pit.
In August of last year, to comply with Governor Hochul’s mandate, the ICSD adopted “Policy 5695.” It’s a three-page list of rules and expectations that discipline student cell phone conduct. Critics view the punishment plank of that policy as timid, offender friendly, and forgiving to a fault. It has no teeth. It leads the cynic to question, “Who’s in charge here?”
Under it’s “Interventions and Responses” section, Policy 5695 states: “The Superintendent shall emphasize equitable, restorative practices when enforcing this policy and ensure that responses considered punitive in nature do not disproportionately affect protected groups or exacerbate inequity.”
And the paragraph continues, “No student will be suspended if the only reason for taking such action is the student’s violation of this policy.”
Undergirding Policy 5695 as its enforcement tool is the “Internet-Enabled Device Implementation Overview,” posted on the ICSD website. It defines a “common set of tiered responses” the policy will employ to address violations.
As a “First Reminder; Relationship-Centered Response,” the guidance directs that the student, after taking out a phone, is “respectfully reminded in private of expectations.” The first encounter expects voluntary compliance. If he or she obeys, the matter ends.
“If behavior continues,” the guidelines’ second-tiered response then instructs, “an educator involves an administrator to take the device until the end of the day.” And, “An administrator holds a restorative conversation to explore causes and co-create a support plan with caregiver (i.e. the parent).” Tucked between those words, in the minds of many, lies the ooze of disciplinary surrender.
Policy 5695 grounds itself in numerous references to “restorative justice,” instead of punishment. The “Restorative Justice” principle has found favor among several of the ICSD board’s progressive members and the Superintendent. Former Board President Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell had lauded the principle with special praise.
But Eversley Bradwell is gone. He retired last month after 17 years of service. Disciplinary pragmatists like newcomer Sara Garner and returning member Dr. Jill Tripp have taken his place.
“The primary concern of teachers is not necessarily the policy as it is written, but in the implementation,” Kathryn Cernera, President of the Ithaca Teachers Association, Ithaca’s instructional union, informed the school board Monday. No one at the board table disagreed.
“After that gentle reminder, then what?” Cernera asked, stepping off from the policy’s first violation response to its second.
Wordsmithing the resolution in real time Monday—with numerous starts, stops, and erasures—the board briefly included—but then dropped—a directive for “the Superintendent to give a status report on the ban implementation for the first four meetings (presumably of the school year) as pursuant to board guidance.” In short, Dr. Brown, how are you enforcing what we’ve ordered?
Written marching orders or not, the tone of Monday’s talk carried a clear message that the board will demand those periodic updates into the fall.
Todd Fox walked into Monday’s meeting with an idea. It never reached the resolution stage. Some who sat beside him that day saw it as a bit much—at least for now. Fox, the board member most insistent on keeping phones from kids as they learn, would have the ICSD procure small, “digital lockers” into which students would place their phones daily and secure them there, arrival to dismissal. Some, more expensive, locker technology would allow administrative oversight.
“This to me is going to be better than what we have right now,” Fox argued. Others pushed back.
Jill Tripp saw the locker concept as “a bit premature.” She also cautioned that it “does not go quite far enough.” It doesn’t cover electronic notebooks and computers. (Still, lockers that are large enough could handle larger devices.)
“There are so many other ways that those brilliant young minds are taking devices into schools,” Emily Workman counseled; pockets, backpacks, all sorts of ways “Teachers will still be dealing with this,” she cautioned.
Workman called for more data before deciding. That may have been one reason she abstained in Monday’s vote. Workman also stood skeptical of quick-fixes, like lockers.
“I want to make progress instead of just having data overload,” Fox responded. And even if the solution takes away only “97 percent of the problem,” Fox pointed out, it leaves just three percent of violations to deal with thereafter.
When Todd Fox had earlier raised the locker idea during the previous Friday’s Organizational meeting, Superintendent Brown was hesitant. Too little time; too much policy change, Brown argued. The start of school is only seven weeks away.
Yet lockers are available right now online, supposedly for immediate delivery. And a cabinet of 15 lockers can be bought for as little as $300. That’s small change for a district with a $177 Million budget and a problem to solve.
“There’s nothing magical about the first day of school,” Jill Tripp pointed out. New procedures could launch a few weeks late.
Given Workman’s abstention, the policy change adopted Monday passed with just the bare minimum number of votes.
Only seven of the board’s nine members attended Monday’s meeting. Karen Yearwood and Erin Croyle, two members who’d most likely be skeptical of any change in current policy, couldn’t make the meeting.
Garrick Blalock, who’d also opposed holding the emergency cell phone discussion, spoke little on the phone policy Monday. Blalock focused his attention on a second matter discussed at the meeting; a major commercial tax abatement. Blalock left early, before the cell phone vote came up.
“L.A (Los Angeles) has banned all electronic devices up until second grade,” Fox noted. (What’s more, that west coast school system has capped electronic device use for students in upper grades as well.) But even Fox isn’t prepared to reach that far; not yet.
Nonetheless, unless the political winds blowing through the ranks and rooms of the Ithaca City School district’s new-found, no-nonsense Board of Education majority shift radically between now and September 8—that’s the first day of school—phone rules soon will change. Pouches may go. Something else—whatever it is—may take their place.
And during class, between classes, and even at lunch, the Internet-to-the-world smartphone to which so many babies of the 21st Century have known for as long as they can remember may stand out of reach for an eternity—you know, for seven or eight hours.
“It’s going to be hard for the first couple months until people get it, that Ithaca’s serious about putting phones away,” Sara Garner said before she voted. I know, “you want tour phone.” Still, “Put it away.”
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Krantweiss tapped to lead as ICSD Board draws new lines
Organizational meeting brings surprise, sudden move to revisit cell phone policy
Reporting and analysis by Robert Lynch; July 17, 2026
Think Supreme Court. A six-three supermajority dominates America’s highest judicial tribunal these days. In the coming year, the same math may also dictate decisions of a lesser sort, matters coming before Ithaca’s Board of Education.
At least that’s how things shook out Friday morning as the Ithaca school board reorganized for the new academic year. It may have been mere coincidence, or it may signal a trend. Nevertheless, on that one day, the levers of power shifted.
By a vote of six-to-three, Ithaca’s elected overseers of education July 17 chose two-term incumbent Adam Krantweiss over Garrick Blalock as the next Board of Education President. Krantweiss succeeds Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell, who ended 17 years on the school board in June, the last four as its President.
Then, on their next vote, the same six and three members lined up on the Vice President’s selection.
Jacob Shiffrin, who joined the board one year ago, was the only candidate nominated for second-in-leadership. All of Krantweiss’ supporters voted for Shiffrin. All of Blalock’s supporters abstained.
And then near meeting’s end, when the agenda appeared exhausted, a surprise got sprung. The board moved, debated for a bit, and then fast-tracked to a snap, special meeting within days the reexamination of the district’s year-old, problem-plagued student cell phone policy. The board will reconvene to discuss that policy Monday, July 20, just three days from when it organized.
And yes, the decision to hold the special meeting again passed by a six-to-three margin. The same people who’d decided leadership voted the same way again.
The Friday leadership votes were not pretty. Civility strained. Old wounds reopened. And the deepest wound of all was Adam Krantweiss’ abstention April 14 on the board’s decision to send to Ithaca City School District (ICSD) voters for their later ratification a $177.6 Million budget.
Krantweiss had argued at the time that the budget process was flawed. It was too much dominated by Administration, too shielded from individual board members, he’d said. At the budget meeting he’d read from a prepared text. It stated, in part, “I feel like we as a collective board have not had substantive public discussions at the full board meetings to provide collective input.”
Colleagues Jacob Shiffrin and Emily Workman had joined Krantweiss in his abstention that April night. As such, the budget barely cleared the board. In this Friday’s leadership election, Shiffrin and Workman each backed Krantweiss. Member Todd Fox did as well. In April, Fox had opposed the budget outright.
“I have a concern,” Karen Yearwood said, raising Krantweiss’ abstention as a likely disqualification. She reminded Krantweiss that he had attended several Finance Committee sessions, meetings that Blalock, by the way, had chaired. Yet Krantweiss had still seen fit to abstain.
“It would be concerning to me having a board president who doesn’t understand the budget process,” Erin Croyle, Krantweiss’ most passionate critic, observed.
Krantweiss defended himself. “It was the way the budget was formed in the first place,” he said. “I didn’t have much agency in the process.”
“It was definitely not a lack of understanding. It was a protest of the process,” Krantweiss stressed.
“You had an opportunity to ask questions; to dive in,” Croyle insisted. “I did not see it through the year.” Instead, said Croyle, Krantweiss chose to “throw a stick of dynamite in there,” with his April statement.
Yearwood said she was “flabbergasted” that Krantweiss had abstained that night by written statement.
Quite predictably, given the course of discussion, Yearwood, Croyle—and expectedly, Garrick Blalock—voted to elevate Blalock as President. All others supported Krantweiss.
Whereas the Supreme Court’s splits along political and ideological lines, what divided the ICSD governing board Friday grounded itself in operational preference. Raise the question this way: How much should each of the school board’s nine members defer to highly-paid administrators or to powerful committee chairs, colleagues who appear to have some special knowledge, an inside track, and exceptional clout?
And the upcoming revisit to the operationally challenged cell phone policy reflects that frustration and discontent among the six who, at least for the moment, have fused into a new, governing majority.
“We were not able to get this onto the agenda last year,” Jacob Shiffrin stated at the tail of Friday’s meeting as to the cell phone policy The unstated subtext behind the new vice-president’s remark may be that the issue wasn’t revisited because one or more people didn’t want it to be—or at least slow-walked it.
“We’ve seen two camps around cell phone policy,” Shiffrin posed to membership. “Is there a majority of board members who’d like to discuss this next Monday or Tuesday?” he asked.
There was. Monday, 4 PM was picked as the preferred date and time.
The policy to comply with Governor Kathy Hochul’s heralded 2025 bell-to-bell, ban on student smartphone use, ratified last year by the New York State Legislature, hasn’t worked very well in Ithaca.
One year ago, acting even before the school board had set its compliance policy in place, District Administration had expended about $20,000 to purchase signal-canceling, Velcro-sealed pouches to give to every upper-class student. The District viewed the pouches at the time as a minimum compliance tool.
Other districts went further. Some employed the “Yondr” pouches, those that sealed phones behind a lock from a student’s arrival until dismissal. Ithaca rejected outright phone confiscation as too invasive. Consider, too, Ithaca School Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown’s comment last August describing the Empire State’s mandate as “a paternalistic and oppressive law.”
“This is the least anxiety pouch,” one district administrator described Ithaca’s approach at a school board meeting late last September. She reported that student cell phone usage had dropped.
But student school board members offered a different take that night. “Honestly, I don’t think I know a single person who actually uses those cyber pouches,’ one high schooler said. “Pretty much all students communicated the fact that they’re kind of a joke,” remarked another.
“We’re not meeting the mandate,” board member Todd Fox, a repeated advocate for a tougher phone policy, told colleagues at this week’s organizational meeting. “I don’t want our teachers to have to police the kids,” he said. “Get the phones out” of the classroom, Fox directed.
What Todd Fox, himself an admitted digital device addict, would like to see are lockers where each student could secure his or her phone, bell to bell. But Superintendent Brown has declined to pursue that route to date. Friday, he repeated his reluctance to make a quick policy change.
“I would like to alert policy folks,” Dr. Brown said. Yet some are away. It’s July. School’s on break.
“It’s a significant shift in the way we approach cell phones,” Brown said of ideas like Todd Fox’s. And with the start of the school year only a month-and-a-half away, “It’s too late to get something done,” the Superintendent maintained.
“I’d like the resolution to be done properly,” Karen Yearwood stated. She was among the three who’d opposed the special meeting. “Next week is too soon,” she said.
Yet expect Todd Fox—and others—to press for action in time for September. “We have the opportunity to get phones out of kids’ hands,” Fox said. “There’s no benefit to having phones.”
Adam Krantweiss joined the Ithaca Board of Education in mid-2023, elected to complete a resigned member’s unfinished term. He was elected to a full term in the traumatic budget year of 2024, when voters ousted two other incumbents and initially rejected the district budget by a 7-3 margin. Krantweiss will face reelection again one year from now.
Adam Krantweiss’ ICSD biography states that the new Board President has worked “as a clinical psychologist in inpatient and outpatient settings.” He has taught psychology classes at SUNY Binghamton and Cornell. A native of the Metropolitan New York City area, Krantweiss and his wife, an Ithaca native, moved into the district in 2017. Their two children attend the ICSD.
Krantweiss and the two newcomers who joined the school board in 2024, Todd Fox and Emily Workman, formed three of the six members who allied in leadership selection and the phone ban’s revisit Friday. Jacob Shiffrin, the board’s new Vice-President, was the fourth. The final two members, Dr. Jill Tripp and Sara Garner, were added to the board in this past May’s elections.
Jill Tripp, viewed by many as a fiscal watchdog, was earlier elected to the board in 2022, but lost her seat in 2025. This year, she ran again and won.
What that cobbled-together new majority may hold in common is a willingness to challenge the status-quo; to question what’s always been just because … well, it’s always been that way.
Evidence of that “question authority” attitude came during the organizational meeting’s attempt to establish committees. The annual ritual is usually routine. But this time it was not.
The agenda called for the seating of six committees, each often assigned three board members. But members Friday could not agree on how many committees—or which ones—to establish. Committees may be seen by some as centers of power, barriers to full engagement by board membership in matters like curriculum planning and budgeting. (Remember Krantweiss’ April abstention.)
“Maybe curriculum should be discussed at a committee-of-the-whole,” Jill Tripp posited.
Committee construction brought impasse. First the board rejected, four votes to five, routine formation of the six-committee list. Then it tied (and thus, rejected) a pared-down number. In the end, only the Audit Committee, a state-mandated panel, survived that day. The board will sort out the remaining five committees come August.
“It seems like a puppet show at the moment,” a frustrated Karen Yearwood quipped at one point.
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Enfield Readies, Newfield Adopts Data Center Moratorium
Local laws proceed even with Hochul’s Executive Order
by Robert Lynch; July 15, 2026
At the Enfield Town Board’s July 8 meeting, this Councilperson, Robert Lynch, made a blunt admission: “If anybody charges me with plagiarism, I’m guilty as charged.”
One night later, speaking before the Newfield Town Board, the same lawmaker made the same open admission, this time extending a compliment to Thomas Smith, attorney for the Town of Newfield.
Smith’s three-page, 1300-word script, drafted for and adopted by Newfield that night, would aim to forestall the quick arrival of data centers within the limits of Enfield’s southern neighbor. And Enfield has lifted Smith’s scripting almost word-for-word to construct its own local law.
And even though New York Governor Kathy Hochul has since imposed a one-year, state-wide moratorium on new Data Center permitting, the Newfield and Enfield laws hold purpose. They could delay construction of computing centers that might otherwise slip through the cracks of Hochul’s directive.
Tompkins County municipalities have been running scared ever since data center developer TeraWulf announced its plans in mid-2025 to retrofit the shuttered Milliken Station coal-fired power plant in Lansing and make it a large-scale computing hub. In June, activists opposed to the conversion submitted more than 17,000 petition signatures urging authorities to reject the TeraWulf proposal.
The TeraWulf scare has already prompted town boards in Dryden and Danby to enact zoning law changes that would ban data centers within their boundaries. In March, Councilperson Jude Lemke, sensing majority support, proposed a data center ban for Enfield as well.
What the Newfield Town Board adopted July 9 was a “Local Law Imposing a Temporary Town-Wide One Year Moratorium on Data Processing Centers.” The Newfield Board’s vote was unanimous. There was no Board discussion before the vote. Newfield began its meeting with a Public Hearing on the law. Three people spoke briefly, mostly posing questions. No one objected to the moratorium. The hearing was over in five minutes.
“This is a farming community,” Bull Hill Road resident Joe Pellegrino reminded Newfield’s Board as he addressed the public hearing. “If they dropped it (a data center) in the middle of open land, I don’t see how this is going to benefit us in this community,” he surmised.
“I don’t see how we need a data center,” Pellegrino continued. It would bring “no tax value to the community.” Data centers are “minimally staffed,” resulting in little new employment, he said. “Have any local owners been approached?” Pellegrino asked.
“Not aware of it,” Newfield Supervisor Michael Allinger answered dryly.
And that was the extent of public comment in Newfield that night.
As Supervisor Allinger correctly observed, what Newfield adopted last week—and what Enfield will likely act on in a couple of months—stands not in response to an immediate threat, but rather serves as a backstop to impede some future data center initiative, yet unseen and likewise unknown.
“I think it’s virtually—very unlikely that we’re going to have any kind of thing like that here,” this Councilperson, Lynch, advised Enfield’s Town Board on the night before Newfield voted. “But I sense that a majority of the Board was interested in doing something just in case,” he said. “And there’s nothing wrong with doing something just in case.”
“The Town Board finds and determines that the consideration of any Data Processing, without the adoption of appropriate local laws could have a harmful effect on the health, safety and welfare of any exiting or future residents of the Town,” Enfield’s first draft of a moratorium law states.
As for Newfield, the 12-month adopted moratorium would buy time for its Town Planning Board “or other select committee” to draft amendments to Newfield’s 2013 Comprehensive Plan and address in that document how the arrival of data centers and cryptocurrency mines would impact “the Town’s natural, historic, cultural, and infrastructure resources, including its water and electrical resources,” its law states.
Enfield, unlike Newfield, has a tough Water Protection Law on the books. So the Enfield Board July 8 wordsmithed its planning board’s assignment somewhat differently.
In line with a resolution previously adopted in May, Enfield would delegate to its Planning Board the initial data law drafting duties. Enfield’s directive would call upon the Planning Board “to review, draft and recommend appropriate new legislation or revised legislation that addresses the issue of A.I. Data Centers,” legislation that the Town Board would later adopt.
The May 13 Enfield resolution had given the Planning Board a six-month window to hand up its recommendations. The new moratorium law, likely to reach a Town Board vote in September, would provide the process a full year and stall any data center permitting until fall 2027 at the earliest.
At first glance, Governor Hochul’s July 14 imposition of a first-in-the nation year-long, state-wide moratorium on data center permitting would render the Enfield and Newfield initiatives moot. But the devil’s in the details. And for smaller communities, those details can, indeed, bedevil.
The Hochul executive order would restrict its one-year permitting moratorium only to high-powered “Hyper-Scale Data Centers,” namely those that “consume or can consume 50 megawatts of energy or more.”
Lansing’s TeraWulf plant would likely fall within that “hyper” category. The Lansing facility would reportedly draw 300 megawatts. Yet media reports quote TeraWulf officials as remaining confident that their project will proceed and do so consistent with the governor’s directive.
Meanwhile, Lansing government officials, some critical of the project, remain cautious.
Lansing Supervisor Ruth Groff said that she and her staff are “investigating the implications of the moratorium,” according to a July 14 report in The Ithaca Voice. “Therefore, we have no comment at this time,” Groff advised the publication’s reporters on the day Hochul signed her order.
The governor’s executive order would also exclude from the moratorium facilities “primarily used for manufacturing, research… education… or the provision of medical care.”
Compare the executive order’s 50 megawatt peak demand threshold to the much-lower, 20 megawatt cutoff contained in the so-called “omnibus” bill, the “Responsible Data Center Development Act,” a measure that passed both houses of the New York State Legislature at the close of extended budget deliberations June 4. It, too, would have imposed a one-year permitting moratorium.
Ithaca Assemblymember Anna Kelles had co-sponsored the omnibus bill, itself an amalgam of as many as five separate pieces of legislation. The omnibus bill was viewed as a compromise. Kelles had initially sought a three-year data center moratorium.
With its much-stricter definition of ”large data center,” which would subject a proposal to the one-year moratorium, the omnibus bill would likely have pulled under its umbrella many more modestly-sized data centers, facilities more likely to locate in rural, infrastructure-starved places like Enfield. Our town might not be able to support a 50 megawatt facility. But a 20 megawatt one might prove doable.
Even after issuing her executive order, Governor Hochul could still sign the omnibus bill. She could do so until year’s end. But the governor has not yet signaled her position. She may sign. She may veto. No one knows. Her indecision leaves environmental and consumer advocates in a bind. Do they accept half a loaf as better than no loaf at all? Or do they press forward for the more sweeping moratorium?
Queens State Senator Sen. Kristen Gonzalez a main sponsor of the omnibus bill, appeared with Governor Hochul at the executive order’s signing ceremony Tuesday, the New York Public News Network reported.
“With this executive order, Gov. Hochul is setting the standard that government should improve our lives, not pollute our environment,” Gonzalez was quoted that day.
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie says discussions about the bill’s fate continue. Hochul has said she “absolutely wants to continue to talk about it.” Heastie was quoted concerning a bill signing.
The higher, 50 megawatt threshold is “something I have concern about,” Ben Basem, an organizer with the locally-based “No Data Centers FLX,” an opponent of TeraWulf, told The Ithaca Voice. “The job is far from over,” Basem warned. New Yorkers wanted the omnibus bill, he said. Hochul gave them her executive order instead. “The will of the people in New York State continues to be dwarfed by the demands of energy companies, big tech and the construction industry,” the local activist maintained.
As of late-Wednesday, Assemblymember Kelles had not released a public statement on the executive order, specifically contrasting it to the legislation she’d co-sponsored.
How far Enfield planners will take their crafting of any data center law remains to be seen. During their June and July meetings, the Planning Board attended to other matters, not to a data center law. Planning Board Chair Dan Walker has signaled that any proposed data center, given its likely size, could be handled readily under Enfield’s existing Site Plan Review Law.
Based on its recently amended text, the review law forces Planning Board review of any new commercial building exceeding 4,000 square feet.
“You’re looking at a 40- or 50-thousand square foot building that would need to set on 10-15 acres, basically,” Walker told the Town Board in support of the Site Plan law’s adequacy.
But despite its recent revision, Enfield’s Site Plan Review Law fails to define a data center, or to recognize the potential drain it might have upon the natural or human-created environment. The need for recognition and special treatment lends support for adoption of a stand-alone local law. It’s something the Planning Board has yet to consider.
Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond and Councilperson Lemke have previously expressed support for an outright ban on data centers and cryptocurrency mines. But fashioning such a prohibition for Enfield in the absence of town-wide zoning poses a challenge.
“I know that Jude is finalizing that language,” Redmond told Town Board colleagues July 8. Lemke admitted her task remains unfinished.
“So you know, if a resolution or a local law came before this board calling for our outright ban on data centers, I probably would not vote for it,” this Councilperson, Lynch, told colleagues July 8. But “common sense, tough regulation,” he said, might prompt a different vote.
“So if somebody wanted to come in here, for example, and put one in (a data center), I think there’s two things that they should do: “Number One, they should generate their own power; and Number two, they should bring in their own water,” Lynch said, “because they are two things that we’re very concerned about; depleting the grid and depleting our water supply… We have no public water; we have to rely on our wells.”
Indeed, that lack of readily available grid capacity and ample fresh water render Enfield one of the unlikeliest of places for anyone to site a data center or cryptocurrency mine right now. Such a center requires many megawatts of readily-accessed electricity to process its banks of computers. And it needs plentiful water to cool them.
During a wide-ranging, 40-minute brainstorming discussion of land use regulation and development pressures at its meeting July 1, the Enfield Planning Board raised the data center issue.
Dan Walker identified two areas of Enfield where a data center most likely might locate. One spot would be on Black Oak Road near the soon-to-be upgraded FLAIR power transmission line. The other would be on South Applegate Road, a location where it could draw upon the 15 Megawatt Norbut solar array for power. That’s presuming, of course, that batteries could store the array’s energy.
“If you want to ban something in the Town, it’s a really slippery slope,” Chairman Walker cautioned during the discussion.
“But if a data center wanted to come in and draw 50,000 gallons a day, there’d be an environmental review,” Walker thereafter acknowledged.
“Could we say no to that?” Planning Board member Mike Carpenter asked as to a site plan veto.
“Yes,” Walker answered. “We can deny anything. It’s a matter of which court you go to.”
For now, of course, there’s Kathy Hochul’s moratorium. Enfield may impose its own, more expansive data center moratorium in a couple of months. Beyond that, the path is uncharted.
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