In Tompkins County; when sacrifices have to be made: they don’t ask what? – They ask who? And the county’s rural residents are at the top of the list. We are the stumbling block to Cornell’s completely homogenized and conforming community vision – and their Legislature is always removing our services and increasing our taxes. How can they do this? Why don’t you ask the 30,000 students that give them that power – they’re our future.
Exposing misconduct, corruption, and cronyism in Tompkins County is not just digging into the past – it’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
“Tompkins County and Tammany Hall” documented only small piece of the overarching policies and actions that dominate and control the lives of the county’s rural residents – and includes nothing that has occurred since its publication.
An unfinished and unpublished companion piece to the “Truck Route” chapter [Road Weary] has even more jaw-dropping disclosures of the actions of local and County authorities; and their ongoing displacement and oppression of the rural community – actions that only those who feel beyond the reach of social justice and legal oversight would commit.
I have sent copies of the book to many people who, I thought, would be open to change – without even getting an acknowledgement – and bringing readers up to date would do nothing to change the situation – it would only increase the “body count.”
It’s hopeless – but I have a plan – as my cousin used to say: “Don’t force it; get a bigger hammer.”
Ithaca is the place where everybody wants to live: because it’s the only place in the county where people have individual worth.
While Ithaca rules the county – it never leads by example. Their plan to blanket rural Lansing with CAFOs is balanced by their own petition to the New York State Supreme Court: enumerating serious concerns about lack of CAFO and Agricultural regulation and oversight, lack of disclosure, and the possible effects of modern farming practices on their own residents and the their own town’s environment. Lansing’s puppet government has expressed no concerns at all.
Ithaca is Camelot: A castle community where people dump their slop on the unprotected commoners outside the walls – without a second thought.
Where would you want to live?
Tompkins County is all about coincidences – but those days are about over: the strata of the New Society is clearly defined by Doctrine. There is no longer any reason to obscure the facts – just be more “important,” be “owed,” or “identified as a need” – and your ascension is a matter of public proclamation.
As for Tompkins County’s poor, marginalized, and underserved rural people – Well, there can’t be a higher; unless there’s a lower — and those “Good-old boy, hillbilly, redneck, lily-whites” don’t deserve to live there, anyway.
In “Tompkins County and Tammany Hall”: I documented the County Highway Director claiming to a Legislator: “I have researched the area and talked to highway officials in Lansing and they report there are no large through haul trucks utilizing Lansingville Road. What is using the road is as I thought, Agriculture Vehicles.”
And in spite of many photographs that were submitted; showing tractor-trailers, cement mixers, gravel dump trucks, and semi-flatbeds carrying industrial equipment using that same road – he never changed that claim.
When this conduct was brought to the attention of the County Ethics Advisory Board – their response never acknowledged it. When it was brought to the attention of the Ithaca-Tompkins County Transportation Council – they never acknowledged it. When I sent the book to Town, County, and State authorities – none of them would acknowledge his conduct [or even acknowledge receipt of the book.]
No one would address it, and no one would talk about it — and as a consequence: they said everything we needed to know.
Progressive thinking is always based on their own superiority – not the recognition of the worth of other people: and the foundation of their policy making is not having that superiority questioned – ever.
The lie of Biden’s Social Policies is their claim to be the instrument of equitable treatment for all those who are poor, marginalized, and underserved.
Tompkins County’s rural population, like rural communities throughout America, is the poorest, most marginalized, and underserved segment of the population — and is beaten, robbed, and disrespected in every trumpeted policy of its overwhelmingly Progressive government.
When a lie is the basis – like the Emperor’s New Clothes: anyone who claims to see through it is labeled “unworthy.”
The back of the bus – the end of the string – by putting rural people last; they’re able to oppress by exclusion – we get less, or nothing: because there’s nothing left – someone measured wrong – it’s unexpected – there isn’t enough money – enough workers – enough government interest. They always run out of everything; by giving plenty to everyone else first.
There are exceptions: the tax assessors are never too busy to give us the highest possible assessments. Tompkins County’s policies are forcing the same rural families that its roads were named after out of their homes. Does that mean that policies will be changed? Of course not — it means they’re working.
“Cornithaca County is so corrupt: Their disclosure statements are blank pages.” Government corruption is prevalent in New York — so much so that just saying “government” is enough for most residents. And the ethics codes are so detailed in what they cover – so that they can be made to exclude everything they don’t detail.
But one place where details are notoriously lacking is in the state’s disclosure statements. The Ag Disclosure statement for prospective buyers in Agricultural Districts merely states “farming activities may include, but not be limited to, activities that cause noise, dust and odors” — failing to mention that these activities have locally necessitated the removal of eyelids and caused brain damage among their neighbors. Tompkins County Legislators called the County Board of Realtors and the Agriculture Committee the “stakeholders.” If they’re the stakeholders: what are the prospective buyers? Patsies. Victims. Fools.
Petitions are a democratic tool for meaningful participation in policy making; but in Tompkins County; there is no meaningful participation – because it’s not a democracy.
“Petitions hold no merit.” — Unnamed county superintendent
Like those lesser-born of the past; laboring under royalty and at the mercy of repressive autocracies — the validity of residents’ requests is entirely dependent upon the approval of those in charge; those at the top.
Tompkins County’s Elite have it all their own way — they’re used to having it all their own way.
And with the “representative” power of 40,000 uninvolved student transients, and Legislative districting out of Gerrymandering 101: it’s not likely to change.
They decide. For you . . . and for themselves. Everything. Always. It’s a drug.
Cornell’s Design Connect: Transportation Issue Assessment and Best Practices Guide leaves out the most important planning ingredient: the people. Its self-serving New Urbanism vision sees rural Lansing’s urban sprawl bedroom community as a solution; not a problem – and its recommendations are designed to maximize the community’s size and density. The town’s original rural residents are never mentioned – except as an obstacle. They are “outside the Study area” — outsiders in their own town.
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COMPLETE STREETS
A children’s puzzle-book approach to solving real-world problems
It’s NIMBY planning with Ivy League backing: Cornell’s Design Connect Complete Streets transportation “design interventions” drop the traffic and esthetic of a “mini-city” urban sprawl bedroom community into the middle of a green rural landscape.
It’s part of the University’s plan to solve Ithaca’s residential development and housing problems — by dumping them on someone else: the rural town of Lansing.
Cornell’s Design Connect isn’t just looking to help residents; they’re advocating “changes to town policy and planning procedure” as well.
It isn’t surprising that their policy recommendations echo every other “helping” voice – since it’s all the same voice and the same agenda. While the Design Connect study uses every possible reason for increasing the construction of residential housing in Lansing; it declares that the town should: “Limit the acreage of land zoned for commercial and light industrial uses in the Town. Dis-courage strip commercial development through appropriate zoning mechanisms. Limit heavy industry to existing Industrial/Research (IR) Districts.”
“County” planning has decided that Ithaca should be the only business center, and has actively worked to block Lansing’s attempts bring businesses into town — the Tompkins County Legislature actually went to Albany to stop NYSEG from supplying Lansing with the natural gas that was needed for new commercial and industrial development.
“. . . the southern portion of the town of Lansing will likely continue to serve as a bedroom community for Ithaca professionals and other workers.”
Design Connect’s “Best Planning Practices” not only accept the existence of a major urban sprawl bedroom community in the rural town of Lansing; they seek to greatly increase its size and density through “urban design overlay zones,” and recommend that the town “increase density and provide affordable housing,” change zoning with “reduced minimum open space requirements,” “Density Bonuses,” and “Amended Density Requirements,” – and build a new infrastructure to accommodate that increase – merely tacking on the goals of efficiency and low carbon emissions onto what is clearly not the “best planning practice” for a rural community.
Their recommendations for Lansing include “redevelopment of underutilized properties”; while at the same time there are block after block of old wood-frame houses in downtown Ithaca that would be perfect sites for redevelopment as high-density housing, and thousands of unused acres suitable for building surrounding the City’s core.
The redevelopment of Ithaca’s unused and underutilized building lots, and creation of affordable and appropriate urban housing, will solve the housing shortage, require no new infrastructures, efficiently use existing bus routes, be in the closest proximity to jobs in the education, business, institutional, and health care sectors, increase access to the cultural center of the county, and have the highest possible walkability and the greatest alternative transport choices for residents, while at the same time reducing the carbon footprint for transportation to a minimum.
It would solve every one of Lansing’s housing and transportation problems but one: Cornell does not want that solution.
Everywhere; there is the exhortation for more higher-density housing in the town of Lansing: high-density housing for affordable housing, high-density housing for sustainability, high-density housing for the environment, high-density housing for lower taxes, for the aging, for reducing carbon emissions, for curing cancer, for bringing about World Peace . . . the high-density housing that is needed in rural Lansing to maintain Ithaca’s gentrified, college-town pastiche for students – taking four years of memories, going to a six-figure salary, and adding more coin to Cornell’s corporate coffers.