WHOSE PLAN IS THIS ANYWAY?
At first glance; the County’s “vision” reads like a promotional brochure — but a careful inspection reveals a dictator’s boot marks among its carefully shaped phrases.
“THE TOMPKINS COUNTY COMPREHENSIVE PLAN presents a vision for the future of the community. It is based on a set of principles that reflect the values of the community as expressed by the County Legislature they have elected. The Plan seeks to foster a place where individual rights are protected while recognizing the benefits that can accrue to community members from common actions. It largely focuses on voluntary collaboration between the public and private sectors, but also supports the role that local regulation can play in addressing key issues impacting the entire community and helping people to live together in harmony. Where regulation is required, it should balance the burdens placed on individuals and businesses with the restrictions needed to protect or otherwise benefit the larger community. In most cases the Plan seeks to expand individual choice in terms of where and how people live their lives.”
This “vision for the future”:
- Reflects the “values of the community” but only “as expressed by the County Legislature.”
- Claims to “foster a place where individual’s rights are protected” but in the same sentence subordinates this to “common actions.”
- It “focuses on voluntary” but “supports the role of local regulation.”
The phrase “helping people to live together in harmony” is particularly fatuous: Harmony requires more than one voice, and that’s something that is entirely missing from this “vision.”
And while the Plan states “Where regulation is required, it should balance the burdens placed on individuals and businesses with the restrictions needed to protect or otherwise benefit the larger community,” it nowhere states who will decide what these “regulations” or “burdens” are and when they are “needed.”
By removing those portions of the Plan’s foreword that are negated by qualifiers; this seemingly contradictory policy statement becomes clear:
This plan is based on values that reflect the principles of the County’s legislature. It uses local regulations to place burdens on individuals and businesses in serving that agenda and restricts individuals in their choice of where and how they can live.
Statements like “The Plan includes policies that, when considered together, can help create both rural and urban communities” indicate that these policies are intended to “create” new communities, rather than help the existing ones. Just what these communities will be and who will benefit is the subject of Cornithaca County.
“Prosperity for All”?
The Plan’s paragraph that begins with “Prosperity for all” ends with an equivocating “encourage the payment of livable wages whenever practical and reasonable” that completely drains statement of any meaning.
The County’s assertion: “Unemployment rates in Tompkins County have experienced the same cyclical ups and downs as New York State and the U.S., but have consistently been lower than statewide,” is used to minimize rural joblessness: “Still, unemployment is considered a problem by local residents, especially rural residents, with nearly 60 percent of rural residents calling it ‘critical’” — and the County further weakens the issue’s significance by the omission of any factual data, and the use of the qualifications: “still” and “considered.”
While admitting that “Individual poverty rates here are quite high, around 20 per-cent in 2011” and “It is clear that not everyone in the community shares in the region’s economic prosperity,” it muddies the issue of rural poverty with: “this can be partially explained by the fact that about 30 percent of the local population consists of students,” and goes on to add generalized family data; thereby avoiding any specifics or insight into the very real plight of the county’s rural poor.
The Plan makes no mention of mitigating rural unemployment or poverty.
Re-colonizing Rural New York
Most frequently, however, the Plan refuses to admit that Tompkins County’s rural communities have any place in its future:
“In rural areas the Plan envisions a working landscape of farms and forests providing products and jobs that support a strong rural economy, while providing for management and protection of these resources to maintain their ability to sustain the community into the future. Rural economic activities may include businesses processing agricultural and forest products, and other small businesses appropriate to a rural setting.”
It’s easy to see this “envisioning” was never done by rural residents; because this policy would exclude the lifestyles and destroy the communities of the majority of the county’s rural population.
“Employment choices for those interested in living and working in rural areas will include full- and part time farming, independent “homestead” lifestyles, entrepreneurship in agricultural and forest product processing, and at-home workers who want to live close to nature.”
Agriculture is historically among the lowest paying of all jobs — the owners may make millions, but the workers are frequently living below the poverty level.
NY farmers were furious with the minimum wage hike even though they are the only industry to receive a tax credit for the wage increase. The NY Farm Bureau was not only a self-proclaimed “leader in the fight against $15,” it’s also an important voice opposing the farmworkers’ right to organize…and an important voice in rural policy.
A May 2016 article in Grassroots [the NY Farm Bureau’s “Voice of New York’s Agriculture”] points out that NY agriculture needs cheap labor to compete with Pennsylvania’s minimum wage of $7.25. Nowhere in the article does it mention what it is like to try to live on $7.25 an hour, or show any concern for the farmworkers who do.
While the right to organize for all workers is guaranteed in the state’s Bill of Rights, the state’s Employment Relations Act excludes farmworkers from being defined as employees, effectively denying them those same rights.
In Conclusion
The County’s “Plan” is a regressive and autocratic vision from the past — a stratified society that serves the goals of vested interests and leaves rural communities in the position of powerless suppliers of raw materials and cheap labor.
This Plan takes that big step from telling people how they should live to making them live that way. The Tompkins County Comprehensive Plan is a “kick out notice” for rural residents unwilling or unable to conform.
The repopulation of rural towns by affluent incomers demanding services and conveniences that local residents neither need, want, nor can afford is the death knell for their historical independence and way of life — leaving young couples unable to buy a house in the town where they were born, or even eat in the local restaurants.
“Living here is only affordable when jobs are paying wages that make household costs manageable.” proclaims the Tompkins County Comprehensive Plan.
Whether by inadvertence or design, the county’s high taxes, aggressive property assessments, and high rural unemployment rates are forcing the community’s rural residents to sell the land and homes their families have lived in for generations and leave Tompkins County — a problem that the Tomkins County Comprehensive Plan neither acknowledges nor plans to prevent.
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This article focuses on the fate of the rural community under the Plan’s “vision.”
Once the takeover of the surrounding towns was accomplished: The vested interests/nobility were given lands and position; with the understanding that they would acknowledge the leadership/sovereignty of the College Town through its County Legislature and the Plan.
Like the unborn who are no longer human beings, and the elderly who died in their thousands from COVUD-19 while state government shrugged its shoulders; New York’s rural residents are a troublesome segment of the population already marked for the chop.
In a county based on using and taking at the highest levels; the less-educated rural poor stand out like a starveling in a field of contented cash cows.
If we don’t “wither away”; there are other means.