Archive: Opinions

EditorialI thought Tuesday's open 'town center' gathering was a good meeting.  Let's face it -- most people stay away from municipal meetings unless they have something they want to complain about.  But this time people freely expressed all different points of view.  My perception was one of a diverse group of townspeople building consensus for a shared vision of our community.

That sounds a bit lofty, but that was supposed to be the purpose of that meeting.  It is to the credit of Peter Trowbridge, who moderated the resident input portion, as well as of everyone who participated, that it actually worked that way.

At first people seemed suspicious.  Questions were raised about why we need a town center when we have Ithaca and the Village of Lansing, how many additional tax dollars were going to be exacted during a time of economic difficulty, why should current townspeople pay for the benefit of developers and future townspeople.

In my opinion these are good questions, but to some extent they represent a negative approach, posing the question in the form of 'why should we not do this?'.  I think the purpose of the meeting was to ask, 'why should we do this?'  So it was encouraging after the first few minutes to hear people talk about things they would like to see happen.  A lot of different people had ideas, and many of them were homogenous.  And those ideas at least begin to answer the question of why we should do it.

Those initial questions served a good purpose, though.  There seemed to be a consensus among most in the room that if a town center is to be developed that it be for people who live here now.  That it should improve current residents' quality of life, and if by doing so it attracts new development and new residents, so be it.  Not planning has resulted in so many undesirable consequences in countless communities that are marred by endless strip malls, runaway development, and overwhelmed school systems.  By planning a future for ourselves we can shape future development in an image our community can embrace as a whole.

Everyone I talk to who lives here says that this is a remarkable community.  I agree -- everywhere else I've lived had areas where 'kinds of people' lived and these groups didn't particularly mix.  In Lansing everyone seems to mix just fine, and people genuinely care about each other and the community as a whole.

Because of that it has always struck me as odd that we don't have a town center.  Town centers are places where strong communities congregate.  It is the convenience of having shops and walkways, but it is also symbolic of the cohesiveness of as strong a community as ours is.

I want to be clear -- I think we needed to be reassured that the idea wasn't to develop the town at our own expense.  We needed to know it isn't happening right away, that we're not footing onerous bills for things we don't know we want, that current residents are not being forced out of town because of new taxes.  These assurances were given at the meeting.  Dream now, build later.

Maybe the answer to 'why should we do this?' is that we shouldn't.  At this stage I loved that my neighbors were willing to share their thoughts on what the 'this' could be without worrying about whether we should or shouldn't.  How do we know whether we want do do it if we don't first know what the 'it' is?  That's what made that meeting great -- people let down their defenses and talked about what our 'it' could be.  Now what it will be.  Not what it won't be.  Just what it could be.

Growth happens whether you want it to or not.  What makes Lansing remarkable attracts people here.  That has always been true and it will always be true.  That makes it all the more important that we be ready for growth.  If we don't steer how it happens, who will?  It's our community and if we want it to continue to be we have to plan the way we want development to happen so that it keeps being ours.

These things take time and money.  We don't know when or whether we will ever see a Lansing town center.  What we do know is that our community can dream together.  Whether that dream manifests itself physically in a town center or not, it will help to insure that the Lansing we collectively want will be the one we get.

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