News Briefs:
Verba lauded as she leaves
(Aug. 31): The school’s camera never caught it. You had to have been there.
Amanda Verba, the Ithaca City School District’s Chief Operations Officer, sat at the rear of York Lecture Hall. August 27th was her final Ithaca School Board meeting. And she was choking back tears.
For more than four minutes, School Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown paid her tribute. What followed was a standing ovation and more plaudits by Board members.
In September, Verba transitions to Trumansburg to become its Schools Business Executive. She’s one of two top ICSD executives to depart this summer.
Dr. Brown credited Verba for the “standard” she’d set at ICSD. “I’m always going to remember the standard by the way you carried yourself for eleven years,” Brown said. “Amanda Verba, we love you, and we wish you well.”
Board President Sean Eversley Bradwell told Verba, “I express my sincere gratitude for the dedication, for the commitment, for the professionalism, for the expertise that you possess. It’s a significant loss and somebody else’s significant gain.”
Board member Karen Yearwood echoed the praise. “I welcome your voice, your opinion, your direction, and your dedication over the years,” she advised Verba. “You are definitely appreciated. You will be missed.”
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Legislature may toss ECC Lifeline
(Aug. 31): Special thanks to Enfield legislator Randy Brown for trying, once again, to seek refund of more than $27,000 in taxes and penalties inadvertently assessed and collected from the Enfield Community Council three years ago.
Brown’s latest member-filed Resolution, which will come before the Tompkins County Legislature Tuesday, Sept 3rd, would as its first step, return the $6,315 charged ECC for late-payment interest and penalties while its 2021 assessment issue was in dispute.
It would also return the Tompkins County share of property taxes the agency paid that year, and further attempt reimbursement of more than $16,000 that ECC paid to the Ithaca City School District and the Town of Enfield.
As a non-profit organization, the Community Council stands exempt from property tax. But in 2021, as it purchased a former church through a private intermediary, the ECC failed to file exemption paperwork on time. Erroneously charged, it later paid the tax, but has sought reimbursement ever since.
“Tompkins County is known for giving people a second chance and that sometimes it is smarter to ask for forgiveness instead of permission,” Brown’s Resolution states.
The County Legislature, however, may not hold the final decision. Some in the past have said reimbursement requires state legislation.
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Lang could rejoin ICSD Board
(Aug. 27): Presuming she’s interested, long-time Ithaca School Board member Moira Lang, first-runner-up in last May’s reelection race, could return to that Board to fill the seat suddenly vacated earlier this month by Katie Apker.
Though no votes were taken, and the absence of two continuing members made determination of a consensus difficult, a plurality of sentiment expressed at the board’s meeting Tuesday suggested that Apker’s vacancy will most likely be filled by Board members going down the list of losers from last May’s election and offering the position to those losers in rank order.
If the plan wins final support at a meeting next month, Lang, who’d finished fourth, 419 votes behind newcomer Todd Fox, would be invited to succeed Apker through next June. If Lang declined, next-place Barry Derfel would be offered the assignment.
All that members agreed to Tuesday was to write the procedure into a resolution and put it to a vote later. Firmly rejected was an option to fill the seat through a special election, which Board President Sean Eversley Bradwell warned could cost taxpayers 35-40 thousand dollars.
Board member Karen Yearwood voiced strongest support for a Lang appointment. Adam Krantweiss was the most hesitant.
“I would like to see the person selected by the community,” Krantweiss said. “Keep an eight-person Board” until next year, he argued.
Moira Lang, a perceived progressive, had defended the initial ICSD school budget that voters roundly rejected in May. Thus some could see her appointment now as reaffirmation of what they’d cast aside.
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Bonding bill boosts fire budget
(Aug. 23): For its second straight meeting, the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners labored line-by-line on its budget last Tuesday. It worked on the numbers for 45 minutes and then set the budget aside.
Cutting expenses is hard. And next year’s required first-year bond payments for the $825,000 pumper engine bought in 2023 only makes the task harder.
“Our budget has not changed significantly other than the bonds coming up,” Commissioners’ Chair Greg Stevenson told the Board and the public. “Let’s go through this the next two weeks and see where we can cut a little here and cut a little there,” he advised commissioners.
Last year’s board set a 2024 budget of $483,691. Line expenses for next year show slight increases, though not by much.
But it’s the locked-in $126,576 principal and interest for that pumper that could push the new budget close to $600,000. Last year, Enfield voters set a $575,000 statutory spending limit for their fire district. But Stevenson said the bond payments remain exempt from the limit.
State law requires completion of the budget by September 17th. Commissioners could finish at their next meeting, September third.
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61 Million… but falling fast
(Aug. 23): Numbers can confuse. So let’s cut to the quick: Tompkins County legislators should have thought before they acted.
In a nearly hour-long, sometimes tortured, fund balance presentation this week, County Administrator Lisa Holmes reported to the legislature that the County’s “Unassigned Fund Balance”—essentially, its savings account—stood at $60.9 Million at the beginning of this year. It was $72 Million one year earlier. But it could total only $48 Million by the end of 2024.
Still, that prediction sounds worse than things actually are. Why? It’s largely because legislators locked up $5.7 Million in one financial reserve account last November; then tied up an additional $12.6 Million in more reserve accounts this January. Reserve doors swing one way: Easy to put money in; tough to get it back out.
Adding to the problem, the legislature last December amended its Fund Balance Policy to require keeping a full 25 per cent (rather than 18%) of the annual budget in fund balance. With a $195 Million budget, that $48 Million mandate is about the bare minimum required.
“I think that our fund balance issues are self-imposed,” legislator Randy Brown told colleagues. “Eighteen per cent was perfectly fine for a long time.”
But Lansing’s Deborah Dawson likes those reserves, and the policy’s comfortable cushion:
“I think that what we’re learning here is that however big the number is, it’s not necessarily that we’re flush,” Dawson said. “And it’s better to know that stuff than to continue spending as if the gravy train was never going to pull out of the station.” /RL
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No-Excuse Mail-in Voting clears NY Courts
(Aug. 22): Some will say New York is headed on the road to Oregon, the state where everybody votes only by mail.
Tuesday, the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest Court, upheld lower court rulings and declared constitutional a new state law that permits any New Yorker to request a mail-in ballot, regardless of circumstances. Up until now (aside from during the pandemic) voters had to state a valid reason, like illness or travel, to qualify for an absentee ballot.
Republicans, led by North Country Rep. Elise Stefanik, had challenged the 2023 law which liberalized absentee ballot rules. Tuesday’s 6-1 ruling reflected the current Court’s expansive reading of the State Constitution. Chief Judge Rowan Wilson wrote the majority opinion.
To those who say the decision advances democracy, remember this: New York’s voters, in a 2021 referendum, had rejected a constitutional amendment to expand mail-in voting, a decision that the State Legislature and Governor Hochul explicitly circumvented by passing the law, just upheld.
Chief Judge Wilson acknowledged it was “troubling” that lawmakers employed this override. “Upholding the Act in these circumstances may be seen by some as disregarding the will of those who voted in 2021,” he wrote. Yet Wilson said his role is to decide the law, not render political judgments.
Dissenting Judge Michael Garcia said by acting as it did, the legislature essentially told voters, “we never needed you anyway.”
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Sigler joins CU Strikers
(Aug. 22): A Republican walking the picket line with striking union workers has a “Man bites dog,” quality to it. So it deserves mention here.
Tuesday, August 20th, GOP State Senate candidate Mike Sigler joined the picket line with Cornell service and maintenance employees, members of the United Auto Workers, striking for better pay and benefits. Sigler got a picture taken with the strikers, and a press release the next day touted the action. The statement did not tell us how long he walked.
Sigler, to date, has drawn labor support primarily from police and corrections officers’ unions. He also holds some trade union support.
The candidate said he talked with Cornell’s strikers “about the union’s position, and how the percentage increases offered by Cornell are well below inflation and simply won’t sustain current workers.” He also said he talked about how much employees must pay the university to park.
Naturally, critics will cite that a couple weeks earlier, Sigler was one of three members of the Tompkins County Legislature to vote against initial efforts to establish a higher, stand-alone Tompkins County Minimum Wage.
Sigler’s Democratic opponent, incumbent Lea Webb, has yet to join the Cornell action.
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Legislature Extends CMC Deadline
(Aug. 20): In what probably became the kiss of death for two Enfield agencies—or anyone else, for that matter—in tapping Community Recovery Funds that Cayuga Medical Center might forfeit for failing to gain state approvals for its Crisis Stabilization Center, the Tompkins County Legislature Tuesday extended by one additional month the hospital corporation’s deadline for getting Albany’s elusive approval.
By an 11-1 vote, with Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown the lone dissenter, the legislature delayed the CMC approval deadline from August 30th until the end of September.
If CMC cannot secure state authorization by September 30th, County government will likely plow its $1.5 Million award into its own general fund, “Dollars for Dozers,” as legislator Greg Mezey termed it.
Had the CMC deadline not been lengthened, two Enfield applicants—its Community Council and the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company, close runners-up in an earlier funding round— might have found a path toward snagging funding support for their capital projects.
Because federal rules under which the Recovery Fund operate set strict year-end deadlines, the one-month extension is crucial. County administrators told the legislature they’d find it nearly impossible to turn-around any new funding grant in just three-months’ time.
“Finance took a harder look within themselves” and determined the later, September date would give them time to complete the Crisis Center’s paperwork, Legislature Chair Dan Klein told colleagues in pushing through the extra month.
Tuesday’s extension came as a surprise, not revealed in advance of the meeting.
While Randy Brown opposed the CMC extension, Enfield’s other County legislator, Anne Koreman, supported it.
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How Fast they Mall-Fall
(Aug. 17): Pyramid Corporation hasn’t owned the mall in Lansing for several years. No matter, locals still call it the “Pyramid Mall,” and those of us with long memories recall the controversies surrounding its construction in the 1970’s.
This week came word that the mammoth, yet ailing “Destiny USA” (formerly Carousel Center) in Syracuse, still owned by Pyramid, totters on the brink of foreclosure.
Pyramid failed to obtain a one-year extension on more than $430 million in overdue mortgage loans, the Syracuse Post-Standard reported Friday. The paper quoted a bond rating agency as stating the mall developer could not pay a required $38.9 Million installment payment on its debt.
The problem there is the same as the problem here: an exodus of big-box stores. Penney’s, Best Buy and Bon-Ton (remember them?) have left Destiny, plunging its value. Similarly, at its local counterpart, our mall is quickly becoming a hospital annex, and a bottom-of-the-barrel tenant may soon put storage units here.
The ratings agency reportedly once valued Destiny USA at $710 Million, but now it’s worth only nine per cent of that.
With Pyramid unable to pay, and with lenders poised to enforce, a foreclosure could sell the mall to a different party, were one to be found.
Making this all more painful, the Syracuse Industrial Development Agency holds subordinated debt of $259 Million, taxpayer money that could be lost.
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Riley-Molinaro Debate Set
(Aug. 15): Mark your calendars, assuming both men honor their commitments.
A quartet of Albany-based news outlets announced this week plans for an October 10th debate between Incumbent Republican Congressman Marc Molinaro and Democratic challenger Josh Riley. Both candidates accepted their invitation.
The debate will happen even though the 19th Congressional District doesn’t extend quite as far north as Albany, itself. Yet the district reaches into those newspapers’ and broadcast stations’ wider region.
And although the Albany Times-Union doesn’t circulate in Tompkins County, and the radio and TV stations involved don’t reach our area with their signals, expect the October face-off to be carried to this western end of NY-19 through affiliates yet to be determined.
We’re informed the 7PM debate October 10th will be moderated by journalists from the participating journalistic consortium.
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Subs pay budget’s price
(Aug. 13): “Building Substitutes,” a special category of stand-in teachers in the Ithaca City School District (ICSD), stand among the first to lose their jobs in the cost-cutting Ithaca voters imposed by rejecting the first school budget put to them last May.
As many as a half-dozen of the estimated 39 building substitutes took their grievances to the Board of Education Tuesday. Board members voiced sympathy, but declined to budge on what appears to have been an administration decision.
“I’m unemployed. I have a family to support,” Mike Brindisi, a building sub at Northeast Elementary, pleaded to the Board via Zoom. “We’re part of this school, part of this community, providing a safe place and a friend,” Brindisi said.
The ICSD, we’re told, established building substitutes in 2020 during COVID, often to manage in-school students when teachers taught virtually. Over time, the positions morphed into semi-permanent floating substitute instructors.
Board member Jill Tripp called the staff cut “a really tough one,” a decision the Board, itself, has yet to publicly ratify.
“It does come down to budgets and money,” new member Emily Workman remarked.
“The building subs are amazing,” Board member Erin Croyle acknowledged. “But we are in a crisis,” Croyle added. A “$6 Million cut is a lot.”
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Apker exit leaves BOE hole
(Aug. 13): Ithaca School Board member Katie Apker missed Tuesday’s Board meeting. She’ll likely miss most of those to come.
Without advance warning, School Board colleague Jill Tripp announced Apker’s surprise resignation at meeting’s end, doing so as she authored a Resolution commending Apker for her brief tenure. She’d served only one year of her three-year term.
No reason was given for Apker’s departure. An inquisitive moderate, the mother of four and research associate at Cornell’s ILR School avoided pitched battle during the ICSD’s recent financial forays. If it’s any sign, Apker initially supported Tripp for Board President in July, then reluctantly swung her vote on a later ballot to the winner, Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell.
Now, the Ithaca School Board must decide what to do. After the meeting, Tripp outlined three choices: The Board can appoint Apker’s successor, it can leave the seat vacant for a year as it did with another opening a couple of years ago, or it can call for a special election. Tripp warned that latter option is “pricey.”
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“CAD” and the County
(Aug. 13): Enfield Fire Chief Jamie Stevens admitted he was “taking it on the chin” by purchasing what he did.
But during a nearly four-hour long budget planning “workshop” Monday, Stevens told Enfield’s Board of Fire Commissioners he’s buying a pair of tablet computers and associated hardware to place in two Fire District vehicles so as to receive the “CAD” emergency notifications employed by Tompkins County Emergency Response. The Chief said later he’s also requesting a computer at the fire house to dedicate as a CAD base station.
Lack of effective CAD communication hampered Enfield firefighters during the destructive July 15th thunderstorm (see earlier story). Commissioners tentatively included the mobile tablets within next year’s budget.
But it didn’t stop there. Fire Commissioners’ Chair Greg Stevenson asserted that the $6,494 expense should be borne by Tompkins County, which sits on mammoth fund balances, but seems oblivious to local fire department needs.
“Seems the County is going opposite of ‘shared services,’” Stevenson remarked. “We’re getting less and less and less support from the County.”
“I feel like we should contact (County legislators) Randy Brown and Anne Koreman, and see if the County has figured out that shared services doesn’t count anymore,” a visibly angry Stevenson continued.
Fire Commissioners Monday filled in most lines of their tentative 2025 Fire Budget. They’ll do more work August 20 and may adopt the budget September 17.
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Tiny-House Foursome
(Aug. 8): Four “Tiny Houses” on a single, combined lot may soon sprout near the corner of East Enfield Center Road and South Van Dorn Road.
Contractor and developer Patrick Head presented the Enfield Town Planning Board Wednesday with his most-preliminary “Sketch Plan.” More of a concept than a layout, Head said he plans to construct four, tiny, one-bedroom dwellings off a common driveway on the south side of Enfield Center Road west of the Van Dorn intersection. They’d be adjacent to several larger homes recently built on lots he’d subdivided.
“It’s good to have more housing,” Planning Board Alternate and Deputy Town Supervisor Greg Hutnik remarked.
“It looks like the kind of project that we’d like to see,” Board Chair Dan Walker stated. “It provides affordable housing that we need…. It increases the density, but not a lot.”
Head plans to drill one well to serve all four of the tiny homes. But Walker noted that’s no worse than for one, four-bedroom house. Head reported he’s gotten good flow levels from existing wells nearby.
Expect Head to return as soon as September with a detailed site plan.
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Ballot Box Sanity Secured
(Aug. 7): In contrast with the election-day chaos of last December, the Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners took steps Tuesday to ensure that nothing like that happens again.
Adopting a “District Election Policy,” as one of several, the Board set firm rules to govern this December’s ballot count, and those that occur annually thereafter.
The multi-point procedural list, approved unanimously, would set firm 3 PM until 9 PM voting hours; no absentee ballots would be accepted; candidates would need to file letters of interest generally by the Wednesday before Thanksgiving; and if multiple Fire Commissioner positions came up for election—for example, if someone resigned a post early—candidates would need to state clearly which position he or she sought.
The Chairperson of the Election, normally the Commissioners’ Secretary, would run the election and take charge of procedures.
This year’s December election, as opposed to last year’s, will likely decide only one Commissioner’s seat, that held by one-year incumbent Chris Willis.
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Enfield, You be the Judge (Commentary)
In defense of a continued Two-Year Term for Town Supervisor:
“If you do a darned good job, you’ll get reelected over and over and over and over.”
Councilperson Robert Lynch; Enfield Town Board, July 31, 2024.
In reply: “Or you have somebody writing a blog about you that is all lies, and people actually believe it, you know (he, he, he), that’s a possibility too. There’s people that have media that severely manipulate the population into believing things that are wholly untrue, oftentimes. And it can be incredibly frustrating.”
Supervisor Stephanie Redmond; Enfield Town Board, same meeting.
Idea: Let’s compare the facts someday. / RL
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SkateGarden Concert Launch Delayed
(Aug. 1): As authorized by the Town Board in mid-July, weekly band concerts at the under-construction Enfield SkateGarden were to start August 8th. They won’t.
The Town Board learned Wednesday that organizers have not finalized insurance coverage for those events. The Town Board had predicated its approval on the Town’s own insurance premiums not rising. They would. So Skate Garden Inc., the nonprofit having oversight, must bear the insurance expense.
During Wednesday’s meeting, SkateGarden visionary Daniel Woodring texted Supervisor Stephanie Redmond that the likely insurer will charge his group $600 a year.
Woodring conceded it’s a setback. And concerts can’t start until the Town Board signs off. The Board’s next meeting isn’t until August 14th.
Original plans had called for weekly fundraising concerts at the SkateGarden site from early-August through Halloween. SkateGarden, itself, is set to open in early-October.
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