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Judy Drake is running for the Lansing Town Board.  She and her husband Doyle have two grown children, and she has lived in Lansing all her life.  This is her first time running for elective office, but she has been serving on the Lansing Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) for the past seven years.

Drake is the Human Resource Manager for the Town of Ithaca, and works as an assistant to the Ithaca Town Supervisor.  She also works as the Human Resources official for the Bolton Point Water System, working with the General Manager and representatives from all the participating municipalities, including Lansing.  She chairs the Greater Tompkins County Intermunicipal Health Insurance Consortium, which currently has 39 participants, over seven counties, and will grow to 44, including the Lansing Library, in January.  She says her 22 years working behind the scenes with elected officials and boards in the Town of Ithaca gives her unique experience she could bring to the Town Board if elected.  She says she has no pet project, but wants to work on good and efficient operations of the Town.

 What do you think is the most important thing Lansing needs right now? What will you do to make that happen?

I think the most important  thing that Lansing needs right now is to come back together as a community.  Definitely through the elections there have been "for this party and for that party".  We're all Lansing residents. We all want good roads, good parks, and programs for our families.  We all want to enjoy the town that we live in.  That's the most important thing for me, bringing things back together.  The only way that I know I can do that is not vote a party line at board meetings, but vote on what makes sense, what I think is going to be the best situation or aspect for the whole community.  Things that are going to make sense for us in the future.  Goals and strategies, and having a good vision for the organization is going to be really important for us. And people need to work together,

My thought is when the election is over, we're a team. We've got to come together and act like a team.

  In your perfect world, how would you like to see development go forward in the Town? What should the town be doing to attract the right kind of developments?

I think that development needs to happen. We can't be stagnant and not continue to grow.  It's very important to keep development focused around where there is water and sewer and centralized utilities.  That's important for not taking tons of space.  Preserving open space is very important to me, so having that organized growth in the right places is very important.

But you also can't control if somebody wants to sell some of their property and have houses built.  So you're going to have that also.

To bring in good development you have to have the infrastructure, and you have to be prepared for it.  You need a good planner to be able to negotiate and work with developers.  Having them just come in and be able to ru n amok on top of us is not good, so having those pre-meetings that will bring in the infrastructure and the planning so that we get a better development is key.

We're never going to have everybody happy.  There are going to be houses where, maybe, they shouldn't be, and developments where they shouldn't be.  But I also agree that not everybody wants to live in a subdivision.  There are still people who want to have ten acres of land and should be able to do that, also.  But they have to do that with the knowledge that we're an agricultural community.  I think that's important.  And living out in a more agricultural area there are fewer services.  You're not going to have water.  You're not going to have sewer. You're probably not going to have great Internet.  It comes with the territory.

So that's the key thing, focusing on development, maintaining open space, and then working with the developers.


  What do you view as the best solution to powering and heating new developments? If you could wave your wand and make anything happen, what would you do to address the natural gas moratorium in order to encourage development?

This is probably going to be the one topic I'm going to have to get some further education on.  The moratorium, I don't think is, naturally, fair to the Town of Lansing. I don't think any one municipality should have control over another and what growth does or does not happen in that municipality.  So there should be continued negotiations about what happens with natural gas.  I would like to see some solution to it, because it does control, definitely, our business development and our growth that way.  So it's important for us to figure out what some of the other avenues are, or why we can't continue the way we were.

Do I think we should have carte blanche?  No.  There should be some controls around it as we are hearing from the State that we need to do climate control.  But, then there also have to be some other elements that come with it like incentives for businesses to be able to use heat pumps or other avenues for them, because we need the energy.  We're a populated place that growing.  We're not shrinking.  The whole county is growing. It's important for us to have some of those resources.

We are also looking at the solar law.  Pieces of that solar law are: do we limit solar farms?  Do we limit them?  But then, we want to have more people utilizing fossil fuels, if we don't want to have solar farms?  So we're going to have to have some give and take.  We want wind power, but we don't want wind power in our neighborhood. To have what we need in the future there's going to have to be some give and take.

I don't think we're there yet, especially because there are lots of questions about what's going to happen with AES (the Cayuga Power Plant).


  Three key points have been proposed in this election: better planning, communication, and spending accountability. What do you think about the current state of those items, and what, if anything, do you plan to do to improve them?

Planning is very important. I am definitely a supporter of having a planner on staff.  I also believe the planner and engineer need to work together.  With planning you have things more organized so you don't have developers just coming in without a good plan for what's going to happen.  The planners are the ones that are going to help the Planning Board be able to form more educated, better decisions, and be able to work through a plan better.

So having a good planner on staff is excellent. And C.J. (Lansing planner C.J. Randall) has done a phenomenal amount of work in the short time period that she's been here.  I worked with (former Lansing Planning Consultant) Mike Long on the Agriculture Committee, and working through what the Ag zone should be.  You can't do that without professional planners to help you.  There's the need for engineers and the need for planners, and they have to work together.  But a simple town board member can't do that without the professional staff.  So I definitely feel that a professional staff is what we need to move us in the right direction.

Lansing's growing.  We're definitely not shrinking in any way.  And we're edging towards some of that agricultural area. If we're not careful we will be a -- and I don't mean this in a bad way --'Town of Ithaca' that has just expanded into the more rural area, and then you lose your rural area.

So it's important to be able to have that professional staff help formulate decisions so they come back with a better plan.

Communications: I would like to see the Town of Lansing be able to push more information out to the community, whether that's through newsletters or social media.  People are attending meetings. Maybe not enough meetings, but not everybody wants to go to a meeting to find out what's going on.  It's really nice that we do have some of the boards in front of the town hall that say when a meeting is coming up.

But pushing some of that information out, whether it's through our Web site or somebody signs up for emails... when anything new hits this Web site it pushes information out to my email.  That would be great.  Pushing that kind of information out.  What are the resources for that community member to get more information?  They don't have to attend a meeting, but they can read the minutes from the Planning Board or the Zoning Board or the Town Board.  So utilizing every aspect that we have, whether it's Facebook or other social media,  or utilizing our Web site.  There have been some great changes to the Web site which I think are fabulous. 

But how do you drive people to that Web site to get the information that they need?  That's the most difficult aspect, because if somebody is looking for the information they're not going to go looking for it.

  The Recreation Department has been doing a good job of that.

Yes, but I don't know if some of our other committees have pushed out information as much.  Like the Comprehensive Plan Committee, or we now have this Conservation Advisory Committee -- are they pushing out information?

One thing that I've experienced in my job is some of those committees have established their own Facebook pages, and are able to push out information in that way.  If we utilize something like Facebook I would like to see it not be turned into a gripe place.  It's a good place to push information out, and then if you need more information there are avenues to get it.  It's not a place to start logging all the nasty comments, but it's a place to get more information.

I think the other aspect is newsletters that are pushed out, instead of people having to go get them.  Trying to get people's emails is difficult to find out.  There are resources like Swift911 -- but in my mind that should only be used in cases of things that are really crucial for people to find out.  For example, downtown when there was a police event going on we thought something would come across the Swift911, and it didn't, because it wasn't an event to the police department that we thought it was.

I know the school district is using that kind of resource for school closings and stuff, and I think that's great.  It would just be a limited number of things that the Town should use it for.

Spending accountability: Spending accountability has been interesting for me. I've looked at the budget and I've spent some time with the budget and where we're spending money.  The different funds that we have.  We're spending money on water projects and I think that's really important. We have good contracts with our employees and staff, and we're frugal in some of those areas where it's important to be.  I have yet to see where there is over or under spending.  I guess I'm not educated quite yet enough to say whether there's too much or too little happening.

I do like the fund balance we have, and how they're looking at how that fund balance is going to be spent with the different reserves that have been set up over the last few years. I think that's smart.  Only having a few months of fund balance is a dangerous place to be, but there is also a point where you can have too much fund balance.

  What have you done to prepare for the position should you be elected?

The most important thing that I've done to make sure that I'm prepared to walk into this position when I'm elected is attending town board meetings, pretty much for the whole year.  I think I've only missed one meeting.  I've been able to keep up with the minutes.  I've tried to keep up on the Planning Board, and, obviously, being on the Zoning Board I've kept up with that.  I'm still involved with the Agricultural Committee when that meets, to know what's going on in the farming community.

Just being at the meetings and listening to what's going on, reading the budget and being prepared to know where spending is going to be happening.  And then, obviously, some of my inter-municipal work that I'm already doing... I'm already well aware of what's happening at Bolton Point Water System and some of the other programs that are happening around the County, like the IO and such.


  What makes you the best candidate?

I have to laugh. I ask people this all the time and they stutter... and here I am stuttering!  In my opinion the best candidate is one that can come to the table, be ready to work with whoever the players are, have the energy to focus on a team, have the energy to put things aside and want to listen to everybody.  You can't always make everybody happy, but you can listen for the different opinions and why they're coming at you. And then try to step up and be ready to make a decision.

I am not a decision-phobic person.  I want to make an educated decision, but I'm not going to hem and haw over it either.  One of the key things is that government runs slowly.  I don't think government needs to run slowly.  If you ask anybody that I've worked with I'm definitely a person that's always pushing -- let's make a decision. Let's get things going.  In the dairy princess world I used to call myself a mover and a shaker, and I've lived that my entire life. So I like to move and shake and keep things moving.

If you want somebody to make government a little bit less slow I would be the right person to put in that position.

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