Archive: News

	The Village of Lansing election is slated for April 28th.  Mayor Donald Hartill , Deputy Mayor Larry Fresinski , and Trustee Lynn Leopold are all running unopposed for another two year term.  The election will be held at the village Office at 2405 N. Triphammer Road, from noon to 9pm.

Donald Hartill is running for his seventh term as Mayor of the Village of Lansing.  Before becoming Mayor he served as a Village Trustee for eight years.  Hartill and his wife Marion has lived in Lansing for 41 years.  He is a Professor of Physics at Cornell, and travels frequently to participate on projects including the CERN particle collider in Geneva.

Hartill sat down with the Lansing Star Monday to talk about past achievements, future goals, and his candidacy.

Lansing Star: Let's talk about achievements from your past term.

Donald Hartill: In the past term we signed off all the papers on the Triphammer Road reconstruction.  We continue to have in place our maintenance program for streets and infrastructure systems.  We continue to keep our tax levy at or below inflation.  We've done that yet again.  Our budget this year will be about two thirds of inflation in terms of the levy increase.

I think that's probably a precedent in the local region, in spite of our hard times.  We've also taken a significant cut in what we project for sales tax revenue, yet we're still able to manage to do all of the things we need to do including repaving a number of streets in the Village this year.

LS: And you added an employee last year.

DH: We have another full time employee in the Public Works Department.  That's a really great team, led by John Courtney.  They work very well together.  They've taken over a number of the things that we used to have contracted out. 

My strategy is always to do as much as we can by contract so that you don't have marching army costs.  We're currently negotiating a snow plowing contract with the Town.  John and I had a subsequent meeting with (Town Supervisor Scott Pinney) and (Town highway Superintendent Jack French) a few days ago.  We're working out the details.  I think it's going to work out.

LS: It seems that even with the perception of strife over the plowing issue that the joint Town/Village meeting was very open and honest.

DH: That's the kind of relationship I want to maintain.  If we don't talk to each other and don't speak our minds, we're not going to make any progress.  I fully expect our relationship to continue to be very positive.

LS: (Town Councilman) Bud Shattuck said to me not too long ago that he has come to think that less government is better and there should just be one county-wide government for everyone.

DH: I completely disagree with him.  (A short discussion of inefficiencies of governments followed.)

There are overlaps of services.  The County has a very large planning department.  They have no legislative authority to plan anything.  I've always been puzzled by that.

LS: That brings us to areas of cooperation between the Town and Village that came up in the joint meeting.  It seemed as if both governments wanted to increase that.

DH: That is the correct interpretation.  We have developed many more capabilities than we used to have.  We're not so different in our DPW capabilities from the Town in some respects.  I think that's slowly beginning to be realized.

We're going to be rebuilding Dart Drive this coming year, and our need is in trucking.  I think we're going to work out a very equitable arrangement where the Town will provide trucking.  We will, of course, pay for that.  Then we don't have to contract with somebody else for this particular job.  We don't have to buy another truck, hire a truck driver, things like that.

We're cooperating with the County in the sense that Warren Road is part of the (Federal) recovery funding that's coming to Tompkins County.  The Village is paying for half of the new traffic light at Bomax Drive.  So your long wait getting out of the post office will hopefully be a thing of the past.

LS: What are your goals for the next two years?

DH: More of the same.  One of the things I try to do is to keep everything steady.  There are no big ups, no big downs.  That's the only way you can survive as an organization.  The Village, through careful planning, is basically debt-free.  The only depb we have is a debt that would cost us more to pay it off than the interest costs.  When (Clerk/Treasurer Jodi Dake) first came on board we looked at all our debt.  Whoever negotiated that contract didn't look at the details very carefully, so there is a big pre-payment penalty clause.  So we'll continue to pay it.

LS: When I first started covering the Village it appeared to me that you were pretty much doing the business of the Village.  More recently it seems that you have delegated more to the Trustees.  Am I imagining that?

DH: No, that's pretty much the case.  One of the things that is important is that people feel part of the process.  If I do everything, then nobody else learns all the details.  So it's important that knowledge be spread around.  I might be hit by a Mack Truck.  You never know.

That's really my philosophy.  If people have a part in the game they're much more attentive to keeping the game going.  I try to set the philosophy of how we do business.

LS: What are you looking most forward to in the next two years?

DH: (Laughs) A couple of campaigns ago I said that when Triphammer Road was done my checklist was complete.  There are other things I want to see happen.  We still have a number of features in the Village that predate me, and it's an opportunity to change them so they are no longer features.

Northwood Road, for example, is a private roadway into part of the Village.  We are negotiating with the current owners, who are negotiating with their bonding agents to see if we can't resolve that.  I'm hopeful.

LS: Why do you want to be in office?

DH: It's my way of giving back to a society that's been very good to me.

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