Submitted by Rachel Kennedy for the Democratic View  published in the Tompkins Weekly for April 2022.   Rachel Kennedy lives in Trumansburg with her family. She has served there on the Village of Board of Trustees and the Board of the Ulysses Library. She enjoys making mosaics, growing things, theater, reading and British TV.  I took a bit of a dive this week into the topic of RECYCLING. The landscape is complex. I participate, certainly, as a curbside recycler, occasional redeemer of bottles and cans, and a gloomy but mostly passive receiver of news that an ever-increasing volume of my recycling efforts are fruitless. The scope of the solid waste mess is shocking.  A number of bills are currently in NYS legislature committees to tackle the problem from a number of angles. Among them: A7668 (Sponsor: Englebright), to prohibit recycling symbols on items that are not truly recyclable; S7718 (Kaminsky), to establish Extended Producer Responsibility; and A8668 (Cahill), to provide for expansion of the NYS Bottle Bill. All fascinating, and I’m zeroing in here on the Bottle Bill. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the original NYS Bottle Bill, the incentive-based program designed to ease burden on waste facilities, encourage recycling, and […]

Submitted by Ann Reichlin for the Democratic View  published in the Tompkins Weekly for May 2022 Ann Reichlin is an artist who exhibits her work  throughout the United States including her current site-specific sculpture, Transient Room at the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia, PA.  Ann served on the Ithaca City School District Board of Education from 2015 to 2021. She has lived and worked in Ithaca since 1997.  As residents and communities attempt to meet New York State’s ambitious  clean energy goals, Greenidge Generation–a cryptocurrency mining facility situated on Seneca Lake– takes us in the opposite direction. If energy efficiency and transitioning to renewables is part of the solution, then the Greenidge plant’s massive use of fossil fuel is part of the problem. In the same way that the fracking industry tried to sneak into New York State about a decade ago, the proof-of-work cryptocurrency industry is slithering into our region hoping nobody will notice. Greenidge Generation should have been a positive clean energy story. The original facility used coal to produce electricity. When the coal plant was closed it was an environmental win. In an effort to re-use the site, the facility was converted to natural gas to […]

Don’t miss this important virtual town hall featuring our own Anna Kelles, Stacey Dimas and others. Although seen as a progressive state, New York has some of the most restrictive voting rights laws in the country and a long history of discrimination, especially against Black and Brown voters. JOIN US  on Wednesday, March 23rd at 6pm for a virtual town hall on this issue and why we need the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York (NYVRA) A6678A. NYS Assembly Member Kelles, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the New York Civil Liberties Union and more will gather to discuss what this bill means for New Yorkers, our communities, and how you can support it. The NYVRA (S.1046A/A.6678A) will provide the strongest protections of any state law against voter suppression, discriminatory election structures, and voter intimidation, while offering nation-leading measures to provide transparency in election administration and support to voters whose first language is not English. After years of lagging on voting rights, now is the time for New York State to lead.RSVP HERE Zoom Video Communications Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: NYVRA Town Hall . After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about […]

A Special Hello to Members and Volunteers, On the evening of January 27 at the TCDC General Meeting I was elected to serve as the chair of the Tompkins County Democratic Committee. I accepted this position with a commitment to enhance the mission of our county committee with the recognition of the needed support of you, members, volunteers, and community groups. Being chair of the Town of Ithaca Democratic Committee and the Political Action Team provided me vast experiences and has fostered a strong commitment to being politically engaged. I would like to extend to Stacy Dimas, our first Vice-Chair a warm thank you for stepping in under such sad circumstances. We know how proud Jim was of you Stacy, but also how thankful we all are for your leadership and unwavering abilities to organize under pressure. As the calendar turned from January to February, the floodgates opened to finalize “Redistricting” across the local, state and federal governmental voting districts. New York State released district lines with the spotlight in Tompkins County on the NY State Senate District 58 now the 53rd which will span the Southern Tier, Finger Lakes, and Central New York and appears to include Tompkins, and […]