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The last hurdle for Tompkins County to receive $82,000 in a New York State Shared Municipal Services Initiative (SMSI) grant was passed Monday when Village of Lansing Trustees voted to support it.  The money is for a countywide water and sewer study to be used in infrastructure evaluating and planning.  Last month the Town and Village of Lansing were unable to garner enough support to even vote on it.  Last week the Town of Lansing bowed to political pressure, and Monday the Village followed suit.

"There has been a fair amount of pressure from all sorts of places," said Village of Lansing Mayor Donald Hartill.  "I've received a number of emails urging us to act."

Last week the Town of Lansing succumbed to similar pressure when Supervisor Scott Pinney presented the proposal in a similar manner to the Town Board.  That put more pressure on the Village as the only one of the 17 municipalities that was holding out.  At their last meeting Trustee John O'Neill argued passionately against spending the money wastefully, saying that this study simply duplicates studies and information the municipalities already have. 

The 17 municipalities had tentatively approved the study, and the award to the County was announced in April, 2008.  The economic downturn prompted more review by the State, which eventually awarded $82,000.  The Tompkins County Industrial Development Agency (IDA) is chipping in over $9,000 of matching funds for the study.

All municipalities in the county are required to approve it before the money will be released, so Village approval became vital to proponents of the study.  Tompkins County Area Development (TCAD) Vice President Martha Armstrong attended Monday's Village trustee meeting to argue what she called the economic development perspective.

Armstrong argued that there is a housing crisis with so many people who work in Tompkins County unable to find housing here.  She said it is less of an issue in the recession, but that housing and infrastructure is a long-term process.  She said it will provide context in terms of the needs of the larger community that can be used by key community stakeholders such as Tompkins County, Cornell University, The Chamber of Commerce, or TCAD to be supportive of future water and sewer projects.

"It is something that needs to be planned for over the long term," she said.  "Each of the municipalities know the situation of their own water and sewer, and they also know where they want to encourage development in their municipality.  However there is no central place to find that information about infrastructure in the Ithaca market."

Deputy Mayor Larry Fresinski countered that aggregating development data should be a normal function of the County.  "It's the County's responsibility to do that job, not hire someone to do it," he said.  "Why can't the towns and villages provide that information to the county so that it would all be there in a central site?"

Armstrong said the County can do it themselves or hire it out.  "One way or another it costs money," she noted.

"For the record I am going to propose we go forward with this because when we originally  agreed to this we hadn't carefully understood it," said Village of Lansing Mayor Donald Hartill.  "On the other hand I do have very significant concerns about a program like this.  It's basically paying a consultant another $80,000 or so to produce yet another report of data that already exists in a variety of places.  In my mind, in these economic times that money could be used much more usefully."

Although O'Neill made a final argument against supporting the grant, the resolution to support the grant passed 4 to 1.

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