CMC last-minute lifeline dims Enfield agencies’ funding hopes
Reporting and analysis by Robert Lynch; August 22, 2024
When it comes to Tompkins County’s Community Recovery Fund, two facts stand out: Cayuga Medical Center will always receive the benefit of the doubt; and Enfield’s deserving agencies will always receive nothing.
It happened again Tuesday. It happened by surprise. And it happened because Tompkins County Legislature Chair Dan Klein bent a rule he’d earlier helped make.
With two members absent—Shawna Black was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention—the legislature voted eleven-to-one to grant Cayuga Medical (CMC) a one-month extended deadline to secure the state approvals it needs to access a long-standing, $1.5 Million grant from the Recovery Fund. CMC would use the money to build a Crisis Stabilization Center to treat mental health emergencies.
“Finance took a harder look within themselves to see if we could extend that deadline, and the answer was, yes, we could,” Klein told legislators.
The 31-day extension means more than just the flip of a calendar page. It cements a make-or-break choice. By pushing CMC’s approval deadline from the end of this month to the end of next, Albany’s more-likely-than-not rejection of the hospital corporation’s request would provide too little time for local officials to repurpose the $1.5 Million to other deserving Recovery Fund applicants, including two from Enfield.
The Community Recovery Fund, created by the County Legislature in 2021, passes through a fraction of our county’s share of the federally-supported American Rescue Plan (ARPA). Those ARPA rules set firm deadlines, one of which falls this December. And while local administrators may push themselves to the limit to accommodate CMC’s last-minute compliance, they indicated Tuesday that they will not do so for anyone else.
Their decision means that if state approvals don’t come in, and if CMC loses its Recovery Fund award, Tompkins County will likely—and quickly—redirect the $1.5 Million into its General Fund, where it will be used to buy bulldozers and the like.
“That’s the worst news you’ve told me tonight, Bob,” a frustrated Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners Chair Greg Stevenson told this writer/Councilperson, Robert Lynch, Tuesday night when advised of the impending one-month CMC extended deadline. The Board of Commissioners was meeting in Enfield as the County Legislature was conferring downtown. Legislators voted about an hour after Enfield’s meeting adjourned.
The Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) that the commissioners oversee was one of two Enfield agencies that stood among a select list of finalists poised to receive Recovery Fund cash should the hospital’s application get denied. The Enfield Community Council was the other.
The EVFC became the second runner-up for funding last year in the Recovery Fund’s most recent major round of disbursements. Though it had sought more support initially, Enfield’s Fire Company in May 2023 requested between $50,000 and $178,000 for its “Capital Improvement Project.” Fire Company President Dennis Hubbell said Tuesday that EVFC would have used the funds to build a “bunk room” for volunteers and for other worthwhile projects.
Fourteen of 35 funding candidates received Recovery Fund support in that May ’23 round of awards. The EVFC came in at number sixteen.
The Enfield Community Council fell a bit lower on last year’s list of 35. It sought—and still seeks—a minimum $146,000 to replace a dilapidated trailer adjacent to its Community Center with a Mental Health Wing. The expansion would in part provide counseling services to Enfield residents.
It was Legislature Chair Klein—who also chairs the Community Recovery Fund Advisory Committee—who joined in a committee request in late-June that put CMC on-notice: Either obtain the long-denied New York State approvals for the Crisis Stabilization Center by August 30th, or else forfeit its $1.5 Million Recovery Fund award. CMC’s was by far the largest amount distributed.
The committee gave a similar ultimatum to Khuba International, the organization which seeks to establish a cooperative farm in Danby. Khuba got $74,086 from the fund in May of last year, but faces delays—and perhaps resistance—from some Danby Town zoning officials.
Tuesday’s adopted resolution granted both CMC and Khuba a one-month deadline extension.
“CMC has had almost two years to get those state approvals since the legislature awarded them that $1.5 Million,” this writer, representing Enfield, told the County Legislature Tuesday. Conveyed was a Town Board Resolution, adopted August 14th, recommending that any unused Recovery Fund moneys be redistributed to earlier-denied applicants.
“We really feel it would be unfortunate, and to a certain extent a retraction of your earlier commitments, to take this money and fold it back into what I affectionately call ‘Bucks for Bulldozers,’ which means taking the money back if CMC can’t use it and spending it on highway equipment or something else,” this Councilperson told legislators, speaking before Klein’s extended deadline was placed on the legislature’s floor. If the state approvals come through by August 30th, “then this is academic,” I qualified. “But we thought… our Town Board should be on record in favor of using this money for its original purpose.”
Legislature Chair Klein had suggested at a committee meeting August 5th that any redirected recovery funds go toward Highway Department purchases should CMC default. Nothing he said at Tuesday’s full Legislature meeting dispelled that idea.
Only Newfield-Enfield legislator Randy Brown dissented on granting the critical, one-month extension of the CMC and Khuba deadlines.
Enfield’s other representative, Anne Koreman, supported the revised, September 30th deadline. Ithaca legislator Veronica Pillar, who in committee had voiced support for redistributing forfeited CMC funds to other agencies, was among the two members excused from the meeting.
Dan Klein sprung his extended deadline initiative with no public forewarning. It found its way into legislators’ secretive “red folders” and was not published with the evening’s agenda.
“It is now believed that a September 30, 2024 deadline will give the County sufficient time to reallocate the money, if necessary,” Klein’s red-folder Resolution sought to justify what he’d proposed.
But “reallocate the money” to whom?
“I don’t know what another 30 days does,” legislator Travis Brooks asked. “I’ve heard Veronica loud and clear. I’ve heard other members of the community loud and clear about the possibilities of using those funds for some of the things we didn’t fund instead of trucks and stuff for the County,” Brooks said.
“So I can’t support this,” Brooks continued. (He eventually did.) “They’ve had two years,” he observed of the hospital’s elusive quest. “Have they indicated they can get this done in that time if we give them 30 days?” he asked Klein.
“So they haven’t quite indicated that they can,” Klein told Brooks. “But there are things happening on both of these projects (CMC and Khuba) that’s coming in the next 30 days that will kinda’ just indicate one way or the other whether they’re likely to be successful or not.”
No, Dan Klein’s answer did not ring with confidence. Instead, it suggested a heaping abundance of high-powered, brute force arm-twisting by Ithaca’s monopoly hospital.
“They are expecting certain things to come into play within the next 30 days that will indicate whether they think they can go ahead with the project as currently outlined or not,” Klein said.
But just stop and think: Our giant hospital, our powerful, pushy, opulent Cayuga Health, quite plainly senses no shame as it sits upon—some might say, squanders—$1.5 Million in governmental generosity, money Albany’s upper-floor bureaucrats may never permit it to spend. CMC is running out the clock while other deserving applicants could put that money to good use right now.
Quite plainly, based on the words Dan Klein employed, Cayuga Health has relied on nothing more than a hope and a prayer and an overdose of wishful thinking. If only County legislators could see what the Enfield Town Board clearly does.
The legislative chair also said Khuba officials had met with Danby authorities earlier that day. Klein hadn’t learned the meeting’s outcome.
County Administrator Lisa Holmes was off her game Tuesday night. Troubled by things unexplained, she struggled through a fund balance presentation earlier in the meeting, a presentation sometimes painful to watch. And the soon-to-retire administrator deferred to her deputy, Norma Jayne, when asked by Brooks whether there’s time before year’s end to redirect surplus Community Recovery funds to back-up applicants.
“As much as I’d love to see that happen, I think that if we had to go outside the County (that is, County departments)… to try to coordinate with the different agencies to get contracts signed within the timeline, that would be very difficult,” Jayne replied.
Mind you, it would not be impossible to do what Brooks had proposed; just messy. It’s County Budget season. A new budget director is still in training. Jayne may need to write most of the budget herself. Legislators always complicate the process more than they probably should. Quite simply, administrators would rather not be bothered with doing anything more.
“I’ve got the contracts on my desk,” Enfield Fire Company President Hubbell stated bluntly at the Commissioners’ meeting Tuesday, Hubbell believing administrative staff had exaggerated their headache. Likewise, ECC President Cortney Bailey has said that within days of an award to her agency, she could get contracts signed, an old building torn down, and the new wing started.
But there’s a back-door Tompkins County strategy also at work here, one only hinted about in public. If the state approvals don’t come through, and County Government needs to claw back CMC’s lost $1.5 Million to buy bulldozers and the like, some would like Tompkins County to repurpose its own taxpayer dollars to underwrite the Crisis Stabilization Center—and do so at a time when state regulators become more receptive to it.
A mental health stabilization unit is “desperately needed” here, Lansing’s Mike Sigler stated in support of last-ditch lobbying and another month’s delay. “Frankly, there no real excuse for us at this point not to have a unit like this,” Sigler said. He’s optimistic that, given time, regulators will come around to his thinking.
But sorry, even if Tompkins County finds a way to circumvent state law and “gift” Cayuga Health the Stabilization Center’s subsidy later, those state prohibitions would undoubtedly slam the door shut on agencies like the ECC or Enfield’s firefighters.
Legislator Greg Mezey pointedly asked whether a government—his government—could pull off such a fiscal shell-game; whether it could redirect CMC’s potentially-forfeited cash for County use, but then replenish the Recovery Fund coffers later with local tax dollars and do so legally. Administrator Holmes and County Attorney Maury Josephson each agreed it could not.
“So it’s either they (CMC and the state) get their act together by September 30th, or it’s ‘Dollars for Dozers,’” Mezey asked the chairman.
“Yes,” Klein answered.
“That’s unfortunate,” Mezey said with sadness.
****
Yes, it’s unfortunate. But of course, it’s predictable. For us living in this west-side outlier of a town, the Tompkins County Community Recovery Fund remains as it’s always been: It’s a fund for somebody else. The ARPA clock ticks. The hospital banks on a prayer. Administrators make things easy on themselves. And Enfield, again, receives nothing. Life goes on, we guess.
###