ICSD Board weighs three tax options in low-key fiscal rollout
by Robert Lynch; April 4, 2026
Memories of the Ithaca City School District’s taxpayer tea party trauma of 2024 are not lost on anyone, certainly not on current members of the Ithaca Board of Education and the administrators they employ.
In case you hadn’t noticed—and most people, including reporters with the Ithaca media, haven’t noticed—the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) is close to finalizing its next year’s budget. In fact, the spending plan is almost set in place, pending, of course, the required voter ratification in May. All that the board has yet to do is to agree on a tax levy. And judging from discussions at the most recent school board meeting, there may not be much for voters to complain about this time around.
“In terms of expenditures, I’m solid with what we have,” Garrick Blalock, chair of the school board’s Facilities and Finance Committee, said as he described the proposed $177.6 Million Dollar budget’s spending tally during the board’s March 24 meeting. ”I think that’s a lock.”
“We think we’ve put together a funding request that will meet the needs of our learners,” School Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown stated. There are “no significantly new initiatives,” Brown stated, “and no significant cuts to anything we’re doing currently.”
Proposed spending would rise by just over five percent from that of the current year’s $169 Million budget.
What’s not yet a” lock,” to employ Blalock’s terminology, is the tax levy. In response to an earlier school board directive, Dominick Lisi, Assistant Superintendent for Business and Finance, provided three alternate taxing scenarios at the March 24 meeting. Each of the three would keep the tax increase to within New York State’s calculated “tax cap.” The highest of the three would fall just under the cap. That option would raise property tax revenues by 4.18 percent.
The two lower-tax options would raise the levy by 3.18 percent and 2.18 percent, respectively. And because each alternative would be tax-cap compliant, the budget would require only a simple majority—not a 60 percent supermajority—to pass.
To make the lower-percentage choices work, the district would tap accumulated savings—defined in school parlance as “fund balances”—to cover the shortfall. The 2.18 percent option would drain nearly $2.3 Million from fund balances. The middle-ground 3.18 percent choice would use about $1.15 Million of the savings. The 4.18 percent option would tap none of the savings at all.
“I am as one board member of the belief that we have a fund balance for a reason,” Board President Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell, told those at the meeting. And there are times, Eversley Bradwell said, “in which it is necessary to mitigate the costs to the taxpayers.”
“I would be much more inclined to be thinking about a 3.18 (percent) increase to the levy as opposed to a 4.18,” Eversley Bradwell said.
And as for taxpayer recognition, no board member at the March meeting challenged the lesson painfully learned in 2024.
Just two years ago, in the early spring of ’24, administrators first brought forth a proposal that would have raised the tax levy by more than 12 percent. The school board wisely cut the increase to 8.43 percent.. But in that year’s May referendum, the board-revised budget lost. It lost badly. Whereas ICSD budgets generally sail to approval in a calm sea of school-friendly voters and benefit from apathy and a light turnout, the initial 2024-25 budget referendum saw seven out of every ten voters reject what the board had handed them to decide.
Turnout in that May ’24 election was heavy. A capital spending proposition was also rejected, and two incumbent board members were turned out of office. For the ICSD, it may have been an election anomaly, but it was still a traumatic ordeal.
The Board of Education regrouped. A trimmed-down budget passed one month later, with nearly three in every four voters supporting it, the revote election’s turnout much smaller. The revised 2024-25 budget kept the tax levy increase to less than three percent.
Last spring, school board members took pains not to make the same mistake twice. They advanced what quickly earned the now-despised nickname of a “rollover budget.” It launched no big initiatives and took no unnecessary risks. It raised the tax levy by 3.76 percent. Seventy-seven percent of district voters supported it. ICSD’s annual elections had returned to their predictable path.
“We won’t use that term ‘rollover budget’ ever again,” Superintendent Brown assured his audience on March 24. “But I hope folks do understand we are maintaining our programmatic offerings for the most part.”
“I’m the one that made the mistake and used the term rollover budget,” Eversley Bradwell apologized, “and realizing how inappropriate that was.”
Yet, two observations deserve clarity here. First, what’s likely to be placed before Ithaca voters in this coming May’s election will, indeed, likely be a ‘rollover’ budget in its impact, if only not in its name. And second, more significantly, the $177,638,041 proposed budget now on the table is still some $6.7 Million higher than was the $170.9 Million budget that Dr. Brown first proposed in 2024, the one that never even got to the electorate, the one that carried the infamous 12 percent tax hike.
School budget planning has a way of proving the old “boiling the frog” apologue. A series of little tax hikes wins greater acceptance than does just a single big increase all at once. Yet little by little, year by year, one gets to the same place. The frog boils.
“The cost of living has gone up a bit, energy costs and so on,” Dominick Lisi explained to the board as to why totals have crept up. And, he acknowledged, “Our contract obligations certainly play a role in that.”
Influential among those contract obligations are those newly-negotiated with Ithaca teachers. One budget line, labeled “Instructional Salaries,” states a 7.38 percent rise in the new budget, an increase about in line with the annual raises negotiated last fall.
“We’re probably in a four or five percent world when we think about all the inflationary costs, everything that’s coming at us,” Superintendent Brown observed. ”And I think we have a budget and a funding request that represents the kind of fiscal reality we’re in,” Brown reflected.
The Board of Education spent only about a half-hour of a much longer meeting March 24 listening and talking about the budget. And almost a third of that allotted time got eaten up in merely deciding when to talk about the budget again. Members informally repurposed a previously-scheduled Thursday, April 9 committee meeting to become a board work session. Expect those few dangling details to be tied up that night. The school board expects to formally adopt the budget April 14.
School district voters will pass final judgment in a May 19 referendum.
But budgets can only be best-guess predictors of what lies ahead. What if there’s a surprise?
“There are always things that we don’t foresee. So particularly oil prices skyrocketing came out of what felt like nowhere,” Board member Erin Croyle, a program-friendly, fiscal progressive, cautioned during the late-March session. “So when we’re thinking about how unpredictable things are right now, I think about safety,” Croyle said.
Lisi and Brown attempted to assure Croyle that uncertainty has been addressed.
“So energy has traditionally cycled, and we have to take that into consideration when we plan the budget,” Lisi answered.
“We’re talking about a 170-some Million (budget). You should be expecting your superintendent, your business official and the team to manage those kinds of spikes in any particular area with that kind of money and the kind of fund balances that we have,” the Superintendent assured Croyle.
Dr. Brown posited it’s actually easier to manage uncertainty with larger budgets like his because an unexpected increase in one area can more easily be compensated elsewhere.
Aside from the board president’s preference for the mid-point option, none of the eight school board members present March 24 (Madeline Cardona was excused) expressed a clear opinion as to which tax percentage would best meet their comfort level. Nevertheless, Finance Committee chair Blalock did say he’d like a better forecast as to where future fund balances and budgets may go.
But judging from the general, understated consensus evident that night, don’t expect any additions or subtractions from expenditures before the $177.6 Million budget goes to voters in a month.
Never spoken about during the March meeting were school buses. But a glance at the ICSD budget page indicates that the school board has already decided, apparently quietly during a past meeting, about how many and what kind of buses to buy.
The district would buy ten buses in all, the page states, most of the vehicles full-size and none of them electric. Each would be powered by “ultra-low emission propane” fuel.
True, New York State, in a legislative decision reaffirmed in the State Senate only days ago, has mandated that all new school buses purchased beginning in 2027 be powered only by electricity. But Governor Hochul is granting districts two-year waivers on the mandate, and the ICSD clearly intends to employ that delay. More than a year ago, ICSD officials put the brakes on electric bus buying, arguing that the Bostwick Road transportation facility lacks the grid capacity to keep electric buses running.
And recall that in that May 2024 rout of a referendum, voters also rejected a mammoth $125 Million capital spending initiative. Never did the board resubmit that proposal, or any one similar to it.
Not, that is, until now. A far more modest, $43.9 Million capital package awaits voter approval in this May’s ICSD election. Gone is any talk of building a new bus garage. Most proposed items in the revamped capital package involve such things as rebuilt roofs, new bathrooms and updated heating systems.
Three seats on the Ithaca Board of Education will be decided in the election. Candidacies won’t be confirmed until the end of April.
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Three Minutes to Move Minds
Amanda’s true story may change your opinion about Flock
Posted March 24, 2026
The Kirchgessner family sinks deep progressive roots into this community’s soil. Some will recall that most recently, in 2019, Amanda Kirchgessner made a run for Enfield Town Supervisor. Now residing across the line in Ulysses, Amanda these days speaks regularly before the Tompkins County Legislature. She spoke again March 19. And as Ithaca and Tompkins County debate and decide whether to purge Flock surveillance cameras from city streets and rural roads, Ms. Kirchgessner used her three allotted minutes wisely this past Thursday. She delivered a message powerful and persuasive. And it deserves yielding this page to her every word:
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“Good evening. My name is Amanda Kirchgessner. I’m a lifelong resident of Tompkins County. And I’m going to start this evening by saying something plainly:
“I’m angry. I’m angry because I genuinely believe this community is different. I believe we cared, and I believe that our level of education, our access to resources, and our relative privilege meant that we had the capacity for nuance, for deliberateness, for actually taking the time to get complex decisions right. And right now I’m not seeing it.
“I’m seeing fatigue. I’m seeing reactivity. I’m seeing self-righteousness and judgment. And I’m seeing a failure to create and hold space for nuance and decisions that directly impact people’s safety.
“What I’m about to share is deeply uncomfortable. But that’s part of the problem. We avoid discomfort, and in doing so, we avoid reality.
“On Wednesday, March 11th, around 9:30 at night, on Cayuga Street right in front of the library, I was approached by three men in a vehicle and propositioned for sex. They were trying to get me into their car. The man speaking to me lowered his voice and was trying to draw me closer. He was mumbling. It was very subtle, but very intentional. It was a tactic.
“I told over a dozen people in the following days, and not one of us immediately thought to report it. But it wasn’t until I spoke with a friend on Sunday, who’s served on the Ithaca Community Police Board, that I was told that this sounded like routine behavior, and I needed to report it.
“So I did. I went down to IPD that afternoon, and the officer there told me that the Flock camera system had been disabled, which means if it had been active there’s a real possibility that the vehicle could have been identified.
“So I’m just asking what are we doing? We’re watching Epstein dominate national headlines, confronting the reality of exploitation at the highest levels of power, and yet we seem unwilling to acknowledge that trafficking is not distant; it is local. It shows up quietly in moments like this. And at the same time, we are removing one of the most valuable tools law enforcement has to identify patterns and intervene. How does this help protect our community?
“Our children are watching us avoid these conversations right now. They can feel when we choose comfort over clarity. And I want to say something difficult. There are people in this community who might quietly celebrate my disappearance. And at that same time my greatest fear is that anyone in this room or anyone’s child in this community could face what I was facing last Wednesday evening, here or anywhere.
“I want to believe that we are capable of nuance. And I want to believe that we are capable of doing better, but only if we’re willing to slow down, to tell the truth, and engage fully with the complexity of what is happening. I’m asking us to do this. I trust us because at the end of the day, we are all that we have, friends. We are all that we have.
“Thank you.”
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Amanda Kirchgessner thus finished her remarks. Others then spoke. The meeting moved on.
Back on March 4, in a unanimous decision, the Ithaca Common Council voted to terminate its ongoing contract with Flock Safety. Council thereby effectively denied Ithaca Police access to the traffic cameras’ license reading capabilities. The Tompkins County Sheriff also uses Flock. Yet in meeting after meeting, Flock-skeptical critics have marched into Legislative Chambers; taken to the mics, and one by one implored Tompkins County legislators to do exactly what the City has now done. Indeed, as many as six of those critics renewed their opposition March 19, the night Amanda Kirchgessner spoke. Public opposition has prompted extended debate among lawmakers themselves. .
Amid this controversy, a legislative committee has empaneled a working group to chart the system’s continued reach in areas beyond the Ithaca city line. The working group will hold its first meeting in April. No deadline’s been set for when the working group’s recommendations will issue.
Sometimes tough problems point to easy answers and bright-line remedies. But sometimes they do not. Amanda Kirchgessner’s words suggest to many of us that Flock’s future better rests amongst those problems tougher to resolve.
Sadly, Kirchgessner’s plea for nuance has yet to resonate. Maybe the greater clarity she seeks will find its voice; maybe not.
In the meantime, please stay safe. As was said, we are all that we have.
Robert Lynch
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County throws legal lifeline to evicted Asteri tenants
Highlights of March 19 meeting; Tompkins County Legislature
Core reporting courtesy, Tompkins County Department of Communications; Monika Salvage, Communications Director; March 25, 2026
It doesn’t happen often that a key member of a lawmaking body crafts a major initiative just hours before a meeting, then puts in on the floor and gets it passed without dissent. Odder still is when the event that drives that leader to act is the death of a friend, a struggling victim of the system, and the legislator lies in bed the night before the meeting agonizing over how best to pay proper tribute to her friend’s legacy.
But that’s what happened last week. And Tompkins County Legislature Chair Shawna Black openly admits that the unnamed man’s untimely death is why she’d sought—and secured—a $50,000 grant in emergency legal services support to aid the briefly-evicted residents of Ithaca’s Asteri apartment complex, some of them the formerly-homeless.
“I was laying in bed, and I just kept thinking like, what the hell could I do (or) could I have done to help this gentleman,” Black told legislators that next evening, March 19, when she directed a colleague to move the $50,000 appropriation..
“The one thing that I wish I knew more of and I wish that the residents knew more of was what their legal rights were,” Black said she’d pondered earlier on meeting day, “because we all know that Asteri has a lot of attorneys and a lot of money, and there’s probably a situation where they’re taking advantage of some of our vulnerable population.”
What Shawna Black presented and what the County Legislature passed without objection March 19 was clearly scripted on the fly. Black credited County Attorney Maury Josephson and County Administrator Korsah Akumfi for assisting her in drafting on deadline. The Legislature’s first procedural vote added the spending item to the agenda. Discussion proved minimal. It passed quickly. No legislator wanted to say taxpayer money couldn’t—or shouldn’t—be spent that way.
Tompkins County’s Communications Department condensed the breakneck action into a single paragraph:
“In response to the challenges that arose for Asteri residents due to the Order to Vacate, the legislature considered and approved a member-filed resolution allocating $50,000 from the contingent fund to support legal assistance for housing needs, aimed at helping residents navigate housing instability and access legal resources,” the news release stated. “Legislators emphasized the importance of proactive support to prevent displacement and ensure equitable access to housing protections,” the paragraph ended.
Largely because of the initiative’s spontaneous submission, details on just how the $50,000 appropriation will find its way to Asteri’s evicted residents remain sketchy. A legal aid group, known as “Law New York ,” its service staffed by attorneys, legal interns and paralegals, will likely handle most of the work. But Law New York may not do all of it. It’s been short on staff lately. Some of the money could go to other legal agencies.
There’s something else to remember: The Chair made one point clear. “This resolution specifically does not talk about representing for the purposes of litigation,” Black advised. “It really is just to offer some assistance.” Nevertheless, she added, “If that (meaning litigation) ends up being the path that they choose, then we might have to have a different conversation.”
Quite obviously, Black’s was well-intentioned and hastily-conceived legislation engineered on the fly.
And much the same way, the hastily-imposed Asteri evictions remain a rapidly-evolving saga hard to follow day-by-day.
On March 4, the City of Ithaca’s fire marshal issued an immediate eviction order for tenants to vacate the 181-unit Asteri Ithaca residential tower on East Green Street. A number of Asteri’s residents living there are the formerly homeless. Reportedly 40 of Asteri’s units were set aside for homeless transitioning. The fire marshal’s eviction order followed the discovery of broken glass in stairwells and glass missing from windows, deficiencies that could endanger tenants exiting in the event of a fire.
As tenants moved out, and with many of them having no place to go, Tompkins County stepped in and arranged to have some newly-displaced tenants quartered in local hotels.
Asteri’s owner, the Vecino Group, subsequently took emergency action to fix the deficiencies. Media reports tell us the marshal approved the repairs last week and Asteri’s tenants began moving back into their apartments Friday, March 20.
Given that the March Asteri evictions—although admittedly disruptive—have so far been measured in only days and not months, and given that third parties may have paid the hotel bills, the extent to which displaced tenants hold any legally-tenable claim for damages against Vecino remains unclear—that is, unless tenants’ lawyers go after alleged landlord negligence more pervasive and long-running.
“Access to legal support at critical moments can make the difference between stability and displacement,” Chairperson Black told the Legislature. “And we must do more to ensure that residents are not navigating these situations alone,” Black said.
But recall that Shawna Black’s concern stemmed from the death of a single Asteri tenant, one particular tenant, a formerly unhoused person, one whose full name was never revealed during the meeting, but one who’d reportedly attended the Legislature at least once. He’d been a friend of Ithaca Republican activist and political candidate Zach Winn, who himself often attends and speaks.
“I’m sorry I didn’t do something before, and I hope he is at rest,” Winn told the Legislature that night of his lost friend. “Please continue to press for positive change over on Green Street,” Winn implored.
The deceased victim was last seen alive February 19. That’s when he’d been served a notice of eviction by Asteri, possibly in error. Black said she’d worked with Law New York to try to help him, but in her words, “due to limited capacity at Law New York and the circumstances of the notice, it appeared he had to leave Asteri.”
“He was understandably upset,” Black described the man’s emotions at the time he got the notice to move out.
Ithaca Police found the man deceased in his apartment on March 18. He may have lain there dead for weeks. At the meeting, the cause of death was not yet known.
“This is a deeply sad situation,” Shawna Black described the victim’s passing, “and this individual was a member of our community who had worked hard to transition out of homelessness and into stable housing,” Black added. “His passing is a reminder of vulnerabilities many individuals in our community continue to face even after accessing housing and services.”
“This is a deeply sad situation,” Black reiterated, “and one that I believe requires us not only to reflect but to act.” And that night, in the legislative leader’s chosen way, it acted.
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In other matters addressed March 19 by the Tompkins County Legislature, as reported by the County’s Communications Department:
Flock camera working group: Legislators discussed forming a working group to evaluate the continued use of Flock license plate reader cameras, emphasizing the importance of balancing public safety benefits with community concerns about privacy and data use.
“We do want to make sure that whatever direction we go in is what’s best for the community,” commented Legislator Travis Brooks, Chair of the Public Safety Committee “We want to protect the programs that have been established by the GIVE grant and hear some of the voices that we usually don’t hear in this room … folks that live in neighborhoods that historically have had larger instances of violence.”
[Note related commentary reported from the meeting.]
Paid caregiver leave policy: Upon recommendation of the Workforce Diversity and Inclusion and the Budget, Capital and Personnel Committees, the legislature unanimously approved a resolution to direct county staff to develop a Paid Caregiver Leave Policy based on the Team Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) proposal.
Legislator Iris Packman said, “It is important that we show that we are creating these opportunities for people so they don’t have to choose between do I stay at my job or do I grow my family or do I care for a family member.”
Vietnam Veterans proclamation: The legislature proclaimed March 29 as Vietnam Veterans Recognition Day, honoring the service and sacrifice of Vietnam-era veterans and acknowledging their lasting contributions to the community. Director of Veterans Services J.R. Clairborne and Terry Clark, representing and leadership team member of the American Legion Post 221, Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 961, and Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter #377 received the proclamation.
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Enfield to draft Data Center/Crypto Ban
Also: Town Board awards Bostwick Bid; welcomes new Deputy Supervisor
“I agree with the abundance of caution aspect,”
Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond, Town Board meeting, March 11
“It’s about as likely a data center or a crypto mine is going to come to Enfield as the next Walt Disney World.”
Enfield Councilperson Robert Lynch, same meeting
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by Robert Lynch; March 17, 2026
As goes Dryden, so goes Enfield. It’s happened before. It could happen again.
In 2011, the Town of Dryden gained credit—some might say notoriety—as the first of its kind in New York State to ban hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking. One year later, in June 2012, the Enfield Town Board followed suit, imposing first a fracking moratorium; and then, after another 12 months, a permanent fracking ban.
Enfield’s “Prohibition Within the Town of Gas And Petroleum Exploration And Extraction Activities….” came amid controversy, but it still became law. Other towns piled on. Governor Cuomo banned fracking statewide by Executive Order in late-2014. And the New York Legislature codified Cuomo’s order into statute at the turn of the decade.
Today, the hot-button land use issue is data centers and cryptocurrency mines. The Town of Dryden has spoken. And soon, once again, the Town of Enfield may echo Dryden’s call.
Councilperson Jude Lemke began Enfield’s latest discussion last week, while from a remote location attending her Town Board’s March 11 meeting.
“I want to get a sense from the Board,” Lemke said, “There’s a lot of controversy about these data centers and crypto mining centers,” Lemke reminded colleagues. “And the Town of Dryden recently passed a law… They have banned those facilities. So I’m just raising whether we want to pursue a similar path just out of an abundance of caution.”
What Dryden did in mid-February was ban crypto mines and data centers within its borders altogether, and a ban with little exception.
“I’m in favor of that, yes,” Town Supervisor Stephanie Redmond answered quickly, unquestionably endorsing prospects of a ban.
Councilperson Cassandra Hinkle would soon affirm Redmond’s position, thereby sealing a three-person working majority in favor of moving forward. A fourth Councilperson, Melissa Millspaugh, participated little if at all in the discussion. But the audio record provides no indication that Millspaugh objected one bit.
Lemke, an attorney, said she’d “put something together” so as to minimize legal expense. Expect the draft local law to come up at a future meeting.
The prospects—some would say, the dangers—of local data centers have written many a headline since the AI Data firm TeraWulf announced last year it plans to acquire rights to the now-shuttered Cayuga Power Plant lakeshore in Lansing and convert it into a data center.
In August, TeraWulf and Cayuga Operating Company, LLC, owner of the former coal-fired generation plant, announced their entering into an 80-year lease for the 183-acre site. Drawing upon the existing plant’s capacity and adding new buildings, TeraWulf projected it could eventually develop up to 400 megawatts of digital infrastructure capacity, a portion of that potential available later this year.
Since the announcement, however, the TeraWulf project has become mired in controversy. Zoning disputes have arisen, environmentalists have urged the project be scrapped, and competing camps have drawn battle lines, with candidates entering last-minute and running as write-ins in last year’s Lansing Town Board elections. Most recently, opponents filed suit against both the Town and the developer.
The Town of Dryden, on the other hand, faces no similar threat. No Dryden data center has been proposed or even contemplated. No mothballed power plant waits repurposing within town boundaries. True, a major electric grid does crisscross Dryden, with high lines into which a data center might tap. But no one’s talking about doing that right now. And just where such a center might locate becomes anyone’s guess.
No, the concerns that energized Dryden leaders to ban data centers and crypto mines at their February 19 meeting are those more elusive; risks anchored in techno-skeptical ideology and NIMBY-based protectionism, one can infer from the reported comments of some Dryden officials.
In a February 20 story, The Ithaca Voice quoted Dryden Supervisor Jason Leifer at a December Board meeting as having said he didn’t want data centers “because they have been an industry with ‘deplorable’ business practices.” The Voice also quoted Leifer as having linked AI centers to the erosion of personal privacy and an infringement on civil liberties.
“We are talking about things that process data that’s been scooped up by like all the Flock cameras downtown,” The Ithaca Voice quoted Leifer. “That’s what all of these AI data centers are all about. It’s surveillance,” Leifer said.
A parallel goal among municipal data center opponents lies in the demand for electricity. Their argument holds that with fewer data centers and crypto mines around to gobble up power, fewer kilowatts would get consumed and electricity prices may fall.
The tool the Town of Dryden employed to ban any sort of TeraWulf clone that might venture within its limits, and the same weapon Lansing has already used to wield against its for-real AI interloper, is a tool not found in Enfield’s own toolbox, namely a town zoning law.
The Town of Enfield has no zoning. No zoning law is planned. And were any zoning law ever proposed, the resulting firestorm would certainly eclipse the current discussion over the likes of AI.
“They have zoning, so it’s a little easier for them the way they passed it,” Councilperson Lemke acknowledged at the March 11 meeting as she spoke of Dryden’s strategy.
The ban Dryden adopted, a prohibition clearly anchored in town zoning law, meticulously defines “Data Center, “Cryptocurrency,” and “Cryptocurrency Data Mine.” It then categorically excludes each such facility and its activities from the zoning law’s “Allowable Use Groups Chart,” a list into which any proposed facility must fit to secure itself a zoning permit.
The new Dryden law’s key paragraph makes it clear by its words that, “It is the purpose of this Local Law to define data centers and cryptocurrency facilities and otherwise take no action to include such uses within the table of allowable uses, thereby protecting the order, conduct, safety health and well-being of the residents of the Town who are faced with heightened risks associated with cryptocurrency facilities and data centers.”
“The way this works is the local law defines it, and we very deliberately don’t put it in our use table,” Dryden’s Dan Lamb told his Town Board’s February meeting, a meeting reported by The Ithaca Times. “And if it’s not in the use table, you can’t do it,” Lamb explained. “I think it’s pretty clear; I don’t think we can do anything unambiguous in what we allow in this town and what we don’t allow.”
But might Dryden’s exclusionary strategy be too smart by half? Could a cunning AI developer challenge the categorical exclusion in court? Perhaps. But to that, Dryden officials would remind us that fracking companies once contested Dryden’s pinpointed exclusion as well. Gas drillers challenged Dryden in court. And the drillers lost.
Efforts have emerged at the state level to impose a three-year moratorium on new data center permitting. Ithaca Assemblymember Anna Kelles has sponsored the Assembly version of the pending bill. Local State Senator Lea Webb has become a co-sponsor of the upper house version, with Democrat Liz Krueger the key Senate sponsor. The Kelles-Krueger bills, filed in early-February, are currently before their respective committees. The bills’ support from Governor Hochul remains uncertain.
“I agree with the abundance of caution aspect,” Enfield Supervisor Redmond said of the pro-active position Councilperson Lemke encouraged at the March Enfield meeting that her town take. “I think getting this in the books might be a good way to start, and we can always reevaluate it later.”
“I’m also in favor even if the measure is only symbolic,” Councilperson Hinkle echoed. “I think from a protection standpoint and keeping the character of Enfield, and letting everyone know where we stand on matters, it’s not a bad thing.”
The data center and crypto mine ban passed Dryden’s Town Board unanimously last month. Any similar law in Enfield, however, isn’t likely to achieve unanimity.
“I am not in favor of it,” Councilperson Robert Lynch (this writer) responded to Jude Lemke’s regulatory initiative. “Not that I love data centers; I don’t love AI and I don’t love cryptocurrency mining,” Lynch qualified. “But you’ve got to realize that it’s about as likely a data center or a crypto mine is going to come to Enfield as the next Walt Disney World.”
“We don’t have the infrastructure for it,” this writer explained. “It’s different from fracking. Fracking, we have the gas underneath. With crypto mining, you need big, beefy power lines, like Lansing’s got over at the TeraWulf facility.” Enfield has only the 115 kV “FLAIR” line to its south, probably not powerful enough for an AI center, he said.
What’s more, the TeraWulf center, if it needs to, can draw cooling water from Cayuga Lake. Again, Enfield lacks such a plentiful freshwater resource.
“So I think it was even a reach for Dryden to do what they did,” Lynch observed. “Well, little Enfield or little Dryden isn’t going to stop crypto or AI, sadly… It’s going to happen elsewhere, and I don’t think we should spend a dime of legal expense on drafting a law that will be totally inapplicable to this town. That’s my opinion.”
“I do agree with it’s very unlikely to come here,” Supervisor Redmond countered. “But you don’t know what the future will bring and there’s always different technologies becoming available.”
And that’s where the March 11 data center discussion ended.
The data center issue consumed a mere three minutes of the Enfield Town Board’s more than two-hour March meeting. Far more immediate was how—indeed whether—the town can proceed with the Bostwick Road culvert project, a flood mitigation effort years in the planning, but one that’s proven of late more costly than planned.
In this latest installment, it appears Enfield got lucky. Two days before the meeting, Supervisor Redmond had opened bids for excavation and stream work to install a giant, already-purchased concrete box culvert that’ll carry Enfield Creek beneath Bostwick Road in a spot a short distance east of Route 327. Four construction bids came in. They varied wildly. The low bid asked $351,300. The high bid registered at more than $1 Million.
With little hesitation, the Town Board accepted that low bid from JB’s Excavation Services of Apalachin.
“Maybe some of you guys got the same sticker shock that I did,” Supervisor Redmond said, recounting how she’d happened to open the high bid first and “nearly fainted on the spot.” The higher bids, she said, would have left us “completely dead in the water.”
JB Excavation’s bid registered more than 40 percent—or nearly a quarter-million dollars—beneath that of the next-closest bidder. The winner will put the culvert in place and realign the roadside stream this summer. State rules require the contractor restrict its work to between mid-May and September because Enfield Creek is a protected trout stream.
Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy” Rollins vouched for JB Excavation’s proficiency. Rollins said the firm had repaired a second Enfield stream off Hubbell Drive a few years back. They did good work, he said.
Far more costly than the work itself was purchase of the actual culvert. The Town Board in January awarded a Watertown firm, Jefferson Concrete Corporation’s $471,600 bid for the big concrete box.
Total Bostwick project cost has risen far above the $693,866 awarded Enfield through a 2024 state-funded Water Quality Improvement Project (WQIP) grant. The Town will proceed, nevertheless. Redmond proposes to tap budgeted bridge fund reserves to cover any cost overruns.
“This is one of our last hurdles for the Town Board,” the Supervisor celebrated as the most recent Bostwick bid was awarded. “After this, we’re looking at shovels in the ground,” she said. “It’s been like three years in the making, so I’m excited.”
An administrative transition that few in Enfield will likely notice day-to-day occurred at the March Town Board meeting. Having served since February 2023, Greg Hutnik tendered his resignation as Deputy Town Supervisor, and Supervisor Redmond officially appointed Enfield event venue operator Terrance Bloom as Hutnik’s successor.
Greg Hutnik must leave the deputy’s position as he and his family are moving to Danby. As Hutnik left his presumed last meeting, Board members and attendees offered him a round of applause.
The Town Board acknowledged Redmond’s choice of Bloom by resolution. It was a ceremonial exercise, given that state law grants the Supervisor exclusive power to pick her deputy. The position pays just over $5,000 annually.
I’m passionate about creating more resources for not just residents in general, but specifically for youth in the future,” Bloom, owner of Porter Hill Road’s Stone Bend Farm, stated as he introduced himself.
Bloom will likely focus on reimagining the “SkateGarden” skate park across from the Town Hall. It’s a place that Redmond seeks to enhance.
“I’ve been around, I’ve worked my ass off for quite a long time, and I’m happy to keep working,” Bloom promised.
Terry Bloom’s appointment did not come without criticism. At the meeting’s start, resident and recent Town Board candidate Rosie Carpenter spoke against the appointment, referencing an alleged dispute she and Bloom had when they were neighbors. Carpenter accused Bloom of having dug a trench through protected wetlands and flooding her property.
“I’m sure there are people in the community that have an opinion about who they think I am,” said Bloom, who arrived at the meeting after Carpenter had made her assertion. “But I promise you if we haven’t had a long conversation, you don’t know me,” Bloom insisted.
Redmond first disclosed Bloom’s selection during a broadcast interview 12 days before the meeting, having announced her decision there even before notifying all others on the Town Board.
Councilperson Lynch initially planned to abstain on Bloom’s affirmation, but later joined in the ceremonial support, acknowledging that neither the Board nor the public holds any “veto power.”
Among other Town Board matters addressed March 11:
- Two Cornell students from the University’s ”Design Connect” program updated the Board on their progress in repurposing the skate park that the new Deputy Supervisor will have a hand in crafting. The students, identified as project managers, sought input and got suggestions.
Supervisor Redmond said she seeks a park that is “very youth-focused, yet also becomes “a gathering space for everybody.” Councilperson Melissa Millspaugh encouraged development of a “natural play space” for children. Councilperson Lynch described what exists there as “a place without character right now” and “a concept without really an end point.” The Cornell students will seek more input, primarily from youth, and may return to the Town Board in April.
- The Town Board approved a contract and License Agreement that allows the Enfield Food Pantry to continue using the downstairs level of the Enfield Town Courthouse for another ten years. Aside from some tightened language, the revised contract establishes a general 48-hour deadline “for the removal at its own expense of all waste food, garbage, or other commodities deemed unfit for distribution and placed outside the pantry.” The Pantry Board reportedly agrees with the new sanitary stipulation.
- And in contrast with the bidder interest for replacing the Bostwick Road culvert, the Supervisor reported no quotes at all came in for another Enfield need, namely the long-distance transport of Highway Department floor drain wastewater, now that the Ithaca Area Wastewater Treatment Plant will no longer accept the effluent. The newly-arisen expense could cost Town taxpayers in the tens of thousands of dollars. The Town Board voted to rebid the service, with new bids to open in May.
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Double-Down on Downtown
Lawmakers stick with a close-to-the-Courthouse Center of Government, yet split on size and cost
Reporting and Analysis by Robert Lynch; March 9, 2026
“It’s striking to me that we could buy a house for each person that’s going to be working in this building for the cost of this project.”
Tompkins Co. legislator Judith Hubbard; Center of Government discussion, March 3.
A newly-sworn and radically overhauled Tompkins County Legislature took its first turn these recent days toward changing course in building a downtown-based, ever-more-expensive Center of Government. The Legislature didn’t alter that course. Members failed in their attempts to do so, yet still took forever that night to acknowledge their deadlock.
What legislators circled back to at their March 3 meeting, but only after nearly three hours of endless, exhaustive debate, was the default reaffirmation of a June 2025 resolution that commits county government and us taxpayers to construct the Courthouse-adjacent building. Last year’s blueprint may prove outdated, however. Price increases and revised operational demands may render last year’s design concept either ill-advised or impossible to build.
The marathon meeting’s most telling take-away, however, may involve those paths no longer considered.
Lawmakers last Tuesday signaled zero interest in replacing their preferred downtown vision with something else, someplace maybe cheaper. Virtually ignored were frugal alternatives like vacant office space at Harold’s Square on the Commons, the modern, minimally-occupied buildings at the Cornell Business Park near the airport, or the now-deserted retail wasteland that once comprised at the Shops at Ithaca Mall.
Back on June 3, by a nine-to-four vote, the Legislature approved a resolution expressing intent to fund “up to $50 million… for the development of the Center of Government (COG) project to be located on the 300 block of North Tioga Street.” That was the last significant public direction given architects and administrators. The resolution called for a new building of 45,000 to 48,000 square feet.
Yet by the time Holt Architects presented their schematic drawings to the public last December 8, what had emerged was a 59,000-square foot, four-story edifice for the corner of Buffalo and Tioga Streets, a structure significantly larger and more costly than the building conceived and authorized six months earlier.
“There was a vision that was set,” County Administrator Korsah Akumfi sought to explain to quizzical legislators at this more recent March meeting. “So the size and scope of the building has increased over time based on that vision,” Akumfi continued. “That’s the reason why there’s been some degree of cost increases and size expansion.”
It may be Administrator Akumfi’s way of explaining away the unexplainable; of justifying why rules that were set were not later followed. Korsah Akumfi wants a new, fully-sized Downtown Center of Government. He wants to make the vision reality.
“So can we build a 48,000 square foot building for $50 Million?” Iris Packman, who only joined the Legislature in January, asked project planners.
“I can’t do that math in my head,” Holt Architects’ lead designer Quay Thompson answered. (True, he should have anticipated Packman’s question.)
“I think that even Holt sort of put this a little bit naïve number of 48,000 square feet and $50 Million on the table; like that’s on my shoulders,” Thompson admitted, somewhat sheepishly. “As we got in deeper in the real moment, it wasn’t a 48,000-square foot building to solve the problem,” the architect explained. “So the problem that we were trying to solve that we thought was a 48,000 square foot building and a $50 Million budget turned out to be a 57,000-square foot building and a $60 Million budget.
Over the course of the fall and early-winter, a County-sponsored webpage that tracks the project had quietly crept the project’s price tag upwards to its presently-estimated $64 Million.
Still, it could have been worse, much worse. “I don’t want to freak people out,” Thompson revealed, perhaps publicly for the first time, “but the first estimate we got back was like $74 Million, and we weren’t going to present that building to you,” the architect assured. Extras, he said, were cut.
As with so much of the Center of Government’s tortured travels these past months—indeed, past years—the public becomes the last to know of what’s being decided. The March 3 meeting proved no exception.
The night’s agenda had listed only a “Special Topical Presentation and/or Discussion;” on the project, namely the County Administrator’s “Center of Government Project Update.” A multi-page compilation of PowerPoint slides was included in the agenda packet posted online about a week earlier. It offered no resolutions listed nor indications given that action that night would be taken.
Yet midway through the marathon discussion, Legislature Chair Shawna Black sprung two competing resolutions on colleagues. By their reactions, legislators knew they’d be asked to vote. It was only those of us on the outside that hadn’t a clue.
This past January, the Legislature’s membership had turned over by 50 percent, Black would later explain. “If I were a new person, I wouldn’t support what the people before me supported,” the Chair insisted.
Shawna Black’s parliamentary initiative pushed to the limits the dictates of New York’s Open Meetings Law. That law is supposed to require “to the extent practicable” that action items get publicized 24 hours in advance. There was no emergency here, just a legislature chair’s preference. “Practicable” necessity regularly gets stretched in legislative chambers (just as it does, for that matter, by the Enfield Town Board). No matter. Legislators accepted the agenda’s additions willingly. No one bothered to seek the County Attorney’s opinion.
The resolutions, we were told, were drafted by County Administration at Shawna Black’s request. One of them would pay deference to reality, acknowledging that costs and departmental needs had grown, and would enlarge the Downtown Center of Government’s size to the Administration’s recommended 57,000 square feet and inflate project cost to as much as $60 Million.
A second, scaled-back alternative would contain the new building to a maximum 40,000 (originally 37,000) square feet and limit maximum cost to $45 Million. Rough calculations that night projected the property tax levy would rise by three percent for the leaner option, by 4.5 percent for the more expensive choice.
Battle lines were drawn; strategies plotted; votes taken. But decisions came only after debate; much, much debate.
Both resolutions would fail in the end. First, the 57,000-sqiuare foot option lost, seven votes to nine. Then, the scaled-back alternative failed as well, six votes to ten. Many of those who supported one resolution opposed the other. After their second vote, legislators, bewildered, exasperated, and woefully deadlocked, retreated to a half-hour’s worth of other business, then to an executive session, and then went home.
Among lawmakers representing Enfield, Democrat Rachel Ostlund supported the more expensive choice, but opposed the scaled-back alternative. Republican Randy Brown first signaled he’d endorse the 37,000-square foot scale-back, but ended up opposing both resolutions.
“My constituents, by the way, are not for this—any of it.” Brown said of the Center of Government. “I think we need to measure ourselves,” Brown continued. “You need to meet people where they are, and they’re not at this building,” Newfield-Enfield’s legislator observed. Brown would prefer Tompkins County seek out unused “public-facing” space at local schools.
Ithaca’s Veronica Pillar emerged as a leading proponent of the big building option.
“I think the question is, are we going all in with—we are going to give our employees what they need to do their jobs… or are we going to continue to squeeze for the goal of saving tax money from our constituents?” Pillar questioned.
“It’s not nothing to raise property taxes,” Pillar acknowledged, “but no one’s going to be like, ‘My gosh, I’m so glad the county tax levy was like kind-of low; I’m so glad they made that building smaller.’ They’re going to be like, ‘My school taxes are high,’ or whatever it is.”
A newer legislator, Ithaca’s Judith Hubbard, drew a different comparison, one that raised a number to remember.
“If I take the construction cost of the buildings and I divide them by the number of people who are going to be working in the building, those costs… are between 325 and 380 thousand dollars per person, which is the cost of a median house in the county,” Hubbard pointed out. “It’s startling to me that we could buy a house for each person that’s going to be working in this building for the cost of this project,” she said. “I just don’t know how to wrap my head around that fact.”
Korsah Akumfi pushed back on Hubbard’s comparison.
“This is a public building,” the Administrator countered. “So we cannot quantify the cost by the number of people who will be working there, but we need to look at the intrinsic value of the building (to) the community as well and the number of residents that will be accessing services and issues of that nature.”
Akumfi compared the COG to the Tompkins County Public Library, renovated for government use decades ago at a cost of $10 Million. It employs just 20 people.
“I don’t think that’s a reasonable comparison,” Hubbard responded. She noted that the library lends books.
Judith Hubbard, like Randy Brown, opposed both resolutions.
The Center of Government design that Holt architects unveiled last December would stand four stories tall. To pare down size and cost, designers would likely delete its planned fourth floor, yet provision the building to accept one or two more stories later, should government grow to demand added space.
Departmental relocations for any downsized project never drew much discussion at the March 3 session.
“We’re not going to be putting departments into rooms,” Shawna Black told lawmakers that night, admonishing them not to get too granular. Nevertheless, if the building’s top floor is lopped off, the resulting departmental musical chairs would likely retain Workforce Development in rented space, rather than move it to the Old Jail.
Under Administration’s calculations, a 37,000-square foot building could accommodate 105 full-time equivalent employees. The larger option would accommodate 165. The half-measured option would keep several departments in leased space indefinitely.
“So on a 50-100-year building, 20-24 extra work spaces isn’t rally that absurd, and a 37,000-square foot (building) is really underbuilt and not sufficient from day one,” Dryden legislator Greg Mezey concluded.
During the evening’s discussion the inadequacy of on-site (or even available off-site) downtown parking was carefully glossed over. It never got mentioned. Nor were the other detractors of downtown construction seriously examined, problems like limited expansion opportunities, heightened building costs, and recent increases in downtown crime.
Instead, a footprint firmly anchored in downtown Ithaca soil emerged as a foregone conclusion.
“We have accomplished a lot already,” Dryden’s new legislator, Dan Wakeman, observed. “We have determined that we are not doing several different things, and we want a building downtown. Remember that everybody,” Wakeman established.
During January and early-February, as new legislators were christened and veteran lawmakers commenced their fresh terms, the Tompkins County Legislature convened a trio of closed-door executive sessions, meetings totally apart from their public gatherings. One can infer that alternatives like Harold’s Square and the Cornell Business Park were considered, and then discarded during those closed conclaves. meetings that none of us could attend.
About the time the June 2025 resolution gained passage, the business park option and its cornucopia offering of as many as 18 foreclosed buildings came to light. Administrator Akumfi was cool to the business park idea and recommended against it. Then, last September, Harold’s Square owners approached the Legislature in near desperation, asking Tompkins County to buy or lease long-unrentable office space. Again, Administration proved reticent. Administration wanted, and still does want a downtown, stand-alone structure. They want it to the point of twisting arms.
“I was not for Downtown originally,” Greg Mezey reminded colleagues. “I encouraged us to look at alternate spaces.” But now, he said, “I feel very confident that I can go back to my constituents and say we have turned over every rock, we have looked in every corner of the county… and this really in the long-term health of the county is the best possible solution.
Greg Mezey’s departure from “what-else” alternatives likely seals the deal for a downtown choice.
“Of course, you’ve got to look at Harold’s Square. It’s right there, for goodness sakes,” Lansing’s Mike Sigler, a frequent skeptic of downtown construction, reasoned. “It would be ridiculous for us not to look at foreclosed properties up at the airport,” Sigler likewise reasoned. “And that didn’t work out, either,” he lamented. “And of course, we’re always going to look at the mall, because we always look at the mall.”
But Sigler was more than a touch annoyed March 3; upset that legislative directives were not followed, that the Legislature last June instructed one thing, and administrators and architects did something else.
“Why wasn’t this directive followed?” Sigler asked anyone who would listen. “So you’re asking me for mission creep, all the way up to beyond $65 Million. I just couldn’t get there,” he said, adding, “But now I’m looking at this eight months later and I’m going why don’t we just like follow the resolution that was there?”
Shawna Black and legislator Deborah Dawson usually stand allied. That recent Tuesday night they departed, throwing a verbal jab or two.
“I’m astonished to hear people say we don’t want to put constraints on this project,” Dawson spoke out. “It’s our job to put constraints on things. It’s our job to put constraints on spending.”
And pushing back on Black’s desire to offer new legislators an opportunity to shift direction or even reverse course, Dawson stated, “If there’s anything I hate it’s wasting time. I hate it when people waste my time. And I agree with Mike (Sigler), if we’re going to end up with what we passed eight months ago, we have just wasted a colossal amount of time.”
And that’s just about all that’s been done so far, other than to unveil an oversized, overpriced, arguably ugly building. One legislator on meeting night tried to calculate how much member compensation got wasted because debate had dragged for three hours. Of course, members get paid a salary, not by the hour.
And for now, the resolution of last June remains the Center of Government’s guiding directive. A 48,000-square foot building size and a $50 Million cost ceiling remain the standard. Designers must return to their drawing boards. And maybe administrators must curb their appetites as well. Maybe.
Groton’s Lee Shurtleff recalled last June’s building promises. He opposed the project then. He’d support it now.
“One of the guiding points that night was this was not a commitment to a contract, but a commitment to the project, to the tune of $50 Million” Shurtleff recalled. As for the present, “I know that we have to move forward and that significant construction has to occur,” Shurtleff said.
There’s a futility in all of this, of course. Shawna Black warned that the absolute moment of truth won’t arrive until construction bids get opened, weighed, and then accepted or rejected; that is, presuming that the Center of Government ever advances that far.
“It doesn’t matter because the numbers are really going to come in where they come in,” Black cautioned, “and we’re going to have to make that decision at that point.” In other words, do or die.
“I think the idea of compromise is an interesting sort of political solution,” architect Quay Thompson remarked at one point in the discussion. Read into that what you may.
Then, again, as Mike Sigler suggested, presumably in jest, yet perhaps carrying a grain of truth, maybe we should just buy each County employee a house. They could all work from home. It would be cheaper.
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