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.

Larry Fresinski is finishing his eighth term as a Village Trustee, and currently serves as Deputy Mayor.  After 16 years he's running for another two year term to continue the work he envisions for the Village.  Fresinski takes the lead on the technology side, maintaining the Village Web site, experimenting with technology to stay in contact with Village residents, and maintaining the Village office Internet connection and email.

He met with the Lansing Star at the Village Office Monday to talk about where the Village has been in the past few years, and where he sees it going during his ninth term.

Lansing Star: What do you consider to be your top accomplishments in the current term?

Larry Fresinski: I have standard priorities that I work towards with regards to the Village.  When I started I told the then mayor that I would be joining the Trustees as a resident.  I was not a politician.  The idea being that I would be a spy for our residents to ensure that their money was well spent.

Well, I think one might claim that in this past year their money has been well spent.  In particular in this last year given that Triphammer Road was put in at a fraction of what it would have otherwise cost as a result of us, as a team, getting together and putting a submission together that didn't have a snowball's chance in heck of being accomplished, given the last minute that we did it in.  And we pulled it off.

It's a terrific addition to the Village that is forever.  It forever changes the way that the Village is presented to the community and to the external audiences in a way that integrates our walking trails, supports bimodal transportation, whether it's bicycles, vehicles, or walking.  It just works really well in a way that's easily sustainable from a cost perspective, and a way that residents can easily use.

It delights us to see people walking down Triphammer Road.  It's never really happened before.  With baby carriages, sometimes bicycles... that's been delightful.

The fairly new accomplishment, which you've written about, was to reach out further in the Village to get people to participate.  As you are quite aware we often have a public (at Board of Trustees meetings) that consists of reporters, an occasional student, and a Community Party recorder.  In the last term I don't know that we had an audience that consisted of more than those people.

You can take that in one of two ways: that you're doing such a terrific job that there really isn't anything for the public to comment on.  Or that people just aren't aware until it's in their face and they're upset about something.

I suspect we're someplace in between.  Most of the people we talk to when we go from house to house -- usually getting signatures for the next election -- wonder what am I signing for?  Things are OK.  When I turn the tap on the water comes out and it's good water.  When I go out into the road I'm not hitting any pot holes -- it looks good.  We've got sidewalks out there.  It doesn't seem to be costing me any more.  Life is good.

Traffic moves smoothly.  I can get out of my driveway, and the list of things like that keep going on.  The cap to the whole thing is that my taxes don't increase any more than inflation.  That has been a consistent theme that we've promoted right along.

Those are the major things.  Keeping the Village Web page up to date is a concern.  I want to keep data out there so that when residents do want to engage they have a history to look at.  It goes back years now.  You can look at minutes.  There is a search engine there to pull things out.  You immediately know who to contact if you have a problem.  Often all of us will get email from a resident who has got an issue, to make sure that someone is listening.  Interestingly we all respond, 'who's got this one?'

I hope to further engage with Facebook, for example.  If that seems to work -- and I'm not convinced that it has.  I think we have about 17 friends, which is a little lower than I'd hoped for.  The next event might be Twitter.  We'll see how many followers we can get.

These kinds of tools generally tap into a younger audience.  I'm not after a particular audience.  I'm interested in the entire audience.  Technology in general is like that, although we're seeing more and more senior citizens now engaging in the technology in a way they haven't before.  They're at least getting computers, they're on our e-mail list, which continues to grow very slowly.

So those are the accomplishments from this last term.

LS: What do you see as the challenges for the next two year term?

LF: There are several things that we need to do.  You're sitting in one of them (the codes office conference table where we talked was cluttered with folders, blueprints, and the paraphernalia of government).  Look at the mess.  We don't have any place to put stuff.

Several years ago we added this addition, so at least we have a clean meeting room to sit in.  We don't have to meet in the barn any more.  I was at a point where I was going to refuse to meet in the barn in the winter with the heater trying to keep us warm!  So having a Village office makes sense for our next move.

We have to get rid of that water tank outside of our existing office, and once that's gone we'll have the property in order to do something right for not only our visitors, but for our staff, who are crowded, sitting between piles of paper and their office chairs.  That just isn't right.  So that's one thing.

Another is solving this issue with Dart Drive.  It's too long, too close to the the intersection with Warren Road to be safe.

LS: Warren Road and Route 13...

LF: Where Dart comes into Warren is very close to Route 13.

LS: Right, that's what the issue is, that people are starting to get into the right turn lane while other people are trying to take a left turn out of Dart -- it's impossible.

LF: It's a disaster waiting to happen.  So we'd like to solve that.  We have some ideas as to how we might go about that.  We'd like to make that area more pleasant for walkers, since that is a densely populated area.  Having sidewalks at least on one side would be very worthwhile, and something we would like to pursue.

Another project that comes to mind is this ongoing issue with the Northwood Apartments roadway.  It's privately owned.  You start from Warren and go onto private property in order to get to the public roadway behind.  It really wouldn't be an issue if the road was kept up to par with Village standards.  It's not.  We have some residents that are quite aware of the problem that it's dangerous for their vehicles to hit potholes.

We'd like to resolve that.  We're working toward that as well to have this roadway transitioned to us to that we can have a safe pathway for our residents.

For a small village that's a pretty aggressive list already.  But we'll be maintaining our walkways, as always, throughout the Village with new materials and make sure they're clean and easily usable.  Other maintenance goes on, which our DPW is extraordinarily good at, whether it's sweeping the roadways, or shrub pickup which our residents look forward to every year, to ensuring potholes are filled.  We like to do at least a mile of roadway is every year.  We look for the worst roadway and have that resurfaced or corrected, whatever is necessary.

Those are standard things, but nevertheless when you're talking about a village that has a few employees and most of the malls in the area, it's a feat.  I think we do it well.

LS: Why do you want to run again?  This is a lot of years and a lot of goals.

LF: All the big goals have been achieved.  They took ten years apiece.  Whether it was Triphammer Road, which was a major one, or bringing to fruition a cable contract that took ten years before we finally got that signed off on.

LS: The Village is finally taking advantage of that as a customer.

LF: Yes, that was another accomplishment of sorts.  We switched over from a local service provider to Time Warner at a fraction of the cost.

We added a fire inspector, so we changed our organization some, and it was easy to get him his own e-mail account so people have direct access to him.

LS: But what's motivating you to run again?

LF: We'd like to see managed growth for the Village.  In particular we have a very large property on Triphammer Road, that if not handled well if and when it's purchased, will transform the Village into potentially a very negative place to be.

Some years ago the property was purchased and there was a plan that scared all of us.  It included having 100 private homes.  There was going to be a golf course, a hotel... This was a whole village unto itself!  It would have overwhelmed the Village had it come to fruition.

The real issue was that it would likely have been a ghost town, because the growth in the Village is just not there.  The growth in the County isn't there.  Our statistics have shown that there's no way that something like that would have been sustainable.  There could have been a lot of building going on, but it would have sat there.  Or it could have caused a shift.  They'd have to lower their prices, and we'd have people shifting around.  We have a net growth of all of eight houses a year, and that's it.  It you're going to build apartments and homes at the rate of three hundred residents you're talking forever to fill up something like that.

Fortunately that didn't go through.  What I'd like to see is that we sustain the Village in a way that we've defined it as a nice place to live and a nice separation between residential and commercial properties.  The hedgerows are part and parcel of our zoning ordinances.  I want to continue to see that.


LS: You're talking about managed growth.  Would all of that be bad if it happened gradually instead of all at once?  When the Triphammer project was happening various Village officials noted that the Village doesn't really have a village square like most villages do.  Do you think Sundowns presents an opportunity for having one, or is the Triphammer development it?

LF: I guess it's a Catch 22 as to 'if they build it they will come.'  Or not.  We're very prudent on our expenditures, so unless we see a need we don't move on it.  The notion of having a nice building here on this property with a place where residents could come and borrow the space -- I'm not sure you want a big hall where people can play bingo or whatever you might do.  I don't see this community doing that.  We have a lot of apartment dwellers.  Homeowners seem to keep pretty much to themselves, so the notion of having a village square where you want to come and join together with your community doesn't seem to fit the character of what the Village is today.

With the transition that Cornell and other businesses are going through. there's going to be a turnover of people.  And it's going to be large.  The question is with that shift of population will you bring in another type of people that may want to be closer together?

I could possibly see that happening.  As I read more articles where someone has gotten laid off, and they start spending more time with their family.  When they do they're finding it enjoyable.  All of a sudden it's back to basics, and that's what this economy is doing.  That could cause us to start thinking differently about having a place where people could get together.

LS: Do you have an election summary that you want to finish with?

LF: My platform isn't very exciting.  My objectives are things that I think all of us have agreed that we want to do in the upcoming year.  My major theme is to connect with more villagers interested in changing the way the government works for them.  I'm looking at using technological tools to help do that.

We've tried having meetings in peoples' homes, and unless there is an issue people don't rally around that.

LS: So these casual technological contact media like Facebook and Twitter might be more appropriate?

LF: For now.  It seems to be the thing that gets out there and touches people that want to be.  When an issue arises and we see any collection of interest, we go out into the community.  In the development of Triphammer we reached out in a variety of ways.  We had meetings here so people could see what the plans were, and interact.  And we didn't run into anybody that didn't want it.

We took every issue to heart to see how this was going to work for everybody.  And it did.

LS: What are you looking forward to in the next two years on a personal level?

LF: Given that I'm retiring from Cornell I'm looking for some opportunities that I wouldn't have before.  I'm not retiring with a mint julep in my hand and looking for the next warm beach, but rather looking for some interesting opportunities that i wouldn't have otherwise.  I've let the Mayor know that I'll have more time come July to spend with the Village, so who knows what will happen!

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