Harold’s Square pitched to County for Center of Government
“Let’s not let our egos determine the trajectory.”
Center of Government critic Amanda Kirchgessner, to the County Legislature.
by Robert Lynch; September 23, 2025
They brought out the heaviest of heavy-hitters; Martha Robertson, former Chair of the Tompkins County Legislature and one-time influencer on the Tompkins County Industrial Development Agency (IDA). She’d once called public purchase of buildings adjacent to the Courthouse for a new Center of Government the fulfillment of a 20-year dream.
But on September 16, addressing the County Legislature she once chaired, and speaking this time as a private citizen, Martha Robertson changed her tune.
“Harold’s Square has got almost 58,000 square feet of existing office space that is ready for the County to take possession,” Robertson informed lawmakers. You “should be able to find what you need there,” she advised colleagues, some of whom she’d once led.
Developers of Harold’s Square want to offload their office space to Tompkins County. They want to do it badly…. and do it now.
Revealing plans never before made public, Harold’s Square owners approached the County Legislature last Tuesday—with Robertson as their lead-off salesperson. They urged lawmakers to ditch their plans for a $50-60 Million stand-alone Downtown Center of Government at East Buffalo and North Tioga Streets and put space-starved departments in their own building instead.
“I’m here to propose our property on the Commons as an alternative for the proposed Center of Government for the County,” Sam Lubin, one of the principals behind Harold’s Holding, LLC, told legislators. “We have space available equaling or exceeding for what is proposed in the plans for the new Center,” Lubin boasted.
“So we’ve got beautiful space. It would be wonderful to see it utilized in this fashion,” said Jim McGuire, General Manager of MDC Harold’s, LLC, a Buffalo and Florida-based development firm that’s become the project’s prime backer, as he extolled the office building’s attributes.
As anyone who’s ventured to Downtown Ithaca realizes, Harold’s Square is the biggest of the big; the building that stands most prominently among those Commons-centric, tax-abated, reach-to-the sky office and housing hybrids that will forever transform Downtown’s landscape, and probably not for the better.
Harold’s Square stands 12 stories tall. Its residential tower, discretely tucked away from the pedestrian mall, stacks 78 apartments beside and atop one another, according to promotional literature. Out front, five floors, with a professed 70,000 square feet in retail and office space, overlook the Commons.
Where Harold’s Square stands at mid-decade gives telling testament to post-pandemic brick-and-mortar pain. Harold’s Square is hurting. Maybe its residential side is holding its own. But plain for everyone to see, its commercial component cannot be doing well. Hardly anybody rents space there. Harold’s Square’s ground floor remains a structural skeleton. Since it was built, the building’s retail offering has never held a permanent tenant. Supposedly, a restaurant once laid plans to open there, yet never did.
“When I was on the IDA and approved the building, it was a whole different economic climate,” Robertson informed the Tompkins Legislature. “Since COVID, we know that office space has really gotten vacated, where people are just not using the space that was previously planned,” she said.
In a trio of privilege-of-the-floor presentations September 16 by Harold’s Holding’s principals and by Robertson, financial desperation became clear to spot. Each speaker bent over backwards to accommodate Tompkins County’s desires in whatever way might gain consent.
“We are more than willing to be flexible to suit the County’s needs, whether that be lease, lease-buy or sale, as well as offer flexibility in terms of buildout,” Lubin said.
“We think it could be very cost-effective,” McGuire advised legislators. “We’re estimating that we could deliver something in the ‘low 20’s’—20-something Million Dollars, versus a current (Center of Government) budget of about 50 Million. And we could do it obviously very quickly because the shell and infrastructure of the building is all up and in place,” McGuire added.
For her part, Martha Robertson held out the prospect that Harold’s Square’s developers could sweeten the deal by buying the three Courthouse-adjacent buildings the County has intended to deconstruct and clear the site to put the Center of Government there. Two of those buildings taxpayers paid some $3 Million to buy back in 2021.
Robertson even suggested that developers would offer naming rights and place Tompkins County’s name upon the Harold’s Square building.
And yes, Martha Robertson’s surprising endorsement of the Harold’s Square alternative is a very big deal.
For the better part of a year now, it’s often seemed that the Tompkins County’s Center of Government project has found itself the captive of bureaucratic inertia. It’s become a prisoner seeking to break itself free of close-minded political and administrative expectations and pursue its own path toward creative alternatives. Still, every time one of those intriguing options surfaces, some consultant, some administrator, or maybe a legislative majority yanks the project back to the route lawmakers planned it to take four years ago, namely to take the shape of a pricey new building at Tioga Street and East Buffalo.
Last spring, possibly the best option of all suddenly came to light as Tompkins Community Bank foreclosed on the mammoth, 18-building Cornell Business Park in Lansing, It followed a private developer’s failure to make good on a $68 Million ground lease mortgage.
Tompkins Bank offered County Government one or more of the buildings. In a later-disclosed memo, County Administrator Korsah Akumfi recommended against purchasing anything at the Business Park. The Legislature followed suit on June third. It doubled-down on its original plans and moved ahead with new construction downtown. The Business Park has gotten little mention since.
And despite the full court press given this latest possibility, Harold’s Square, on September 16, the official reaction from officials that night proved decidedly lukewarm.
For just about every good argument raised to support Harold’s Square, a counter-argument surfaced to confront it. Cost comparisons could deceive, some would say. Key departments, quartered just a few short blocks away, might find themselves too far distant from the Courthouse to do their business, another argument went. And where, for that matter, would all the newly-transported employees park their cars?
The Center of Government’s $50 Million estimate “includes a lot of other things besides just the construction of the building itself.” Legislature Chair Dan Klein cautioned. “It includes deconstruction of the current buildings; it includes the moving-in and moving-out costs,” the chairman reminded project skeptics.
“It includes rental and/or purchase or sale of other buildings to be used temporarily while construction is going on, Klein continued. “And it includes renovation to the existing buildings as we shuffle departments around, renovations that have been deferred for many, many years, that we would have had to pay for anyway.”
“And furniture,” a fellow legislator—it sounded like Ulysses-Enfield’s Anne Koreman—chimed in.
Later in the meeting, County Administrator Korsah Akumfi raised the same argument as had Klein.
“So we need to make sure we are quantifying everything in terms of what we’re going to do with the Center of Government project. It’s not just construction of the new building, but the whole project in itself,” Akumfi said.
In the Administrator’s opinion, offices in the Old Jail, first repurposed from correctional use in the early-1990’s, will need updating as new departments move into them. Legislative chambers need remodeling, too, even though the Legislature only moved into them in 2013.
Standing by itself, the Center of Government building, Akumfi posited, would only cost “35 or 36 million or so.”
Yet the Klein-Akumfi qualifications and breakouts can deceive as well. The Center of Government master plan anticipates mass migrations of very many departments. Were Tompkins County not to “shuffle departments around” as much, fewer renovations would be needed; fewer new desks and chairs purchased; and fewer swing-space buildings bought in different places to quarter staff temporarily.
Moreover, should Martha Robertson prove correct and Harold’s Square owners were to buy the Courthouse block structures, County Government would find no need to deconstruct them at public expense.
Builder Tim Ciaschi attended the Legislature’s September 16 meeting. And he brought with him props; blocks, 12-inches square.
With those blocks, Ciaschi compared square-foot construction costs: a $50 Million, 48,000-square foot Center of Government at $1,041 per square foot, versus the $90 per square foot cost for the Dutch Mill Road building in Lansing that Tompkins County bought in early-August to temporarily house the Assessment Department and the Office for the Aging.
Ciaschi also claimed Cayuga Medical Center recently purchased 61,000 square feet at the financially-flagging Lansing mall at $377 per square foot; “all-inclusive, and it’s gorgeous,” he said.
“It’s not financially responsible” to spend what Tompkins County’s proposing toward its new building,” Ciaschi argued, even though he and Dan Klein might quibble over the comparison’s validity. “Use what we have and be fiscally responsible,” Ciaschi asserted. “Spending this kind of money, not a good idea, especially in today’s times,” he said. “We’ve got to take care of taxpayers in a reasonable way.”
Another speaker—perhaps recruited by the Harold’s Square promoters to attend, or perhaps not—urged the Center of Government project be put to public referendum. It never will be, of course. The speaker also demanded a cost-benefit analysis. “We shouldn’t be spending $55 Million to make government employees feel more comfortable,” he asserted.
Harold’s Square advocates found themselves sandwiched that night amongst a gallery of community activists, most who’d come to speak out against County Government’s continued use of “Flock” surveillance technology that track license plates. So the Harold’s Square message found itself diffused amidst the competing din. Amanda Kirchgessner, a one-time candidate for Enfield Town Supervisor, attended for yet another reason. Still, she offered a passing swipe at the Center of Government plans.
“Please delay breaking ground on the ‘COG’,” Kirchgessner pleaded. “Delay any decisions for just a little bit more research. I know that we can do better as an educated community. Let’s not let our egos determine the trajectory.”
The downtown behemoth that is Harold’s Square cost an estimated $42.9 Million, according to developers’ documents filed with the Tompkins County IDA in 2017. The project carries a decade-long, graduated tax abatement that commenced in 2021 and runs through 2031. County legislator Martha Robertson sat on the IDA Board when it granted the abatement.
Were Tompkins County to buy a portion of the Harold’s Square building now, the County’s purchased portion presumably would fall off the tax rolls permanently.
Several days after the Legislature met, Newfield-Enfield’s Randy Brown, Chair of the Downtown Facilities Special Committee, the committee granted oversight in Center of Government matters, remained unsure as to whether the long-darkened, high-ceilinged first-floor retail space of Harold’s Square would become part of what Tompkins County might lease or buy, even were it interested.
Brown accepted Robertson’s invitation to tour Harold’s Square September 12, one of the few—perhaps the only—governmental leader to do so. Brown’s report to colleagues four days later was mixed.
“It’s a nice, big, beautiful building on the Commons,” Brown reported. “It would be less expensive for the County to move to a facility that’s already built,” Brown reasoned,” probably about half the cost (maybe a trifle more),” he said. It’s got a full basement for storage. But there are limitations, Brown cautioned. Some ceilings are low. Departments like the County Clerk might find it too far from the action. And “parking’s always an issue,” Brown cautioned.
Then, there’s…well… the Ithaca Commons itself. As Brown walked the Commons for an hour the day of his inspection, he said he was begged for money twice. People were smoking marijuana “in various places.” One dog was trying to bite another. And electric bikes were flying down the center of the walkway at Noon. Most of those activities violate City rules, but “nobody’s there to change any of that,” Brown lamented.
Again, institutional inertia reigns, at least for now. Tompkins County’s Center of Government probably will never move into Harold’s Square, even though there are good arguments it should do so. And if not there, that it should move out to Lansing, to the business park.
“There’s a way to do this,” Martha Robertson counseled the Legislature, as she urged a mental reset toward Harold’s Square. “I really urge you to take time, take a look, and have an open mind.” Take a tour, too, she recommended.
“We hope it’s not too late for you to give some thoughtful consideration to this alternative,” Jim McGuire added. “And we would obviously work in good faith and earnestly to do something that’s very beneficial to the community and would stabilize this asset and create a very nice presence on the Commons.”
“All we ask is for consideration,” Sam Lubin joined in.
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