Archive: Around Town

The Village of Lansing Trustees voted Monday to move $114,100 from the Park & Recreation Capital Reserve Fund, largely to pay for 2019-2020 improvements to Marian Hartill Park.  The money will go for stormwater abatement, grass for the new playing field, and equipment, as well as for signs for the park and other village parks. 

"There was a significant amount of storm water work that had to be finished," said Mayor Donald Hartill. "There are some trails that are part of that storm water work being done, and hopefully we can get the grass to grow this year, which we've tried two seasons now and we've been unsuccessful in doing that. We now have the park signs, which will be installed soon as the ground thaws out enough to be able to do that. And there will be some paving we need to do in the parking lot and things like that."

Hartill said there have been some upgrades to Global Village Park, and the Village has received a $5,000 grant from Tompkins County to pay for park benches.  He added that he will be personally paying for a bench in the park that villagers voted to name for his late wife.

Just as cats will forego expensive cat toys for a cellophane candy wrapper, village children evidently forgo playground equipment for... dirt.

"I'm told that the pile of dirt is not quite tall enough, so we'll add to that a little bit," Hartill said. "As a kid growing up, dirt was an important part of life. And so I want to make sure that that opportunity is available to our young people.  When we were building the park, we had a pretty good sized mountain of dirt and my friends and people who live in that region told me that the most popular thing there was the pile of dirt. So when we used the pile of dirt for the field one of the things I insisted on is that there'd be another pile of dirt."

Taking money from capital reserves is subject to a permissive referendum.  The New York State Comptroller's office says, "An action subject to permissive referendum requires the municipality to publish and post a legal notice informing taxpayers of the board’s planned action, for example, the establishment of a specific capital reserve. The legal notice also informs eligible voters of their right to file a petition to require the matter to be subjected to voter approval."

The deadline for petitioning for a permissive referendum on the park expenditure is 30 days from last Monday.

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