Archive: News

Mr. McEver has lived in Lansing for 11 years, and has six children and 12 grandchildren. A Lansing Town Board member for the past three and a half years, he is definite about what he thinks town residents should be getting from their County representative. Mr. McEver runs his own Allstate Insurance office on Triphammer Road, where he spoke to the Star on July 27 about his candidacy for Tompkins County Board. 

Lansing Star: With you out for about three weeks (for minor surgery) and the Primary in September that only gives you...

Doug McEver: About three weeks of campaigning, but most of my campaigning is going to be done by mail. I know probably, first hand, five or six hundred Republicans in the area right now. I probably know another four or five hundred as a "Hi, how are ya?" You never know what their view is of what you've done on the board until after the election. I think I've done the best for Lansing as I can.

We had a problem with the personal watercraft (law). The County wanted it, and if the County got it, it was going to be destructive. They wanted to eliminate motorized watercraft on the South end of the lake. So it was quite obvious to me and to the supervisors that we had to put ordinances in, be the first ones there. Some people didn't like it. A lot of people liked it. And I think of the people who didn't like it, they've now become used to it. It's not a big bother to them, what little bit of ordinance we put in.

LS: Were these the ordinances that became effective last year?

DM: Yes. Last year we gave out about 200 warnings. They've been giving out some tickets, but not very many. Most people are complying. Safety issues are being taken care of and more people are having pleasure on the lake. And that's what that was all about. Making sure that everybody could still could use the lake.

I enjoyed doing that. It gave me a lot of knowledge on law and how to get ordinances through, how to work with the supervisors, how to work with different committees within the county. It was quite an interesting year and a half.

LS: How long have you been on the Town Board?

DM: Three years, eight months.

LS: And the term is how long?

DM: Four years. So at the end of this year I'll either be on the County Board, or I'll be volunteering help to the town.

LS: So you're not planning to run for Town Board again?

DM: There wouldn't be another option for two more years. Unless one of the two people who would be running at that time wanted to step down I would not try to beat them out of it. One's Marty Christopher. I think he's a very good man up there, he's doing an excellent job. He's a Republican.

The other one's Connie Wilcox, a Democrat. She's doing a very good job, and I would not come up there and say, "I'm going to have your position now, time for you to leave."

If one of them stepped down and there was an open position, yes, I'd go after it again.

LS: The big question: why are you running for County Board?

DM: I've lived in this county probably 50 of my 54 years. I was born here. I saw a lot of changes. And the biggest change I have seen over the last ten years is the cost for people to live here. As an insurance agent I see clients leave the area, and their explanation is that they just can't afford to live here any more. There have only been four or five over the last three years, but the increased taxes due to the continuous assessment and the continuous tax levy increase each year has hurt the older folks and we have to do something to stop it.

Most of that is being created because of the additional spending that is not mandated. They aren't thinking five, ten years down the line. Or twenty years. They're thinking about today. "Oh, we've got the money in the coffer today. Let's spend it!"

They can't do that any more. They have to go through every single program that they have, mandated and non-mandated. They have some mandated programs that really aren't mandated. They say they are, but they're State funded or Federally funded at a small percentage. They have to be reviewed. Are they efficient? Are they effective?

LS: What are some examples of those?

DM: Alternatives To Incarceration (ATI) is one big program, one point four million dollars that consists of a non-accountable situation. Within that program they have a drug court, they have an alcohol court, they have a non-violent felonies court. Some of it's good, some of it's questionable, some of it was running perfectly fine before that existed. At the expense of the perpetrator, rather than that of the taxpayers.

Do we need it? I think we need parts of it. But to the tune of one point four million dollars? No, I don't think so.

In addition to the one point four million dollars, some of the people (in the program) receive social services funds, and travel expenses and cars and help getting jobs above and beyond other people who are law abiding citizens.

At what point and in what time period of a person's life can they be corrected? Is there any real evaluation of the program? These are things we have to look at. We have people who have supposedly graduated from the program, for whom we have no idea, later on, if they continued to stay...

LS: So they're not tracking at all?

DM: They're not allowed. Within the program it is guaranteed that once they're done everything gets sealed. According to the Ithaca Journal, about a month and a half ago, they showed approximately a 46% graduation rate. Now that's fairly good if everybody stayed off drugs and alcohol, and not committing crimes. But from what I hear from police officers and district attorneys, and from lawyer friends, is that the graduation rate and the actual recidivism are completely different. But they're looking, really, at something more in the neighborhood of 80% of the people in the program repeat.

But there are no facts, there are no figures to say, "Yes, that's happening." And that's where the mistake of the program is. Any program that's put in at a County level at taxpayers' expense, it has to be able to be determined if it's a viable program two or three or five years down the road.

We have spent approximately eight million, nine million dollars over the last six years on this program. We can only guarantee that three people that have come up and said they are still clean. But that's because those were the people who were willing to talk about it. Now there could be 50 people out there who are still clean. I don't know. But that's the problem of the program.

Then there's the Human Rights Department. A triplicate program. Everything they do is required by State Law to go to Binghamton to be reviewed. Anything that they make a decision on, it is determined whether that decision was right or wrong. Last April the Ithaca Journal came out with a ten year report card. 87% of their decisions were reversed by the State.

Are we talking about a program that is viable? No, we're not. Can it be made viable? By readjusting the thought pattern of the people working, changing the work load, decreasing the work load... we're looking at 400 people over ten years for complaints. That's 40 per year. Do we need three people working there? I don't know.

These are things that have to be looked at. After i looked at the budget and after I looked at all these different programs, and there are eight or nine programs that are non-mandated that I know of to the tune of between seven and eight million dollars. They all have to be looked at. Do they belong there? Are they duplicates? Can they be served better elsewhere, saving the taxpayers some money? Probably. Can we cut four million out of the eight million dollars? I think so.

And then we have to go to Social Services. Social Services has a bunch of programs that are not mandated. We do get Federal money for them. To give you an example, the Wheels for Work program. It's not mandated. Up until this year we haven't had grant money, but we've gotten some Federal money back from it. It's a nice program. If someone's willing to work and get off of Social Services we should help them. But there are two things that aren't being done.

We aren't checking to make sure the car is actually worth what they're saying it's worth. And I know for a fact that it happened. They were getting $500 cars and we were writing $3,000 checks. That's not right. Then the person is reneging on it because they lose their job. Now, not everybody is reneging. Maybe it's 50%, maybe it's 40%. But if everybody is inflating by 250% (laughs) or even 20% of them are, and then that 20% is reneging...

And it's so simple! You go onto a computer and look under NADA (the NADA Official Used Car Guide) and within five minutes you know what the value of that vehicle is. I talked to the investigators and I said, "Why don't you do that?" "Well, it's not required."

Then there are other programs for which we only get five or ten or twenty percent back from the Federal government for. They're not mandated.

LS: So you're not saying that the programs should go, but that they should be accountable?

DM: Everything has to be accountable on a County level, State level, City level. If it's government it should be accountable. The spending has to be accountable, the justification for the program has to be accountable. If the program isn't working then it has to be readjusted to either make it work or to eliminate it. If it can't be made to work then we shouldn't be spending money on it.

And I think if we look at things seriously over the next two years I think we can cut four and a half to six million dollars out of the budget from programs that are either cut or adjusted to be more accountable and more streamlined.

Of that four and a half to six million dollars, we should take 25% of it and put it into the highway department to repair the roads the way they haven't been done in 12 years. I've talked and listened to the highway supervisors, and at the present rate it will take more than 100 years to repair our roads. And they're only good for 35, 40 years tops, once you put a brand new one down. There are some dangerous ones out there. I've had clients actually destroy their cars on roads that have been washed out and never repaired, because they are back roads and people don't think they are necessary. Therefore, "Oh well, we only need to put a million and a half into road repair this year" instead of the three or four that we should.

The second thing is, we've lost deputies in the Sheriff's Department.

LS: How many?

DM: My understanding is that we are down four from what we had four years ago.

LS: Are these positions that are opened, or positions that have been taken out because of budget?

DM: I believe that they're still there but they haven't been able to replace them because of the budget.

LS: In other words, they can't offer enough to attract new deputies?

DM: They can't afford to pay them according to the scale that is required by the contracts. Now the Sheriff's Department is discussing with the County eliminating road patrolling entirely. Well, we can see just by looking in the newspaper that with the road patrol decrease over the last four years we've also noticed more youthful deaths in cars over the last four years on the roads.

Even though you may not give a kid a ticket, he sees a police officer going down those roads, he's not going to do 75, 80 miles (per hour) down that road. He's going to try to stay close to the speed limit. He's still going to try to speed, but that happens. If we don't put more (officers) on that road, there are going to be more dead kids out there.

And I'm sorry, I'm not going to replace a gentleman who decides he doesn't want to comply with the laws, and do drugs, or DWIs and commit felonies... I'm not going to substitute his life for a kid that is just foolish going too fast down the road. We need to have the police officers.

DM: Let's go back to 2002. The tax levy increase and the assessment was actually a 22.5% total tax increase. Since 2001 we have had a 65% increase in total taxes. That's a three year period, 2002, 2003 and 2004. This year they used eight percent of an assessment increase. Overall in the County they brought it down to two and a half to six percent total tax levy. They took four million dollars out of the reserves to balance the budget. Four million dollars against a 31 million dollar budget... there was actually around 13% that they should have raised the taxes last year.

And all they were doing was preparing for this election, so they could win. That's what I think. Is that what they were really thinking? I don't know, but I don't think they can do it too many more years in a row. Will they be able to come up with a zero tax increase? Yeah. They took another seven and a half, eight percent tax increase, so they're going to have eight percent more money. Sales tax is coming in. I see a two and a half million dollar increase this quarter. So they should have the money there.

I don't think they have enough money in the reserves to come up with another four million dollars for the zero tax increase. They're going to wind up with a total tax levy of eight percent. They can't come down to three percent total tax levy. I can't see how they're going to do it.

LS: So the only way you think they could accomplish it is what you were saying before, cutting programs or making them more efficient?

DM: More efficient is the first goal. I wouldn't want to see any child that's gotten involved in drugs at a young age not have a chance to get out. A drug addict at age 30 or 35 that is actually dealing, I have a different thought pattern for him or her. An alcoholic who at the age of 35 or 40 who owns a house and has a job who goes out drinking every Friday and Saturday night to the point where he can't stand or winds up in a ditch? I have another thought pattern for him, too. For years they got a DWAI first, a DWI, they were required to go through five years probation, go through these programs for two and a half years, and they had to pay for their own programs.

Now the taxpayers are paying for them. That's the part I'm going to eliminate, guaranteed.

DM: It became part of ATI. ATI might be viable. I read it, I understand it. I would segment it more. I would declare what a non-violent felon is exactly. I would declare the age grouping of drug addicts. I would declare the age grouping of DWIs. And then I would try to correct them so they'd become more viable citizens in the future. But to turn around and say "let's shove everybody over there," it isn't going to work.

LS: I heard someone on the radio about a month ago suggesting that government below the county level isn't really needed. His argument was that because of the economy of scale the County could save taxpayers money, in effect lowering prices like Wal Mart by buying more at once for police departments, schools and so on. I have two questions about that. Do you think that's a good idea, and do you think that is possible for this county to achieve?

DM: I think the best way to answer that is that in actuality until 1964 was it? There was no county legislature. There was a board of supervisors. We could go back to that and save ourselves a lot of tax money. Then we (Lansing) would take over our own highways entirely. The County roads would become the Town's. We would make better, more efficient use of them at less cost. We wouldn't have the huge employee problem that the County has. What is it, 900 and some odd employees they have now? That's where a lot of our costs are.

LS: As opposed to about 40 for the Town of Lansing.

DM: Most towns have between 20 and 40, yes. The city of Ithaca is different. Could it be done? Anything can be done. Will it be efficient? I doubt it. What you're going to wind up with is a large bureaucratic mess with more commissioners making 200, 300 thousand dollars doing absolutely nothing to get the roads done. You'll have a Sheriff, two or three under sheriffs, you won't have constables in the area who know the neighborhoods very well, you won't have a police department in Dryden, you won't have a police department in Trumansburg... No I don't really think it would be as efficient as he was trying to (make it seem).

If something were to come in governmental change in this county, I would like to see some sort of stop-loss system so that when legislatures or towns make decisions on expenses and laws there's someone up above who will say, "No, it's too expensive." A checks and balances system, just like we do in State government, or Federal government. There are different branches. One will stop the other one from over spending, from becoming too strong and too destructive.

We don't have that here and for the last twelve years we've seen why we need one. A county executive is a good possibility.

LS: I want to ask about representation. I was doing some math based on the County's census documents. If you count the town and village it looked like they were saying in the 200 census that there were a total of almost 14,000 residents.

DM: 13,938 people. Yes, more than enough for two representatives.

LS: In the city of Ithaca, 28,775. So according to my math Lansing has about 48% of Ithaca's population, but only has 30% of the representatives.

DM: We don't even have 30% of the representatives, because one of the representatives is being used for Cayuga Heights and the Town of Ithaca. They redrew the maps.

LS: When I do the math just based on the Town, which comes to 10,521 and Ithaca City, that gives Lansing about 36 1/2% of the population, but 20% of the representation.

DM: Precsely.

LS: It appears that compared to the city that Lansing is under represented.

LS: Yes. The problem with the system of redrawing the districts every ten years is that the County, depending upon the power structure that's up there will adjust it to their benefit.

LS: To the incumbents' benefit?

DM: Right. You have eleven Democrats and four Republicans. They redistrict. They take a bunch of people out of Lansing and put them into the Groton district, they move some of Lansing into the Dryden district, I believe some of them were redrawn into the Town of Ithaca, and then Lansing Village was put over into the Cayuga Heights (district), thus putting it back down to only one true representative for Lansing.

LS: So this is even more complicated than I thought. I thought we had one and a half, but you're saying we have even more fractional representation in Lansing, depending on where you are in the town.

DM: To give you an example, the part that went to the Town of Groton, which George Totman has represented for years, may have been going to the North Lansing fire station before, and now probably 100, 150 perople are now going toward Groton to vote. It wasn't designed for the advantage of the populace. It was designed to keep the extra seat in the City of Ithaca that they did not deserve, because according to the statistics they were only entitled to 4.1 people. They should drop that down to four, put that out to the Town of Ithaca and leave Lansing alone.

Then Lansing would have had two. But then they would have had a problem. They would have had another possible Republican coming in, because they'd have to go all the way down to where 34 Ts off and divide it accordingly there. Then they would have had another Republican to deal with, possibly, on the County level. Well they're there to keep the seats and their order as a political party.

That's what the problem with a non-diversified board is. When you have a very large quantity of one party, not only do you have over-spending, but you're going to have them doing legally allowed trips to keep their power. If you have a board that is... I don't care whether it is Republican or Democrat dominated... eight and seven. You'll have less spending. Everything is going to be looked at three more times, because they're going to need those votes to cross back and forth.

But when you have eleven and four they're going to spend. One group is going to get all their programs in, no matter what everybody else is saying in the rest of the county, it's going to go. We have to diversify. The towns (residents) have to start looking at the benefits, rather than... We have a representative up there. What we need is a representative who is going to bring back to the town. I don't see people like Martha Robertson doing that. Mike Lane used to. Everything has been powered to the City of Ithaca, and it's going to continue that way unless there is a change.

And with the way that taxes have been it could very well happen this year. I hope so.

LS: How much responsibility for the airport does the County have?

DM: They are financially responsible for the airport, and they're the ones who set the contracts up for the airlines. They also do a lot of negotiations with Cornell to have Cornell help out financially, because Cornell is probably the major user.

LS: Is that being done well, do you think? It looks like passenger traffic is up now, the new airport has been in place for a few years...

DM: The answer to that is a difficult one primarily because 9/11 created such a panic about flying that small airports like this got hit very hard. US Airways has been hit very hard and I believe they filed Chapter 13 twice in the last four years and they're about to do it again. They can't make enough money to survive. And these small airports can't get enough people at the price range that they need to stay affordable. Therefore the prices go up.

Then the average individual says, "Oh, I can take a bus down to LaGuardia for $65 round trip, or I can rent a car for $45 straight down and I'll save myself hundreds."

Northwestern has come in inexpensively. And it's subsidized by the County and Cornell, or it's supposed to be subsidized depending upon their profitability in the next six months. I think there was an article in the Ithaca Journal about two weeks ago about how they aren't going to have to subsidize them for the the last two months, because they have been profitable. But they're profitable because they came in at a good price to get things rolling.

Let's see what a year, a year and a half does. We need an airport. If subsidizing is necessary, that is the County's responsibility, to maintain Tompkins County as an up and coming, growing corporate structure. With all the new companies that have been coming here in the last ten years, with biotechnology that is being developed here, the computerization, the engineering corporations that are coming in, you really need an airport. I think it will finally balance itself out now that we're further away from 9/11.

LS: In public safety, do you feel that the Sheriff's Department and the DA's office are getting the support they need from the County?

DM: Anybody with the idea that ATI is the sole purpose doesn't believe that incarceration should exist. They believe in program after program after program to stop the criminals from doing what they're doing. The only program that I know of to stop them from doing what they're doing is to actively give them enough funds or the ability to make enough funds that he doesn't have to.

Most criminals do it on an economic basis. They're not educated enough. They've had less school. They come from uneducated families usually. They're economic background is very poor. They're used to it. They find that crime is very easy for them. I find a lot of them are extremely smart people, just not educated.

But the Sheriff's Department is there to save lives and property of the law abiding citizens. If we don't have a Sheriff's Department out there that is adequate enough, people are going to get hurt. And if we don't have enough prosecutors to take care of the arrests, we're not going to have the cases (of good enough) quality in court to win. They'll go slim, slam, and go back and forth and the next thing you know we're going to have a murder or worse, which has happened. Was it because of the District Attorney's office, or was it the lack of funds needed to be able to properly prosecute? Was it because of the lack of police officers needed to properly investigate? I don't know. I can guess.

LS: The library's budget woes have been in the news a lot recently. Is that under-funding, is it misspending?

DM: I don't have access to the documents that would tell me if it is misspending. Do they have too many employees? They're unionized so I can't tell you what the requirements are there. I would have to read the contracts.

They did throw an awful lot of money into a white elephant that is sitting on top of the roof and now has shades on the South and North sides. They put a solar panel system there to save a lot of electricity costs. It wouldn't have been so bad if they didn't have a five story building on the South side, no more than 30 or 40 feet from the edge of the building. Well you're not going to get any morning sun any more. And you have a five story building on the North side. That's a little further away, but it cuts the afternoon sun.

So your efficiency level of the solar roof is adjusted by how much shade it gets. Well I think they have a product up there that is not going to pay for itself in a hundred years. So that was a waste of town and taxpayers' money.

I love the library. I go there probably once a month. I take my kids down when they need special stuff. I grew up in Ithaca. I remember when the city library was down in the old Sons of Italy building. And I was over there every Saturday morning abut ten, eleven o'clock, right after they opened up. I spent hours in there reading and looking through the books, just in awe. And that was small compared to what we've got now.

So I really can't answer, I really don't know. That's something that would be investigated, because it's one of the programs, non-mandated that would be reviewed. Is the problem the fact that it has become too bureaucratic and thus, inefficient? I don't know. It could be, I've heard that's a good possibility.

LS: Recycling. Do you think this has been a success for the County?

DM: I love the looks of the highways and the streets compared to what it was 20 years ago. I recycle every weekend. I pick up my recycling here (at his office), at my mother's house, at my home. I pick up my own garbage and I take it down. Sometimes it's a little bit packed down there. But I love it. It's no longer laying around in the ditch, it's no longer in someone's back yard.

Yes, environmentally it works. Is it a little costly? It's cheaper than having someone pick it up. I do it myself.

LS: What unique benefits will you personally bring to the County as the Lansing representative?

DM: 35 years of business between insurance and retail. 4 years on the Town Board. 15, 16 different committees, between environmental and political and economic committees that I've been on. The ability to read a budget and understand it. Having worked with the Woolworth Company, at which I had a million dollar budget to work with, here (Allstate) I have a million and a half of sales that I built up myself. The Town of Lansing has a budget around three and a half million dollars.

Though it's not 120 million it's basically the same thing. You've got to digest the numbers, look at the accounts, figure out what's viable and what's not viable. You have to have strength in your convictions that what you're doing is right for the majority of the public. And hopefully the minority will get some benefit as well. I don't want to say anybody should be left out in the cold, but I have no intention of hearing that what I've done is going to send some older couple who has lived here for forty years down to the South two or three years earlier than they really wanted to because of the tax structure.

LS: What should I have asked you that I haven't?

DM: The new thing that has just come up... They've been looking to try and find a proper home for the Health Department and the County Legislators and County offices. They've come up with a recommendation that says they're going to take nine million dollars and build a new building for the Health Department. They're going to take down the old library and put 11 to 15 million dollars into building a new structure there for the legislature's offices and for the County offices.

DM: That's prime real estate. You have a structurally sound building , very attractively made. Vey viable and very easily developed into offices, probably at half the cost. The problem you have is that you have no parking. They would have to take a couple of buildings nearby no matter what they do.

I say don't build new buildings at a cost of 20 to 25 million dollars more of our taxpayers' money over the next 30 years. I say take six million dollars. Renovate that building. The whole upstairs can be made into offices with a nice walk-around so you can look down into the center. Take the downstairs, circularly encompass it with offices, and the open floor space is a beautiful place to have the County legislative board (meet). Every County meeting with plenty of chairs, instead of being stuck with room for only 15 or 20 people to attend a meeting at a time, the way it is now. It's a beautiful opportunity at a third of the cost.

----

v1i4 countyinterview