Monthly Report
Tompkins County Council of Governments
for August 13, 2025
by Councilperson Robert Lynch
Enfield TCCOG Representative
The Tompkins County Council of Governments (TCCOG) met on July 24. It was a long meeting, one lasting nearly two-and-one-half hours. Finances dominated. TCCOG devoted greatest attention to emergency medical services, particularly to the potential expansion of Tompkins County’s Rapid Medical Response (RMR) program. The RMR discussion lasted nearly an hour.
EMS: By an eleven-to-one vote, TCCOG endorsed a resolution recommending the Tompkins County Legislature adopt and fund an enhanced Rapid Medical Response (RMR) program in the 2026 Tompkins County Budget. This Enfield Councilperson, Robert Lynch, cast the resolution’s lone dissent. I will explain my objection later in this report.
TCCOG’s Emergency Medical Services Committee presented the resolution to TCCOG’s membership, via email, only two days before the July 24 meeting. Dryden Councilperson Dan Lamb, who chaired the day’s meeting, is one of the enhanced RMR initiative’s strongest supporters. Trumansburg Mayor Rordan Hart is another. Lamb and Hart sit on TCCOG’s Emergency Planning and Preparedness (EMS) Committee. The EMS Committee has considered the RMR expansion in several meetings since April, committee sessions sometimes kept confidential and to which other TCCOG members were not invited.
The Town of Dryden and Village of Trumansburg each run municipal ambulance services. Each service employs paid staff. And each of those service’s supporting municipalities incurs financial burdens as the services find themselves increasingly called upon to provide mutual aid to communities beyond their contracted service areas, to Ithaca (but also, to an extent, Enfield). The Town and Village of Dryden, the Village of Trumansburg, and the Town of Ulysses (which subsidizes Trumansburg Ambulance with taxpayer funds) strongly back enhanced RMR. Their representatives drove the July 24 discussion.
The enhanced RMR proposal placed before TCCOG July 24 remains little changed from that first discussed at a meeting of the Tompkins County Legislature’s Public Safety Committee May 27. The Tompkins County Department of Emergency Response (DOER) prepared the proposal this spring. DOER’s visionary plan would greatly expand the current RMR program both in terms of staffing and cost.
The present RMR program employs nine full-time, part-time or per diem EMT’s plus a program manager. The favored of DOER’s three alternative staffing models for “enhanced RMR” would expand staffing to 40 people (some part-time or per diem) plus a manager. RMR would buy three transport ambulances. The service would expand from Basic Life Support to a limited level of Advanced Life Support.
In terms of cost, the enhanced RMR vision would grow the program’s current $ 544,828 annual budget by an additional approximately $2.5 Million. The document shared with TCCOG estimates “Total Year-1 Costs” at a minimum $3,044,614.
“I think this resolution should be withdrawn,” Tompkins County Legislature Chair Dan Klein, the Legislature’s TCCOG representative, said at the outset of the discussion. Klein cited two reasons for requesting the Committee’s resolution be pulled.
First, Klein said, TCCOG should await completion of a study toward improved local EMS coverage, a study the County Legislature authorized in June with the Center for Governmental Research (CGR). “We have a study, we’ve paid for a study, the study’s ongoing; so it would be illogical to take action before the study is done.” Klein stated. Plans call for the $48,000 CGR study to be finished by September. The study’s authorization had ensured that DOER’s plan would be among the options considered.
Secondly, Klein said, there’s financial reality. He reminded TCCOG members of the fiscal warnings issued earlier in the meeting by County Administrator Korsah Akumfi, predictions of up to an $11 Million deficit forecast for the 2026 Tompkins County Budget (reported here later). “I can’t say that there’s no chance that this kind of thing will make it into our budget.” Klein told TCCOG. “But to ask at this stage of the budget process to ask the County Legislature to endorse this project and to apply for a Certificate of Need, I just predict it will go absolutely nowhere,” Klein predicted. “So that by TCCOG voting on this resolution, you’re just setting up a situation with the County Legislature that is not going to accomplish anything except some bad feelings.”
Dan Klein would eventually support the TCCOG EMS resolution, but only reluctantly, and only after members had unanimously amended its text to strike its initial request that would also have had the Legislature ask the New York State Health Department for a “Municipal Certificate of Need (CON),” a regulatory instrument needed for any expanded, ambulance-equipped County-run service to operate.
Listening to legislator Chair Klein’s concerns, and disturbed by the sudden submission and hurried consideration of the EMS resolution, this Enfield Councilperson moved to delay TCCOG’s vote until its late-September meeting. Delay until then, I’d argued, might have enabled the CGR recommendations to first come forth. The motion to postpone failed five votes to nine.
“We have to deal with this,” Dryden Village Mayor Mike Murphy insisted in defense of prompt action. “Postponing for one month if it makes it nicer for the Legislature, that’s not the issue.” Murphy said. “The issue is for us to do our job, and our job is to get this out and have it discussed; have it be in this Legislature budget. Whether they give it or not, it’s time to take action.”
“I’m not under any illusion that the Legislature would necessarily be able to act on this,” Rordan Hart, Trumansburg’s Mayor, stated. Yet, he said, “TCCOG was formed 21 years ago for the purpose of local municipalities being able to present our needs and wants to the Legislature collectively. And what we have in this situation, where emergency medical services—ambulance and EMS—as we have seen over and over again is in a precarious state, and it is time for this body to do something about it.”
“I personally would like to see County legislators go on record and say that ambulance service does not rise to the level of importance to be considered in the 2026 Budget,” Hart continued, daring Tompkins County to deny the request. “EMS and ambulance is not a luxury item. EMS and ambulance is at least as important, maybe more important, than other public safety departments. It is at least as important as issues to do with clean water, clean air, and clean food sources.”
“Whether it can be funded or not is not the question,” Dryden’s Dan Lamb remarked. “We’ve been consistent saying it needs to be started as soon as possible because the other communities (including his, Dryden) will have to keep bearing the brunt.”
Both Dan Lamb and Rordan Hart suggested, but did not promise directly, that were the status quo to continue, their communities’ services might stop responding to mutual aid calls outside their territories.
“I don’t want to see that happen,” Mayor Hart said. “I don’t want to see that mutual aid framework break. I don’t want to be in a situation where someone in the City of Ithaca or the Town of Ithaca doesn’t get an ambulance because we don’t respond, and then that person dies. However, I don’t want to be in a position where a Village of Trumansburg or Town of Ulysses or Town of Covert or Town of Hector resident doesn’t get an ambulance because we are providing mutual aid somewhere else. That’s why it’s so important for the County to tackle the issue head-on, sooner rather than later.”
“This issue is not going away, and the people needing service are not going away, and I would hope that pressure on Tompkins County is not going away,” Ulysses Supervisor Katelin Olson told TCCOG, “because the alternative is the Town of Ulysses will not be able to continue to pay-in for ambulance service. We can’t deal with exponential costs year after year after year,” Olson emphasized. Mayor Hart said that before he’d allow Ulysses to exit from its contract with Trumansburg Ambulance, he’d cancel mutual aid responses to non-contracting communities.
My own dissent from the TCCOG EMS resolution rested on several factors. First, I sensed the need first to view the results of the CGR study, due in September. Its findings and recommendations “might surprise us,” I stated. Secondly, I referenced Tompkins County’s financial challenges and Chairman Dan Klein’s own reluctance to proceed hastily. Thirdly, while the later-adopted resolution requests the County Legislature to support “adoption and funding” of enhanced RMR, “it doesn’t say funding how,” I cautioned. “It could be through a complicated system of cost-sharing, and that could cripple some of the smaller towns’ budgets,” I warned. Moreover, a larger issue bothered me. As I termed it, the Department of Emergency Response’s Enhanced RMR plan is “not ripe.”
“I think it’s trying to do things by half-measures,” I informed TCCOG. “And I think what we’re hearing from municipal representatives is in the long run what we need is really nothing short of a Tompkins County ambulance service. And this is not it,” I said. It’s purchasing three ambulances, but only for transport, not with the Advanced Life Support capabilities that Bangs ambulances provide. Staffing the expanded service stands uncertain, and long-term funding remains tenuous. I equated what’s been proposed as “putting a blowout patch on a worn tire.”
“And it seems to me we need something bigger,” I said. “But if we get something bigger, there’s something we will need that we’re probably not going to have next year, and that is a countywide ambulance tax that everybody pays based on value of property countywide. And I don’t think there’s time to do that, and I think that’s probably the only solution.”
Pierre St. Perez represents the City of Ithaca on TCCOG. Suitably served by Bangs Ambulance, Ithaca suffers least from the current EMS crisis, should one exist. St. Perez urged thoughtfulness, not haste:
“What I hear in the discussion is we have a need,” St. Perez said. “But if we push forward in a certain degree of frustration, that need’s not going to be met. I am concerned that it might undercut how actually deep the need is and the County’s ability to push for it in a holistic way, rather than trying to patch it short-term.”
County Administrator Korsah Akumfi took much the same position. “So if there’s a commitment to fund it for 2026, is there going to be a commitment to fund for 2027?” Akumfi asked. “Because it’s not worth funding something of this magnitude for a year,” he observed. “It’s a commitment that has to be established that is the way you are going, and we [then] put it as part of our program and create the funding mechanism to sustain the program.”
One should step back and always remember that Tompkins County’s Rapid Medical Response program was initiated in 2024 with a single purpose: to supplement during daytime hours weekdays the work of rural volunteer rescue squads whose ranks had become depleted. RMR was never envisioned to operate ambulances or replace existing ambulances unable to respond sufficiently fast. Enhanced RMR—perhaps desirable, perhaps necessary— must always be viewed as mission creep.
Tompkins County Budget: County Administrator Korsah Akumfi provided TCCOG with a preview of 2026 Tompkins County Budget planning one day after the Legislature had met for a semi-private “July Budget Retreat,” its second retreat this year, “semi-private” only because no known outsiders had attended.
Unlike in prior years and at Akumfi’s request, legislators have set no “target” tax levy increases for 2026. Rather, the Administrator has solicited and compiled departmental requests. Akumfi’s placed them within two categories: 1) those that would provide “Maintenance of Effort,” allowing continuation of current programs; and 2) “Enhancement Requests,” additional spending to address pressing needs. Those “Enhancement Requests,” summarized later, though never stated with precision, would spend $2.9 Million more toward capital programs, assign $2.3 Million to the Airport, allocate $1.9 Million toward agency program expenses, and put $3.7 Million into higher salaries and fringe benefits.
“For us to provide the maintenance-of-effort… and also accept new requests that have come in, we’re looking at the deficit of 22.1 Million. That’s about (a) 40.3 percent… increase on our tax levy,” Administrator Akumfi advised TCCOG of the worst-case alternative. “And also for maintenance-of-effort alone, if we do not approve any new requests that have come in as of now, we’re looking at a deficit of 11.1 Million,” the Administrator cautioned. “That puts us around about 20.3 percent tax levy increase.”
As a 20 or 40 percent tax increase stands unrealistic, Akumfi shared with TCCOG a slide from the retreat that calculated five different “scenarios” with tax levy increases ranging from four percent to ten percent. TCCOG presiding officer Dan Lamb’s immediate reaction to Administrator Akumfi’s budget overview was this: “Thank you, Korsah; pretty stark.”
Presentations: TCCOG received a general status update from the Cayuga Lake Watershed Intermunicipal Organization concerning its ongoing operations, including its 2025 Work Plan. CWIO has set new, higher Organization Dues with a total goal of $130,000, contributions to be phased-in over a three-year period. Counties collectively will contribute one-third of the dues; municipalities two-thirds. CWIO set the Town of Enfield’s eventual (2028) contribution at $1,562, constituting a 1.8 percent share of the goal.
Claire Walsh Winsler, Director of Food, Agriculture and Land Use for Environmental Advocates New York, detailed current challenges affecting soil, water and food quality arising from the application of toxic sewage sludge onto farmland. Although the sludge from Tompkins County’s sewage plants is now landfilled rather than spread onto land, Walsh Winsler is pushing for a statewide ban, with legislation having passed the State Senate this year, but not the Assembly. The danger, our presenter said, is that industrial contaminants, including PFAS “Forever Chemicals,” can enter the environment through deposited sludge. Walsh Winsler’s entire presentation can be viewed on the Tompkins County website.
Respectfully submitted,
Robert Lynch, Councilperson
Enfield TCCOG Representative