by Robert Lynch; August 26, 2025
Upon learning of the news, one former Tompkins County official greeted it this way: “Welcome to the Police State.”
A legislative committee Tuesday recommended a major hardening of building and meeting security for Tompkins County Government. As one key component, security guards and screening devices—wands and/or magnetometers—would confront attendees to all Tompkins County Legislature and legislative committee meetings.
Key members of the Legislature’s Public Safety Committee made no secret of why they’d endorsed County Administration’s security recommendation. They fear political violence.
“There’s a national trend of people being frustrated with government and with people struggling with mental health issues,” legislator Shawna Black, the committee’s strongest supporter of the new security measures, told colleagues at the August 26 session. “And so I think it’s important for people who are at this table as well as for our staff to feel safe whenever they come to work, and that hasn’t always happened.”
The resolution won support by a four-to-one committee vote Tuesday. Its text was not made public prior to the meeting, nor was it readily available that day other than in legislative chambers. But based on what committee members disclosed during their discussions, the proposal would authorize hiring seven new security guards and station them at selected building entrances at specific times.
The resolution would also purchase a magnetometer for the DeWitt Park ground floor entrance to the Legislature’s meeting place. And it would station guards at both the Whole Health and Mental Health Department buildings, bolstering existing security at that latter location.
The security spending would draw $138,000 from the current budget’s contingency account to cover 2025 expenses. Additional “over-target” spending of $610,000 would cover expected costs next year.
“This was something we were asked to put together by County Administration to help address some of what were considered immediate needs for security and public safety coverage in some of our buildings, including having staff for the Legislature meetings and also for our committee meetings,” Michael Stitley, Tompkins County’s Director of Emergency Response, told the committee.
Stitley said County Administration had directed his office to construct the security plan. County Administrator Korsah Akumfi, hired only last January but quickly and eagerly assuming his leadership stature, attended the meeting and defended the security measures he’d recommended.
Security is not just for legislators and employees, “but for members of the public as well,” Akumfi insisted.
“They need to feel safe, they need to feel protected, and they need to feel guided,” Akumfi stated. “A sense of security that is visible around the county seat area is very helpful,” the Administrator asserted.
Akumfi broadened expected benefits beyond just for meetings and for the buildings, extending them “for the community as a whole,” for instance, to places like DeWitt Park, not far from the 19th Century building where lawmakers meet.
But take a step back for a moment and ponder the Administrator’s statement. One could analogize the same principal of community benefit to the deployment National Guard troops on the Washington Mall, or in Downtown Los Angeles or Chicago.
The Department of Emergency Response’s recommended staffing plan backed by the committee would not provide full-time guard-duty at legislative chambers. It would only do so during meetings of the Legislature and its committees. After-hours guard staffing would rotate somewhat. Guards would secure the Whole Health and Mental Health Departments when those offices hold evening counseling sessions, yet seek to coordinate health departmental schedules with nights when the Legislature meets and avoid staff being needed two places at once.
As part of the plan, staffing would harden at the Mental Health facilities on Ithaca’s East Green Street. Security would extend bag and visitor searches to outside the front lobby and just inside the front door. Security at Whole Health would be something new.
Employees paid by the State Courts system already search those entering Tompkins County’s Main Courthouse and have done so for decades. Guards and Magnetometers showed up at the County-supervised Human Services Building about a year ago.
Tuesday’s resolution left unclear whether some of the proposed added spending would cover existing security measures at the Mental Health and Human Services buildings.
“I don’t want people to think that government is any more or less safe than any other workplace,” Republican legislator Mike Sigler qualified. “This is bigger than I had anticipated,” Sigler said of the seven-person hiring plan and its expected cost.
Republican committee members Sigler and Lee Shurtleff each joined Democrats Shawna Black and Veronica Pillar in supporting the security resolution. But Sigler and Shurtleff did so with reservations. Each voted his support arguing the proposal deserved the full Legislature to weigh in. Yet neither promised he’d give the resolution his final support.
Public Safety Committee Chair Rich John cast the committee’s only dissent. But he, too, remained torn as to how he’d vote when the Legislature considers it, likely on October 7.
“The trouble I’m wrestling with if this passes and we put it in place, we will have more security on any given day for the County than we do Sheriff’s deputies on the street,” Sigler concluded. “That’s hard to reconcile for me. There should be a way to secure a building like I secure my house.”
To some extent, that’s already been done. At a meeting in December of last year, the Legislature authorized several building hardening measures that a security study had recommended. Among other things, visitors to the Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins Building, the Legislature’s home, can now only enter by first “buzzing in” a legislative clerk. Similar security protocols exist at the “Old Jail” offices next door.
But legislative staffers routinely disable the buzz-in system prior to public meetings. What’s proposed now is not so much a building security measure as it is one founded on an inherent suspicion of anyone who seeks to participate or observe public democracy’s daily tasks. That’s a far different matter.
The City of Ithaca has long employed magnetometer screenings and bag searches. Security tightened after a heckler once tossed his shoe at former Ithaca Mayor Carolyn Peterson during a Common Council meeting.
“If someone is going to come in here and harm any of us, whether it be us or our employees, this will hopefully be a deterrent,” Shawna Black said as she referenced the new security measures she supported. “I know other communities and other municipalities have taken steps before us, and we tried to put it off a little bit, but I hope that we do move forward with this because I am afraid that if we don’t, something tragic could happen to us.”
Black asked County Attorney Maury Josephson whether Tompkins County incurs legal risk by not instituting tougher safeguards. Josephson replied it’s a question of negligence law: did government exercise an adequate “duty of care,” a standard that he admitted is “hard to define with precision.”
“I would imagine if there were a significant shooting event, where there were deaths, one or more deaths or serious injuries, and there was not security, that the County could face a hefty liability in those situations,” Josephson opined.
Shawna Black claimed that if one considers “threats” read in word but not conveyed in deed, public antipathy against those we elect locally—including her—has grown of late. Black claimed that for her, “concerning emails” have multiplied “20-fold, even from last year.”
“I don’t know this is getting us where we need to go,” Public Safety Committee Chair Rich John observed of what the committee that afternoon had recommended. John recalled his serving as a congressional intern decades ago and having then roamed freely under the Washington Capitol dome, security almost nonexistent. Security’s much different there now, he said. Maybe it needs to be here as well.
“Unfortunately, it seems like our society has just fundamentally changed since when I was an intern,” Rich John lamented, “in that the acceptability of atrocious behavior is now allowed and particularly by a lot of political leaders, where we should know better and we don’t.”
Rich John didn’t name names.
Whether necessary or not, the new security people and expensive things proposed for Tompkins County’s facilities come at a price, a significant one. Lee Shurtleff cautioned that adding $610,000 to next year’s budget would bring with it a more than one percent increase in the tax levy.
“It’s money that doesn’t do anything,” Rich John acknowledged. Yes, it protects a few from potential harm that may come—or may never come. That said, John concluded, “I doesn’t provide services to constituents, other than when they attend a meeting, perhaps.”
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