Economic case pushed for Center of Government siting
Reporting and Analysis by Robert Lynch; March 4, 2025
A prime reason to build a $40 Million Center of Government downtown next to the County Courthouse is so that government employees will continue to prop up the Downtown Ithaca economy, an architect guiding Tompkins County in the pricey project argued to lawmakers Tuesday.
“The main reason that we’re saying this is the right location for the Center of Government is related to the economic impact that it would have in Downtown Ithaca,” Quay Thompson, a principal architect with Holt Architects, Tompkins County’s design firm, advised a Tompkins County legislative committee.
Thompson pushed back on a hypothetical alternative—advanced by some, though still not considered seriously by most legislators—that County Government instead build its new, eight-figure office building on cheaper, more objection-free land, a “Greenfield,” somewhere outside Ithaca’s city limits.
“So not only would you lose the benefits of bringing all of the county employees right to the heart of Downtown Ithaca, but you’d also conceptually lose the employees that are currently in the Old Jail and the Tompkins Building if we were to consolidate all of them together at an off-site location,” Thompson said, albeit deceptively.
The “Do it for Downtown” argument may fall flat with some rural Tompkins County residents, taxpayers who wince at paying a premium price for an office complex buried in the bowels of Ithaca, an increasingly congested place many hate to visit, where crime is perceived as on the rise and where (paid, of course) parking is catch-as-catch-can.
But what architect Thompson and his team must work on most immediately is a presentation to the New York State Historic Preservation Office, the agency commonly known as “SHPO.”
The SHPO review centers on the County’s intent to “deconstruct” (i.e. demolish) three existing buildings on the Center of Government site. In 2021, Tompkins County brought the former Key Bank branch at Buffalo and Tioga Streets and the one-time Wiggins Law Office building adjacent to that bank. County Government would raze both buildings to make way for its new five-story office building. Its plans also call for tearing down the so-called “Building C,” the current home to the Tompkins County Board of Elections and the Assessment Department.
One year ago, alerted by the preservationist group Historic Ithaca, SHPO bureaucrats began to express concerns about the proposed demolitions. SHPO holds influence since the Center of Government site lies within the DeWitt Park Historic District. The structures may not themselves be historic, but regulators regard them as “contributing structures” to the district.
The Tompkins County-SHPO standoff has dragged on for a year. The agency demands input and warns that evading its authority could compromise Tompkins County’s ability to secure state and federal grants to help underwrite the office project. About the extent of that leverage—or the range of grants affected—local officials remain unsure.
Holt’s design team will submit to SHPO by March 20th its final justifications for the buildings’ deconstruction. SHPO representatives plan to tour the downtown site April 10.
The Tompkins County Legislature’s Downtown Facilities Special Committee took no action Tuesday. But unless plans change drastically, legislators appear moving unimpeded toward building the Center of Government on the downtown site with a groundbreaking, state willing, targeted for January 2027.
“What SHPO wants to see is have you done due diligence in trying to (sort of) create a solution for your project that preserves the three buildings… reuses and preserves them,” Thompson advised the committee Tuesday.
The problem is that keeping the old buildings is not what either the architect or most legislators want. So what Holt’s team will do instead, Thompson made clear, is to make the most persuasive argument as to why as many buildings as possible should come down. And it’s in the context of demolition advocacy that the issue of downtown economic vitality secures the architect’s attention.
Thompson called it, “the importance of locating the Center of Government downtown in Ithaca from an economic perspective.”
What the architect plans to present SHPO preservationists are three principal options. The first would retain all three of the structures and somehow build a Center of Government around them. A second option would keep only the former bank building at the corner as some sort of public-facing entrance and build a government working space in a new building behind it. The third, and the preferred, option would tear all three buildings down.
Regarding the option of keeping all buildings standing, “That’s an option that we’re trying to take off the table,” Thompson admitted.
“Leaving the three buildings on the site and building a really tall, skinny building in the middle isn’t really a viable option,” the architect opined. A new office building, he explained, must be built with an expected 80-100 year life span in mind. Moreover, one can imagine that a tall, odd-shaped monstrosity could overpower the adjacent DeWitt Park. That’s the historic space SHPO most wants to protect.
Quay Thompson hadn’t even planned to consider as an option moving the building’s site out of downtown. Only when Department of Planning and Sustainability Commissioner Katie Borgella raised the alternative did the architect latch onto it as it could sway SHPO regulators into endorsing demolition.
“Should we include a project option of moving the Center of Government to a ‘greenfield’ outside the boundary of the City of Ithaca?” Borgella asked. “It does help tell the story for why we would be investing in downtown and what the benefits are of that,” she said.
“So you’re asking if we should build this in Lansing instead of downtown?” Downtown Facilities Committee Chair, Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown, asked the planner.
“I’m asking if we should include that in the report as an option,” Borgella answered. “If it is, then it seems like it’s something SHPO should understand that if this doesn’t get approved, that (relocation) might be one of the options that the County move forward,” she said.
Some Tompkins County legislators, most notably Dryden’s Mike Lane, hate the idea of “building in a cornfield,” as Lane has derisively put it. Others, however, may prove more open.
“I’m not against moving the building location if it’s counter-productive,” Brown said, presumably referring to the obstacles faced by staying downtown and facing SHPO’s continued roadblocks. “It is what it is, right?” Brown posited rhetorically.
“We’ve always looked at… keeping the center of our government in the county seat, which is the City of Ithaca,” Mike Lane insisted. True, Tioga County built its offices in the proverbial “cornfield,” Lane acknowledged. But he thinks that was a mistake, and that his county should not follow Tioga’s lead.
“Yes, it’s cheaper, faster to do that,” Lane admitted. Nonetheless, he said, “Ithaca is central from all of the surrounding areas,” and a building’s location should consider that.
Toward that issue of centrality, some on the committee raised transportation concerns. An estimated one-third of Tompkins County residents live close enough to the downtown Courthouse complex to either walk there, bike there, or take a reliable TCAT bus.
“More and more people that I’m meeting and talking to downtown are foregoing getting a car,” Ulysses-Enfield’s Anne Koreman observed. “Some people don’t even have a driver’s license,” she said. An out-of-the-way office building, she argued, would prove inconvenient for them.
Whether through institutional ignorance or by purposeful design, architect Quay Thompson spread much misinformation about the committee’s meeting room Tuesday, arguments that would work to dispel thought of a more rural siting and keep the focus on downtown.
“So we have three buildings that we’re preparing to take down that are currently unoccupied,” Thompson told the committee. “One has become a homeless shelter. They’re deteriorating, and we haven’t been able to find tenants for ‘em for the last number of years.”
“We’ve invested a lot in the Old Jail,” the architect continued. “If we moved this project off-site into a greenfield, those buildings would continue to sit there and probably be sold off to someone else, and the investment that we’re planning for those other two buildings wouldn’t occur.”
So wrong, so misleading on so many fronts:
First, only two of the three buildings targeted-for-deconstruction are “unoccupied.” Building C is—and has remained for many years—very much in use. It’s a county office building.
Secondly, the two other buildings, the former bank and the law office, were bought specifically to be torn down to build the Center of Government. Tompkins County has never made a serious attempt to rent them out. The old bank is now a Code-Blue wintertime homeless shelter only because no one could find any other place for the state-mandated service.
And what about the Old Jail and the Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins Building, the 1854 Courthouse? No, they won’t become vacant. The Gov. Tompkins Building houses the County Legislative Chambers, and no one’s talked about moving that venue. The Old Jail was repurposed in the 1990’s. Renovations to either of the buildings would be made only to re-accommodate departments moving in after the current occupants expectedly move out.
But again, consider the arguments advanced here as bargaining points to bolster demolition’s case in any forthcoming negotiations with SHPO.
“Certainly, if we’re talking about moving off campus and letting three buildings become abandoned and not making the improvements in the two buildings that we were talking about, they can’t not look at the whole project, the whole package that we’re talking about,” architect Thompson reasoned to legislators, trying to think as he thinks the state office’s preservationists would.
Might the argument work, as biased and deceptive as some may see it? We can only wait and learn what happens in April. That’s when SHPO comes to town.
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