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Dan Pace has led the fight to make the Lansing School District polls require that voters be registered.  Last year he was successful in getting that to happen when the Lansing Board Of Education voted to change voting procedures and requirements for the district.  The library may be a victim of this campaign.  While Pace originally opposed putting another taxing authority on property owner's annual bill, he now says that it's about a certifiably fair vote.

Pace sat down with the Lansing Star Monday to talk about the tug of war between his group and library supporters that started when the May 2007 vote asked for 17 cents per thousand dollars of assessed value and failed by a narrow margin.   In December supporters brought it to a revote, asking for 15 cents, and it won by a slightly less narrow margin.  This year Pace brought a petition to the school board to have a third vote, this time with voter registration required.

Lansing Star: Why should people vote 'Yes'?

Dan Pace: We got to a junction where it wasn't about the library any more.  It was about the voting procedures and process at the Lansing Central School District.  When this came to a vote the original time the library took advantage of an opportunity where they would not be having a vote in the registered Town district.  They took it down to the school, which was a non-registered district.  They knew they had an advantage there because you didn't have to be a registered voter.

In the 30 plus years I've lived in Lansing and if you talk to people who have moved here -- when they came to vote on school district budgets they thought they had to have an ID.  When you just sign your name on a sheet of paper it was pretty unbelievable that you could vote that way, and these people were shocked.

The Friends of Lansing Library took advantage of that.  If they had voted in the Town of Lansing the Town would have had to open three voting offices and you would have to be registered to vote for that library.  I think they took advantage of something there.

I saw how the vote went down, and this has happened in the School District in the last decade.  I've seen how the vote has gone, and I've heard through the rumor mill from parents who have students in the school how things have happened.  I said this has got to change.  We're talking big money here.  We've got to have a fair vote.  You can't have people from outside Lansing come in and vote for us.  We identified that to the State when I put my appeal into them.

The State came back and I won a sort of a half victory there.  They said I that I had the right to go back to the school under Section 268 of the State Education Law to petition the school board to have a re-vote on that.  We did it and we did it the right way.

We went through the Tompkins County election office and got the right forms for the petition, and we proceeded that way.  And now it's like the 'rubbber match.'  We had one vote that won, and one against.  This vote now -- we know the people in the school district are pretty satisfied with the way it's going to go down.  The only people that are going to vote in this are going to be the people who live in Lansing, in the district.  You've got to be registered in Lansing Central School District.

This is what it's morphed to, that we want a fair vote.

My original objection to the library was that the people in Lansing were promised that that would never go on the tax rolls.  There were people that gave very large donations on that promise that wasn't kept.  Some of these people are pretty upset that that is now on the tax rolls.

One of the top librarians at Cornell, who lives in Lansing, is on my side of the argument.  We've got a population base of about 95 to 100,000 people and we've got over 40 libraries in the county.  How many libraries does Tompkins County actually need?  You've got to count the school libraries.  That's duplication of efforts.

LS: If the 'Nos' win what will happen next?

DP:  Nothing.  I'll live with it.  I'm satisfied that we have a fair vote.

If they win I hope the library is successful.  But I hope if we're spending that money it's legitimate money that's really being used, and that people are really using that library.  One of the issues that we're seeing right now is that since the library did become a chartered library it has very irregular hours.  People go there and it's open one day and closed the next, it's open one day... Are we going to spend $105,000 to have a library that's open one day, it's closed the next, it's closed three days, then open?

They've got (regular hours) posted but the problem is that if you drive by that library a lot of time it's closed.  I get feedback from people that tell me that.  My concern is if the 'Nos' win -- are the people that are running that library going to be efficient with our money and understand do we really need this library?

If you live here in Lansing it takes five or six minutes to run to the library here.  It's going to take about 12 to go to the Tompkins County library, which is much bigger.  They've got parking down there.  We just spent a lot of money a few years ago to build parking for the new library where it's located now in the former Woolworth's building.

I look at that and ask is that really what we want.

Another point we brought out is that if Lansing is growing and we need this library are we coming to the point that we don't have to fund the Tompkins County library?  The money that Lansing is sending there, let's spend it here in Lansing on our own library.  Have we grown to the point that that should be a city library and we pay for ours here?

Costs keep going up.  I don't know what their budget is showing there, their operational costs, salary, wages... I learned in business school that labor is called 'burden.'  What is the impact of that.  They're telling people it's 18 cents per thousand, which is not a lot.  But is that going to be realistic five years from now?  Or ten years from now?  Is that going to escalate to a point where it becomes a line item on our tax bill that's really large?

Those are the things we've got to be concerned with, especially with the economic conditions that we have in New York State.  It's not good.  I just heard today that because of the bottle bill there are rumors in the mill that Pepsi and Coke might pull out of New York State.  I just heard that on a well respected news program out of Albany.  So the burden on the tax payer -- it's not so much the dollar amount, but every family is getting hit with $20 here, $20 here, $20 here... the next thing you know it's in the hundreds of dollars.  Now here in Lansing this year, if all the Lansing residents lose the STAR program our taxes are really going to escalate here.


I'm a fiscal conservative.  I look at the property tax burden that the people are under.  The more things that are thrown on that make it harder and harder for people to live.  If you look at New York State over the last decade, we've lost two, two and a half million people who have left the State.  When those kind of numbers leave the State that leaves the vurden on the rest of us.

LS: If the Library wins, they have to have a vote if they want to increase or decrease the library budget.  What would it take to convince you to raise it in the years ahead?

DP: The first thing we'd have to do is look at the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and inflation.  One of the things that New York State government has been very poor at is that they don't have a tendency to stay within that and the tax rate goes astronomically up.  I presented a program to (State) Senator Nozzolio to institute the Homestead Act.  People's tax rate is a combination of the taxing jurisdiction and the assessment rate, so there are two variables to it.  And you know what's happened to assessments in Lansing.

I put a proposal in to him, yet the politicians -- Democrat and Republican -- are not acting on it.  And it's hurting families.  34 states across the country have this.  What that would state is that once you purchase a home that becomes the assessed value.  The next tax year you become homesteaded.  From that point on it doesn't matter what the tax rate is or the assessment rate.  The most that property owner's taxes can increase is 1.5% of the raw dollars they paid the prior year. If you pay $1000 on your home, the most you're going to be obligated to pay is another $25.

That way it's not going to hurt families.  I don't know how families today with two children and a husband and wife -- how difficult it must be when you've got home insurance, fire insurance, car insurance -- typically you've got to have two cars in a family with gas, groceries on the table.  With the tax burden that we're up against I don't know how families with kids are doing it.  And then you have to put your home loan mortgage in there, too.

That's where I'm coming from.  I'm a fiscal conservative, but I also want to be fair.  We need government institutions.

LS: So one of the things they'd have to do to get your vote is to stay within that boundary of tax increases.

DP: Yes, they've got to be reasonable.  Let's hypothetically say that they come back to us and want to increase the tax base 5%.  The actual raw dollars that's going to bring in is a lot more than 5%.  It's going to double it.  It's a small number here, but when the actual dollars come in from the masses they end up with this much more money.  It's huge.  The schools are the same way.

So you have to be careful about that.  I object when people say what a little amount that operation is costing us.  you can't really say that because it might be a little to you and me, but to another family that might be a lot of money to them.  That's their gas for a week or two to get to work.  To make a broad generalization that it's a small dollar amount... I always go back to a story I saw on the Syracuse station about an elderly couple from the Preble - Tully area.  Last winter they were living in their home at 40 degrees.  They were all bundled up.  During the day they would go to Walmart in Cortland to stay warm.  They'd stay there all day and then go back at night when Walmart closed.  So when people say it's not a lot of money you've got to be careful because for certain people it could be.

LS: What would you like say in closing?

DP: They've worked hard for their side, we've worked hard for our side.  I've lived here long enough.  I know what the town is like, what we're up against here, and I just want to see a fair vote.  That's what we argued for.  That's what this is really about today.  Whichever way it happens, whether it's a 'yes' or a 'no' we're going to live with it.  People that I've worked with to get to this point -- I'm representing a lot of people -- were not happy with the way the original vote went down because of the allegations of fraud that we identified.  We want to see the best for whatever happens for Lansing, on both sides.

One of the things we don't want to happen is that I don't want to see people attacking each other.  Lansing is too good a community to have people fight over this issue when there are a lot bigger things happening in the world.

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