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 conclude our series of exclusive interviews with the candidates. These interviews will be kept live on the 'Elections' page (click News, then click Lansing Elections) at least until Election Day.

Larry Fresinski and his wife Cathy have lived in the Village of Lansing for 20 years. They have three grown children with daughter Tammy and their two grandchildren in Ithaca, and sons Matthew and Aaron studying in Las Vegas. The couple have three dogs, one of which recently won an award of merit at the Westminster Dog Show.  Coincidentally the Village was incorporated on his birthday.

Fresinski became interested in computing in college, and has continued to work in the field.   He is the Chief Information Officer at the Johnson School of Management, and has worked at Cornell for 37 years. He also says he enjoys managing money, which he has done for church funds, his wife’s business and his son’s DJ Business. He is finishing his seventh and a half term as a Village Trustee (he initially served a half term to fill a vacancy in 1993).

Lansing Star: What are your credentials to be a trustee and deputy mayor?

Larry Fresinski: My primary credential is being a resident of the Village of Lansing. I have a keen interest in finance and management of our funds. I have had a security license for some time and have sold securities and insurances for a while for Primerica while I was at Cornell.

They are part-time agents but the training requirement was rather intense and it kept growing so I stopped doing that. I did it primarily for training education opposed to trying to sell things. I did sell a few things. So I guess it’s fund management and my interest has been to ensure the residents of the Village of Lansing that the money has been well spent and well managed.

LS: Which evidently it has been.

LF: Indeed it has. I guess the real proof in the pudding has been a significant drop in taxes for this next go-around.

LS: How did you get onto the board?

LF: I started on a half term. There was a vacancy on the board. I had previously canvassed by our residents in my area over on Burke Drive when the credit union was being built. We understood that the laws were such that buffer strips needed to block the view from a residential area to a commercial area at all times. As they saw the credit union being built, they could see the building and they were quite upset.

LS: Is that the credit union on Kraft?

LF: Yes, Kraft Road. It’s the only commercial building you can see from the residential area so they enlisted me and I talked to the board about it and whatnot, and ultimately the mayor then asked if I would sit on the board. So I wasn’t terribly interested. I had no credentials for being on the board, but what I would do is be a spy for the residents of Lansing to make sure that their funds were spent well. And the nice thing about coming in on a half term was that if I didn’t like it, I could get out.

Now you know the rest of the story. It’s been a real joy working on the Village Board predominantly because of the board members. We each have our own expertise that when blended together is a real powerful group of people that has been able to really create what we now have as a village all the way to now the Triphammer Road reconstruction which is probably one of our greatest feats -- we have done it at a fraction of the cost that it was originally going to cost us.

LS: Are you seeing the result form the project that you wanted to see?

LF: Absolutely. It worked out very well for us. If there was any problem it was the fact that it took 10 years from the time we started talking about it until the time of completion. The process was extraordinary to go through. My previous experience on the board was to bring the contract for Time Warner into alignment with the Village of Lansing, and that took 10 years.

Because we were part of the Town, the contract became effectively null and void as a result of the separation of the Town and the Village in 1974, and we really needed another contract. I learned then to be very patient with government processes. But I’ve learned quite a bit as a result of being on the board. Now whenever I go to any municipality I am looking at the streets, and the layout, and the construction, and the sewer system, and the water system, whether there are overhead wires. I never paid any attention to that sort of thing before and now I do.

LS: What do you see as key challenges now that Triphammer is done?

LF: The single largest challenge facing us right now is what’s going to result from this sewer creation that comes from the Town of Lansing. It’s a very expensive -- another 10-year project, probably longer, actually. That’s a critical component to how growth will happen in the Village and the Town. I think everybody’s aware of that. We need a solution in the long term for the Village, but right now we have a solution that will work for the Village for quite some time. So, we don’t really need to have sewer but our colleagues and our sisters in the Town need it desperately.

How that’s done, who manages it, and how it is paid for are the critical components for those in Lansing. Other than that we have some, probably that’s the only critical thing. Triphammer Road was the big nut because that was going to cost us a million dollars just to repair, to dig it up, fix the water and electric pipes that were underneath the ground, and resurface. That all would have had to come out of the pockets of the Village of Lansing and its residents.

As a result of the reconstruction and getting on to the Transportation Improvement Program, we were able to create a $6 million dollar program at a fraction of the cost. And that was a miracle in of itself, but then trying to keep what it looked like, what we wanted to the Village to look like was a challenge because the State really wanted it to look like a five lane highway and we wanted it to look like a residential area. Ultimately we won out. We do have a lot of lanes on the bridge, but that was our choice to have safer passage. The whole design was never to increase traffic or to increase speed but to have safer managed traffic along with pedestrian movement in the form of walking, now that we have sidewalks, and in the form of bicycles and an ultimate tie in with our greenway system.

LS: The State wanted it to look like a five lane highway, this portion of Triphammer is actually a village road though isn’t it?

LF: Yes it is.

LS: The State had input because they were providing some of the funding?

LF: There is federal and state funding. Basically 80% of it was federal funding. We had to pay for the amenities. Anything that wasn’t directly related to the reconstruction we had to pay for. But ultimately we thought it was going to cost more than it did. As a result that’s why we ended up with a larger savings account than we anticipated and we’re lowering the tax rate as a result of that.

But it’s all village road up to the bridge and then it goes back to the Village of Lansing on the other side, the south side of the bridge all of the way to the entrance of Cayuga Heights. So this was really two projects that were originally presented to the Department of Transportation. But when we got to Syracuse to discuss it, broken up into two projects as they requested it was not going to be approved. We just missed the threshold. While we were there sitting at the meeting, we were doing some math on the side and calculated that we would meet the threshold if it was treated as a project together.

So just before the meeting ended, the chairman was about to hit the gravel saying this is all done, is everybody in agreement? We raised our hand and said wait a minute, the Village of Lansing initially wanted to submit this proposal as a single project and if you do the math you’ll find that we indeed make the tip as it is called, and that’s where it all started. It was approved at that point, and now you know the rest of the story.

LS: I think it was Lynn who first talked to me about a village identity. How important do you think a village identity if and how far do you think Triphammer reconstruction goes toward creating it or part of it, and what more should be done if anything?

LF: I think the identity is not the end of all worlds. It is not the most important thing. But it does give one an impression of the Village so in that sense we would like to illustrate our difference. We’ve done that predominantly through the reconstruction. The lights say something right away. They are the only lights like it around the area. Some people have called them the Darth Vader lights. I had not seen that in the lights until someone mentioned it. It’s the curvature. And then at the entrances, or at least on the south entrance we have the wall that says the Village of Lansing. We’re trying to figure out what to do at the north end.

Identity was important to us, but it wasn’t the end-all. How far should it go? Not much further than it has. The next step that we’re looking towards is what we are calling Wayfinding. How does a new person in the area find their way among the businesses, some of which are well hidden? We find critical areas like Kraft Road, which has several businesses down it, and it looks just like a residential street. So a new person would find it difficult without knowing very specific directions on how to get there.

And then going down Sheraton Drive, that’s a very difficult place to even give directions to find any business that’s down in that area. The third area is Lansing Village Place, which is in front of Pyramid Mall, is another place that’s difficult to find. What we’d like to be able to do is find a way to help people locate those businesses without having a sign for every business someplace along Triphammer Road, and different signs at that.

So we are talking to some of the businesses now trying to get an idea of what might be the best approach. We had a committee for a little bit, a group of people who have met together and have talked to the Planning Board. Directory signs might be the way to go. So the idea would be particularly coming up off one of the ramps on the bridge, to know at least which direction to go to find a directory sign. It’s not like we want to post of 50 businesses to know which way to go like you might find at a theme park, but rather general directions where if we can label those three areas in some unique way then you will at least know whether to turn left or right, and then you’ll know where the directory sign is, and then you will know which businesses are there.

The ultimate would be to find a way to do that in such a way that the businesses really owned it, but we would create the theme for it, so the signs would all look the same. Then if there were any personal signs that our landscape designer would have a smaller sign designed such that the same signage could be used even on personal property. So in Savannah Park and Lansing West where it is difficult to know which building is which and where things are located, if they wanted to have additional signage in that area they could follow the Village theme and then it would all look nice together. So that’s part of the identity.

Creating the walkways, the trees, the lighting, we’re going to do special surfaces on the crosswalks, we’ve got other crosswalk amenities where now we’ve got the timers that talk to you when you can cross safely. Safety and pedestrian movement has been a critical part and that blends right into the identity of the Village of Lansing. When you step back or come to the Village the thing you should walk away with is that it was well-planned and a nice separation from residential and businesses where each can thrive with an easy and safe passage through both for pedestrians and vehicles alike.

LS: Now, moving this to the next step, what about growth? What kind of growth would you like to see in the Village? I know there isn’t a whole lot of room for it.

LF: There is some, and it’s been well managed. I really pride the planning board on how well they have done in being able to convince developers to fit through a theme that works well for them and the Village alike. Each of the areas are just well designed with landscaping taken into consideration, eye appeal, lighting, and bleed-over, and the lack thereof is something that is intended when you plan these things.

And most recently we have actually changed the law so the setbacks are closer to the roads so that when you drive down through the Village of Lansing instead of seeing a myriad of cars in front of all these buildings, you will see the landscaping and the cars will be in the back of the buildings. That’s been done on purpose.

The other purposeful thing about that is the buildings being closer to the road will also give a somewhat of a tunnel effect, and when you do that people tend to slow down, so that fits into the theme of our safety. We do have a problem with folks coming in from the north where they are coming down from a 55 to a 40 and ultimately to a 30 mile per hour and they don’t get down to 30 fast enough for our liking. And so we are going to put a special sign towards the north that will be a radar sign that will actually tell you how fast you are going and actually let’s you know when you are exceeding the speed limit.

It won’t be a trap and we won’t be taking pictures, but it will tell us the frequency of which we have speeders and that will encourage us to have some police enforcement if necessary.

LS: Do you give the Village’s point of view more inline with the City of Ithaca or the Town of Lansing?

LF: Boy, I guess I would answer that by saying neither. We’re different. The design of the Village started back in its creation in 1974 with a very purposeful layout by way of the zoning laws. Zoning laws have only been adjusted here and there and not really changed. As a result, they have not ever been accosted in a court of law. So that’s one of our strongholds is the fact that the zooming law hasn’t been changed. It’s been altered, but only to do things like allow McDonald’s to go from one side of the street to the other which gave them a larger property and gave us a safer road because what was happening was that cars were going out on Triphammer Road into a very dangerous situation with families getting out of the car and walking down the roadway because of the lines, things like that.

So we are very close to our residents and listen to what they have to say. We don’t hesitate to have a resident come to our board meeting talk to the board and explain a problem for which we engage and have a solution through our Department of Public Works in a very timely way.

I don’t see that happening in the Town and I don’t see that happening in the city. That’s the difference. Part of it is because we are small enough to do that. And we have a tree planting program, for example, where we are encouraging property owners to plant trees along the side of village streets and we’ll help pay for that. It will be in the Village right of way. You don’t see those kinds of programs in either the Town or the city either. So I guess it’s our size that makes a difference. It’s interesting. As small as we are with a 3,200 population, we have more malls per square mile than any other place in Tompkins County. We have more travelers on Triphammer Road, probably, than most other roads, and that’s why it was fair for New York State and the federal government to pay for the reconstruction of the road. You couldn’t justify it for 3,200 people but you can for the thousands that drive through the Village.

We are probably more like our sister organization in the Village of Cayuga Heights given the density where they have no growth opportunities, and we still have some, the single largest of which is Sundown Farms. From a beautification perspective we would like to see that stay that way for quite some time. The property owner would probably like some money for it and at some point it will probably be sold.

But it’s also the single largest collection of deer in the Village of Lansing, which is one of our serious problems that our residents would point out to us very quickly. And we want to encourage the land owner to offer hunting on that property once again to reduce the deer population. All the studies that have been done conclude the only effective culling of a deer population is through sharp shooting or hunting. Once you look at all the DEC’s rules and regulations with regards to deer, that is the only thing you have left in a dense area because you can’t trap them. I suggested at one board meeting well can’t you lasso them? Actually that is considered trapping, and you can’t do that either.

So I thought that was a novel idea to bring in some cowboys and I could see horses going around and capturing the deer that way, and then go to slaughter and sell the meat or give them to needy families or something like that. It all seemed like an interesting idea but it’s not allowed.

LS: The town is going to be probably the big center of growth in Tompkins County over the next who knows how many years. It could really go two ways as I see it. One way is that the southern part of the Town, south of South Lansing, but north of the Village of Lansing could become ‘Lansing Village North’ so to speak, or the growth could take place in the Town center, which would mean more commercial development there rather than glomming on to the commercial development here. From a village perspective, which one of those do you think would be better?

LF: Well, I don’t think there is much of a choice. Our zoning would not allow further development of commercialism down Triphammer Road. We specifically designed the zoning laws so that wouldn’t happen. So you’ve got the Sundown Farms -- I’m not sure how that is zoned, but I don’t think it would allow for commercial development. I mean there was a shot at creating housing and a golf course along with a hotel that was originally going to go in that area some years ago. Fortunately that didn’t make it because there was no way to sustain that kind of growth. If anybody were going to buy into that it would have to be a transition from elsewhere in the county. There just isn’t that much growth to take on the 100 homes that were planned for that property.

It was going to be 100 homes, a golf course, and a hotel. It looked like the sewer system would have to be a package plan, but it was the only way to handle that many people in such a small area. So, no, it was the one time where we had a lot of competition for board positions and it was a close call. I think that’s when the community party really got engaged because the Village landscape would have changed dramatically if they had Sundown Farms turn into residential property. Not that it wouldn’t have been nice but we don’t think it would have ever sold and you would have ended up with a ghost town there which wouldn’t have been to the benefit of anybody.

LS: Maybe not then, although it might now. The county wants 3,000 affordable homes over the next 10 years.

LF: Well, affordable. Back 10 years ago these were going to be $300,000 homes. So now they would have been a little more. It wasn’t meant to be affordable in the sense of what the county is interested in. So having more commercial activity in the Town is fine. No matter how it plans out we’re going to end up with more traffic on Triphammer Road. That was part and parcel of our planning to make it a safe thoroughfare especially with that turning lane makes all the difference in the world. And being able to efficiently go through without getting into road rage where people are in line for long periods of time.


LS: It’s a remarkably noticeable difference.

LF: We pay a lot of attention to the signal system and how it works. We don’t control any of it, it is all done actually in Syracuse but we watch it very closely and we listen to residents who report back saying, ‘You know how long I had to sit in line before that light finally turned?’ And we would go out and study it. It gets back to one of my earlier issues that we listen to the residents and indeed we find more often than not there’s a lot of truth to what they have to say. We get hold of the engineers, they study it, and they say an adjustment needs to be made.

In fact one of the residents brought to our attention this very problem with the lights and the engineer said it could absolutely not be true because of the way it’s wired. It worked out that it was wired backwards. If the resident hadn’t brought it up and wasn’t so adamant about it then it would have probably still been wired backward but they caught it, corrected it, and we’re just delighted.

LS: What do you consider your key accomplishments in your tenure?

LF: Well, I mentioned earlier the completion of the contract with Time Warner. That was one of my projects. Increasing communication in the Village of Lansing, I brought the webpage on to the Village with predominant purpose of sharing government information with the population. My colleagues at the time didn’t think it was necessarily a good idea, that it could bring us a lot of controversy, and we finally all agreed that controversies aren’t necessarily bad. That indeed we don’t own the Village, we manage the Village, and we manage it for the residents, and as a result the webpage has been very successful.

It is very basic. I wouldn’t go on to say it’s pretty or anything and it’s as basic as you can get with the sole purpose of when I stop managing it someone else can easily manage it. Then all the tools in it are all free, there is no cost associated with it at all. Other than the fact that we recently purchased a domain name so that it’s easier to remember.

I have created an email list of all the residents who are interested and sold the idea that they should be on it for three years in advance to when Triphammer Road project came into play. And then I took responsibility for communicating all traffic changes for all the participants on that email list throughout the construction phase.

LS: That was handy. We certainly carried it and I know WHCU carried it and other news outlets did.

LF: Well indeed that was a nice side effect which we didn’t really anticipate, that the newspapers, both on-line and paper, were picking up on it. Plus people were getting it in their inboxes and sharing it with other lists and things like that. It was actually quite a challenge for me to listen to the engineers in their dialect and convert that into something I could translate for Village residents to understand. First I had to understand it, which was a feat unto itself. I learned a lot of terminology that I didn’t know before, where they wanted to give me all the details and all I was interested was what are you going to do that will effect the traffic? That was the most difficult part in getting out of the communication.

And working alongside of the mayor in helping get the Triphammer Road project completed, all the way from its inception and working with the hiring of the initial engineering firm. I worked with a team of people who ultimately decided upon the Fischer and Associates engineering firm that did an extraordinary job. They were just far and above better than the other firms that we interviewed. I had never done that before -- to read five inches of material and make some kind of determination from a language that I didn’t understand. Fortunately we had an engineer on the team, Kim Jacobs, who really helped in that regard and helped us narrow down how we could pick the right firm for us.

So those are the major accomplishments. Other than that it’s more watching how the financing is working. (Mayor) Don (Hartill) and (Village Clerk/Treasurer) Jodi (Dake) just do a fabulous job of managing the funds in a way that’s probably unique among most other municipalities. We have a very small staff here. We outsource practically everything. If we can do it cost effectively, we do. If we can’t, we outsource so we never have the overhead of whether it’s materials or machinery or staffing that goes on and eats away your resources. That’s worked out very well. We often hire the Town. As we all know the Town plows our streets and cleans our streets in the spring. That’s a very effective way to do business.

LS: What would you want people to know about your candidacy that we haven’t already talked about?

LF: We continue to have a resident who is a spy that will watch out for their best interests. I am not a politician.

I am very interested in expanding the communication where people will actually use the email lists themselves. It’s actually designed for the population to use it, not me. I have been the only one who has ever used it to send out communications relative to the Village of Lansing where it’s single largest use however was when there was a lost dog in the Village. We used that list in order to coordinate communication among all the people who were looking for the dog and the dog was successfully found. So it’s there. It can be used for emergency purposes; it can be used to find a babysitter and those sorts of things.

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