Archive: News

Village of Lansing elections are scheduled for April 24th at the village firehouse on Oakcrest Road.  Mayor Donald Hartill, Trustee/Deputy Mayor Larry Fresinski and Trustee Lynn Leopold will all be running unopposed for a new term.  All three are running in the Community Party, which seeks to unite Village residents regardless of political affiliation.  This week we continue our series of exclusive interviews with the candidates.  These interviews will be kept live on the 'Elections' page (click News, then click Elections) at least until election day.

Lynn Leopold is running for her fourth term as Village Trustee. She began when she was appointed to finish out the term of a resigning Trustee. She and her husband Carl have lived in the Village since 1981 when they build a log home near the old railroad bed made from pine ‘Leopold Logs’ that were created when a forest planted by Carl’s father in Wisconsin had to be thinned.

Leoplold was the recycling specialist at the Tompkins County Solid Waste Division, now retired. She says she is enjoying her retirement. She met with The Star last week at the Village Office.

Lansing Star: What are your political credentials?

Lynn Leopold: Probably nothing qualified me at all when I first got elected. I was appointed to fill a remainder of a term for one of our Village board members who decided to retire from the board early because she had a lot of other things going on. So, (Mayor) Don (Hartill) appointed me and then I had to run for the rest of her office for the following year. I’d say the only thing that qualified me for running for office was that I had been a member of the Community Party almost since the day I moved into the Village and helped run many, many campaigns, helped find people to serve on the board.

I served on the nominating committee, went to a lot of meetings, and so I was pretty aware of what went on in board meetings. Nothing really prepares you for being on a board like being there. So I guess I just gathered some know-how over the years.

LS: You did bring qualifications to the job. For example, you’re working on storm water now, because of your environmental work.

LL: Yes, I’m probably the environmentalist on the board, and I actually volunteered to be the Village liaison to what we call our storm water working group, which is a coalition group of all the municipalities that are now required to comply with the new EPA Phase 2 storm water regulations. And that meant our Village was now considered what’s called a MS4, Multiple Separate Storm Sewers Systems.

It’s a daunting task so we put this group together to try to solve each other’s problems to help each other along. We have formally become the Storm Water Coalition of Tompkins County. We are working on our by-laws, we now pay dues, so our municipality pays dues. So that’s one way.

The other thing was I was the Village Representative on the Environmental Management Council for 13 years before I got elected to office. Once I got elected, I stepped down from that post.

LS: Why are you running for a fourth term?

LL: Seems like a good thing to do and I feel the way my colleagues do is that we have a lot of unfinished business. I sure don’t want to step away from the storm water work right now because it’s coming down at us.

We have been taking advantage of a lot of other efforts that are being done on our behalf in terms of education and outreach about storm water to people in the community, and working with school kids on a floating classroom, all that stuff. But now, we have to get our ducks in a row and make sure we have a storm water law in place before January of next year.

LS: A lot of municipalities are struggling with that.

LL: They are all struggling with it. There are 10 of us and we are all struggling with it, and some are very small like Newfield and only a very small section of Newfield is actually an MS4. A tiny little geographical area and they still have to go through all the same hoops, jump through the hoops that we have to jump through.

I feel that is unfinished business. I really want to see that all put together.

I think there is a lot more we can do toward trying to build the sense of a Village Center. Now the North Triphammer Road project has helped somewhat, but we still have a lot of beautification to do to kind of spruce things up and make it look much friendlier an like someone really cares and someone is really taking care of things. So there are those things to do.

And we are still growing as a village, and I feel strongly about helping guide that in the most environmentally friendly way we can. So going to the planning board meetings, I get to be apprised all the time of what’s happening in the way of proposed developments. Not that I’m a guide necessarily but at least I’m aware and I can put in my two cents worth when I think there might be a problem vis-à-vis environmental issues.

And then there are deer. They are a problem, and I would really dearly like to see us do something this year about removing deer out of the Village. And I mean permanently removing. I think we are going to have to shoot some deer and I don’t know how that is going to happen. But they are doing horrendous damage to the environment.

LS: Well, part of your land design though is the old railroad route, right? So you’re seeing it first hand there?

LL: Oh yeah, we have lost maybe a third of the flowering plants that we had in our woods when we first bought our wood lot. And we are seeing invasive weeds coming in now just rampantly because there is so much disturbance due to the deer trafficking all over. I can tell you that there are places on my land that look as though it looks like a feedlot before they ship cows off to Chicago to the slaughterhouses. The ground is all torn up from their sharp little hooves, and as soon as you’ve done that the native plants can’t compete. You get garlic, mustard, coming in and Black Swallow Wort and Black Thorn, all these invasives that are pushing out the niches that were previously held by flowering plants plus all the animals that came with them -- the insects, the herps -- we don’t have salamanders any more.

There is a lot that has disappeared off our property because, I would say, because of the deer.

LS: You actually anticipated one of my questions. You were the one, I think, who first brought up to me the issue of the Village identity. It was a year or two ago that you said many Village residents feel themselves as Ithacans and didn’t even realize in some cases that they live in the Village of Lansing. A number of people are saying that the Triphammer reconstruction helps to address that. So in what ways do you think it has addressed it successfully and then what else do you see it could help that?

LL: Well, that wasn’t even my project. That was really (Deputy Mayor) Larry’s (Fresinski) domain. I think that the North Triphammer project had a unifying effect visually. Now you see sidewalks, you see curbs, you see the really strategically placed lighting and everything matches. When the trees mature a bit more we will begin to fulfill our imagined view of how that (core) should look which is more constricted physically so that it will have the feeling of being more constricted so therefore, we hope, it will slow traffic, people will spend more time in driving through the Village and looking at it instead of ‘Oh, I’ve got to get to Cornell and I just have to get there as fast as I possibly can.’

The only thing that would help is if we had a real Village center and I know the town is struggling with the same thing. We have this little building that we share with the pumping station for Bolton Point. People wouldn’t even know it was here and they drive right by our sign and don’t see that.

LS: Not only that but the Audrey Edelman complex is called ‘Village Offices’.

LL: People think that’s our Village office and they go in there and they think this is a dentist office.

There is definitely discussion going on between our Village and the Town of Lansing about where the next new fire station could go. Either we would they would build the fire station on the existing lot over on Oakcrest which they say probably isn’t big enough, or they would join forces with us and build a facility here on this property and we would then have a Village Office complex. We would have Village Offices part of it, maybe a community meeting room, so maybe that would give us more of a sense of a Village.

In the meantime we have to work on more signage I think. And just continue to reach out to residents to let them know in fact we are a village. You know they are going to be getting their tax bills after we pass our budget and they are going to realize that no, we are not the Ithaca City School District asking them for money, we’re the Village.

But other than that, people don’t really have a feeling of being a village because if you ask people they say well, there’s the airport and three big malls, and oh yeah, there are some houses. Unfortunately for us it’s a geographical anomaly because we have part of our village on the other side of Route 13 in Highgate and then the health campus, our health care area up on Arrowwood.


LS: You could also say the Village is in three north-south running stripes. The Warren Road stripe, the Triphammer Road stripe, and the Cayuga Heights Route 34 stripe.

LL: Right, we have all these north-south intersecting roads runways running through us, so I think people really look at us as getting from point A to point B and not think of it as the Village.

I’m hoping when we get our new radar speed limit sign that we are going to be posting out here on North Triphammer that people will recognize oh yeah, I am coming into some kind of municipal situation where there’s residential land and there’s business land, commercial land, and it’s not just a speedway.

LS: Has the Village ever considered Village events?

LL: Many years ago we had some real movers and shakers in the Village who thought we could have a Village picnic, and we had a barbeque down at the fire station. A fellow from Lansing who was one of the volunteer firemen came down and was the chef. We got the chicken, we got all the barbeques, I forgot where the money went, I think it went to the fire department.

That got people out but when you think about our population part of it is tremendously transient. If you look at all the apartment complexes that are in the Village, there are many, many people from foreign countries who don’t have a sense of community here at all. Their only community probably is Cornell. That’s just why they are here. It’s hard for us to build community for them because they are here for such a short time, we don’t have any schools in our boundaries so their kids aren’t going to school here. It’s really hard to pull those people in.

The permanent residents -- we’ve tried to pull them in on community picnics and we’ve never been able to get dates that would work or get enough turnout. You’ve got 15 people who come and the Village has got 3,000 people living in it. So I think we just kind of gave up on that.

Maybe if we have a new center we could actually then start having some events. But if you have an event, we don’t have any facilities for an event. Maybe if we ever get the Poison Ivy Point land through this Crossmore Bolton Point development… that is Village land but it’s inaccessible now because of the railroad. The problem with the railroad is that we would have to pay them a hefty sum if we were going to use the road that crossed the railroad bed. But if we ever did decide to have a park down there that was open to the public, then maybe we could have some kind of a festival down there. But we just don’t have a place where you could actually have something here.

LS: Well, you do have Dankert Park.

LL: We have Dankert Park but it’s very small. We tried to have a picnic there one time and I think Sorrel Gottfried was working on that and we never could get a date that would work for everybody, and then we had a picnic and it poured rain. So we called it off. We were never able to reschedule it. It is usually because one person gets the idea of drumming up support for something, and frankly, I guess none of us have the energy for it. We’re all so busy with other things.

LS: What do you see as goals for the Village over the next term?

LL: Well, definitely for me and a very important goal is to finish up on the storm water work, and that’s going to go right up until the last day of December because I just know how long it takes to get all the legal things in place. I know that actually (Planning Board Chair) Ned (Hickey) and (Code Enforcement Officer) Ben (Curtis) are talking about storm water a lot right now. They are looking at our subdivision law to see where the overlaps are between the state’s sample law and what we already have on the books. There’s that.

I would like to do more public information and outreach on storm water in different ways that specifically addresses our village as opposed to just sort of signing on to something that someone else has done for the whole community. I think more articles in our newsletters and maybe even mailings to home owners about water use, about lawn chemicals, there’s just so many things that tie into what goes into the lake, and storm water is all about what goes into the lake.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the lake today. Oh, God, it’s awful! There is so much stuff floating around out there. All of the ice has let loose because the lake level has come up so there’s all this slush floating up the lake plus all the flotsam and jetsam that has come down from all of the streams, all of the stuff that was left on the shores over the winter is now all floating and is re-depositing itself.

LS: We’ve had flooding.

LL: Well, I watched an ice dam that came down our creek, North McKinney’s Creek, about two weeks ago. Just when we had that ferocious cold wind and it was about a minus 15 wind chill but bright and sunny, really huge heavy north wind, and I heard this rumble and I stood up and looked out the window just in time to see this big ice dam come down the creek, take our Leopold bench, dumped it upside down and take it down the creek and dumped it in the lake.

I haven’t seen it since. We can’t find it. I looked, and looked, and looked and that’s when the lake level was really low. I walked up and down the shore, I walked up and down the railroad bed about a mile in both directions all the way down to the marina and there is just no sign of it. It may have just sunk.

LS: Is that actually a kind of bench or is it made out of Leopold lumber?

LL: It’s a kind of bench. It’s a bench designed that Carl’s father designed, came up with. The land trust was making them and selling them as a fundraiser. Plus we had built some of our own because Carl has been building them all of his life. It’s just a cute little design where you sort of have cross pieces and you just have a flat seat and a slanted back to lean against. It’s a very simple design.

LS: Do you think the Village’s point of view is more in line with the City of Ithaca or the Town of Lansing?

LL: Well, we’re not rural, so I think we don’t have that contingent in our population that doesn’t want anything to do with government. I think the expectations here are that we make sure we have youth programs and Gadabout and transportation and the kinds of things that taxes help pay for, sidewalks. I don’t think you hear people in North Lansing talk about sidewalks much.

LS: Well, they are starting to.

LL: Well, they are starting to but that population is changing. When I first moved up here Lansing was very, very rural. People were still farming, Carl Butler still had horses up there on his farm, he was still alive. So the population is changing, the kinds of people who are living up there, moving up there, are a very different population. But I would say we are more in line perhaps with…

I guess we would have to be more in line with the City although I feel we are more of a sister village to Cayuga Heights because we abut each other. We are villages, not cities, but we then have all this commercial area. That is a planning board area and the planning board is working really hard to improve the way the commercial areas look. When they get the opportunity, and it only comes up when a shopping center owner, like an absentee owner like Cayuga Mall’s owner wants to come in and re-do their parking lot, that’s when we can say it’s time for tree islands, nicer lighting, more green space, permeable pavement.

Apparently our mayor and Ned have been talking with new management over at Pyramid and they want to become greener. So those folks are all still part of our village whether we like it or not and we have to try to work with them to have them look more like responsible members of our community and not be shabby.

Pyramid is pretty good in that respect I think. Cayuga could definitely use some work. It’s a messy looking place a lot of the time.

LS: What kind of growth would you like to see in the Village?

LL: I think we have more commercial than any small municipality should have to bear. I think we’ve got plenty of commercial. I don’t want to see any more commercial. The only caveat is that we still have zoned low-traffic commercial so definitely things like doctors’ offices or pet clinics or hair salons, maybe a couple of other nice sit-down restaurants would be great, not fast food.

Along areas where it’s zoned for that kind of development and that they be designed in a way that is all sort of cohesive in architectural styling. I’m really tired of all these ratty looking buildings. None of them look like each other.

I love it when you go into a village, some of the older villages in New England and downstate where there is an architectural covenant and a McDonald’s like this would never have happened with all those… you would never have that kind of lousy red roof with those horrible light bars and it just looks icky. It’s a disgusting looking building. If you go to Scottsdale Arizona McDonald’s looks like an adobe hacienda.

LS: Actually I have been there and you’re right it does.

LL: And there’s a tiny sign and no big golden arches none of that nonsense. We’d be more cohesive.

It’s clear that a lot of the land in the Village has yet to be developed and will go, I think, the way that we’ve seen a lot of other developments go which is very large lots with very large houses.

I am very distressed by the mansion mentality. People are tearing down cottages all along the lake and building huge houses. Perfectly good cottages that would have been very serviceable, made out of good materials, but they are just too small. They are not elegant enough.

I think we are getting a lot of elegant houses in the Village of Lansing. We’ve got plenty of big houses, a few older developments, there’s still Ivar’s Lansing Trails II which is cluster housing and I’m glad to see that although I think it’s coming now into much pricier level then we originally thought it would. He’s asking a lot more for those townhouses.

We always said we have affordable housing in the Village because we have a lot of apartments, but that’s not the same thing as low cost or low-income housing where you can own your own home. Just the smallest tract house these days is going for over $100,000. I’m sure if you wanted to buy a tiny three-bedroom, one bathroom house on Dart Drive you’d probably be paying $150,000 or $220,000. That’s just the way housing is going.

So finding a way to build maybe more senior housing, some kind of a senior facility in the Village would be very nice. You’ve got Woodsedge. We have Chateau Claire but that’s not really senior housing, just a lot of seniors live there, but we don’t have anything built specifically for independent living seniors. That might be a nice thing to have but I’m not sure where.

What I would love to see, but we’re not zoned that way, is to have a better mix of residential and commercial in the same building. Boulder is doing this and every new commercial development now has to have housing attached to it. So you get coffee shops, bakeries, and tailors on the ground floor and you’ve got these little apartments up on the upper floors. In the last 50 years our suburbanization has moved away from the idea of an urban mix of commercial and residential all in the same place so that people can walk to the grocery store, or walk to the movies, or whatever.

We now zone it so that all residential is way, way far away and it’s totally car-dependent. So I don’t think it’s a healthy thing for the country. We know that urban sprawl is creating a lot of overweight people who now just get in their cars and drive to wherever they have to go because they don’t ever walk any more.

LS: The Mayor has talked about this becoming a walking community between the greenway and the sidewalks.

LL: We can as long as we’re a small village, but I would say if you lived up on Sundowns it might be a fare piece to get all the way to Tops and all the way back again you know with two bags of groceries if Sundowns ever gets developed.

So in my dream world, I would think if I was not going to live in my wood lot that which I totally adore and someday I’ll have to face living in something else that is going to be more suitable where I don’t have to worry about plowing the driveway and splitting any firewood, I would love to live in a cute little apartment that’s in a mix of commercial and residential in an urban center somewhere where I could walk to everything I needed.

LS: We haven’t talked about the sewer yet.

LL: Well, I’ll tell you my opinion on the sewer, and that is that Lansing should have been allowed to build it’s own plant, period. I see absolutely no logic whatsoever if you’re in an environmental regulation to spending tens of millions of dollars on a very expensive project that pumps sewage out of the Town of Lansing runs it seven miles down, runs it through sewage treatment and pumps it out at the south end of Cayuga Lake which is already an area of water body of concern. I just don’t see any logic in that at all.

LL: Why not build a small efficient plant -- and Don says they are a lot more efficient these days -- perhaps even more efficient than the big plant downtown, that if it’s properly managed and maintained. That’s a very big caveat, you could have waste water being released into Cayuga Lake much further up and therefore more dispersed and less of an impact on the south end of the lake. I just don’t see the logic in the project. And I can see all of the snags they are running into you know, the funding and who is going to buy into it, and where’s all the money going to come from and the residents are disgruntled about the fact that they are going to have to pay so much in annual fees, and it’s going to run development.

It’s going to be a real driver for development you wait and see. I have seen it happen everywhere in the west where I lived, and as soon as you bring in sewer and water the land goes just like that.

LS: Well, you know, I see that as a good thing if you use the sewer to drive where the development happens and what kind of development it is, because it’s a tool, or can be a tool.

LL: It can be but so often it’s been misused. I think Sierra Club did studies years and years ago of how providing sewer and water has driven development in this country and has really contributed to the population explosions all through our urban areas and suburban areas. As soon as water is available, in will come the housing developments. Unless you do the advanced planning and say this land is just off limits, we’re not going to sewer there, we’re not going to sewer there---that’s hard. It’s very hard to do.

We as a village can’t say we’re never going to sewer Sundowns. Well, we’re not going to do it ourselves, they are going to do it. They are going to have to do it because we can’t afford to sewer a great big piece of private land and we’re not even, by law, even allowed to do that.

You’re right you could do it if you do it the right way but how many examples are there out there where municipalities really got ahead of the ball, ahead of the curve on planning for where they wanted the growth and didn’t want the growth so planned development very carefully done. And that doesn’t happen unless you have very strict zoning.

LS: That’s the other tool.

LL: Land use planning. And you’ve got to have zoning to go with it because otherwise you’re going to have the big land developers come in and they all got their eyes on Kingdom Farm. My brother was one of those.

Yeah, the sewer, I’m not happy about it. I would love to have sewer, I don’t like being on a septic system, but for one thing if it came down the railroad bed or East Shore Drive, either way it would still be a $50-60, 000 tie-in for us because we would have to go through bed rock to get to it. So, personally, I can’t benefit from it. I can see how the communities could benefit from it and how the lake would be in better shape because of it. So you take care of all the failing septic systems, but I do think Myers is a total priority. All the cottages on the lake are the places where you need the help the most.

And then there are other places up the hill whose septics are failing but it’s not as big a threat to the lake. You know the lake level comes up and where does all those septic systems going to be? Literally under water!

LS: It happens a lot.

LL: It happens every year.

LS: What do you feel your chief accomplishments to your tenure as a trustee?

LL: From the beginning? Gosh, I don’t have anything like Triphammer Road that I can point to because I haven’t had any major projects like everybody else has. I chaired the sewer committee for a while to look at all of the issues from the Village’s perspective and then came up with a recommendation for a route, which was then rejected. That’s okay. We came up with our preferred route and the things I do are more of the day-to-day stuff, going to different meetings, being the liaison for the watershed and the Cayuga Lake watershed in a municipal organization which is also about water, it’s not storm water necessarily, it’s about the lake.

I’m sort of a worker ant.

LS: I ran up against this when I interviewed the candidates last year, and they answered very much the same way you are answering now. It seems like there is more of a collaborative effort here.

LL: Yeah, we don’t have bricks and mortar things, but Don and Larry definitely have North Triphammer. That’s been a long time coming. The sewer for Don and Frank that will be the resolution of that however it comes out will have been a long time coming.

For me it’s going to be storm water. I think every year I’m the one who puts the annual report together. Well, we got our last annual report back from the DEC with nine pages of comments on what was lacking, and it’s such just a headache. It’s such a headache so this time I’m going to get help from T.G. Millers. I’m going to have them sit down with me and we are going to look at all places where we are deficit as a village and figure out what do we have to do between now and January to fulfill all of the requirements.

All I can do is present those to the board and say okay we’ve got to have John Courtney trained in elicit discharge and detection and elimination. We’re going to have to catalog all our good housekeeping methodologies and make sure we know what we’re doing every time we have a little spill of gasoline up there or anything else.

I just look at all of this as a worker bee work and I guess as you say it’s collaborative together we all help keep the Village running and individually we don’t really take much credit for any particular one thing. But we do go to a lot of meetings.

LS: What else would people like to know about your candidacy?

LL: Well, there are probably other people who are out there that are as qualified as I am to do what I’m doing and they would learn also by coming on the board. We are always eager to have people who are interested in Village politics come to our meetings, come and talk to us about issues. I heard recently there was a guy who was one of our village residents who was apparently miffed. He didn’t realize we had already chosen our candidates, we had already our nominees rather. He is very interested in the deer issue and I have a feeling he wanted to run on a deer platform. So if people are out there and interested in things, they know where we are and they get the Village newsletter, we’re in the phone book and they can call us and talk to us.

It’s a lonely business, it’s a lonely job. If I were to step down tomorrow I don’t know where I would find a replacement. It’s hard, and it’s getting harder and harder to get people to serve in places. I’m happy I don’t have small children at home and a job to juggle. I’m in a perfect position to serve as a trustee because I’m retired. Larry and Don still have day jobs and John is gone a lot of the times because he is consulting for a field too. Frank, he’s retired so the two of us have it rather soft because we don’t have a whole lot of other demands on our time so we can do this.

But it’s a lot of meetings. I figure that all of the meetings that are related to me being on the Village board include three Village board meetings and two planning board meetings per month, all of which I go to when I’m here. The inter-municipal organization meeting which is once a months which has now gone to quarterly, the storm water coalition each month, and I go to the floating classroom committee because that’s a project of the inter-municipal organization. So that’s eight meetings a month, not all of them at night, but that’s just the minimum, and then there are extra during the week. It’s a lot of meetings and I’m out a lot of nights.



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