A Problem of Tone and Process
Last night, I described how the Village Board of Trustees went about selecting a new mayor for Trumansburg. What I left out, for the sake of being concise, was the flavor of the meeting. If I were generous, I might call that flavor spicy. To be accurate, I might describe the flavor of last night’s board meeting as harsh and overdone.
John Levine and David Filiberto were able to retain a calm, respectful demeanor throughout the meeting. Other board members were not so calm. There was yelling. There were insinuations of bad intention. There was a pervasive attitude of defensiveness.
Worst of all, there was a strong message from many members of the board that the opinions of the village residents were an intrusion into the process, not a welcome source of input. During a discussion about whether the water rates of the village should be raised, residents were told to be quiet, and that “if you don’t like it, there’s the door.” Before he resigned, Levine told the audience, “This is a meeting of the board, not a meeting of the public, and you’re not invited to speak unless we want you to.”
After Levine resigned, John Hrubos took charge. Hrubos insisted that village residents in the audience would not have the chance to have any input regarding the selection of a new mayor. He decided that residents would have to remain silent and merely watch as the decision was made for them. No nominations for mayor could come from village residents. No comments could be made.
Unfortunately, the no-talking-from-the-audience rule was not evenly applied. Some people were allowed to speak, and others weren’t. John Levine, an ordinary village resident once again, made a comment, was listened to, and was responded respectfully. Chris Thomas, not yet a village board member, was allowed to ask a question and was given a response. However, when someone else raised a hand and said, “I have an idea,” Hrubos snapped back that, “This is a board meeting,” and silenced the resident. Geoffrey Hart asked to speak and was denied. When another resident spoke up and suggested that a particular village resident be nominated, he was told by Hrubos, “That’s so inappropriate it’s beyond discussion.”
It’s bad enough for the board to tell village residents that they will have no say whatsoever in the selection of their own mayor, and that they must remain silent. To allow some people to speak, while others must be silent, however, took the dynamic of the meeting even further downhill.
Commenting on his resignation to a local TV news team earlier this week, Levine said, “I can fix the budget. I can fix the streets. I can fix the water tower. I can’t fix people’s feelings.” The assumption underlying these comments is that it’s the job of the mayor, and elected village officials generally, to take care of the practical business of the village and not be concerned with how village residents feel about the way that business is done.
This narrow view of the role of elected officials is in part to blame for the current disfunctional relationship between the village board and residents. The mayor and members of the village board do need to be concerned with fixing the collective feelings of Trumansburg residents, at least in as much as those feelings pertain to the village government. Practically speaking, they won’t be able to get business done effectively if they don’t try to repair hurt feelings among residents. Lawsuits like the one brought by Geoffrey Hart, whether or not they are well founded in fact, are at root motivated by people’s feelings. Deal with those feelings, and lawsuits can be avoided.
Members of the outgoing village board are right to be upset at the angry, confrontational tactics of some village residents. However, village residents are also right to be upset at the arrogant, dismissive attitudes of board members. The arrogance of the village board and the confrontational tactics of village residents are feeding into each other. In such a situation, one side has to step aside and work to end the cycle of disrespect. The village board, given the special power it carries on behalf of village residents, has the greater obligation to resolve the situation.
When John Levine said that he can’t fix people’s feelings, he was wrong. Responding to constituents’ feelings is what elected officials are supposed to do. Levine could have worked to fix people’s feelings, but he chose not to. Levine could have led the board toward a more healthy demeanor, but he chose to quit instead. It’s his right to do so, but that doesn’t make it the right thing to do.
Jonathan,
Hey! You and I agree completely on this issue!
Well, I’m glad to hear that, Marcia. If there is a second vote for selecting a mayor while you’re on the board, would you support a motion to allow a time for residents to make short statements or ask brief questions?
I’m really happy to hear that bringing people together is a priority for at least Marcia. Healthy, respectful debate is great, important, and can facilitate change. Doesn’t sound like that happens as often as it should. In a town this small, i think it’s important that we keep it respectful rather than divisive. There are bigger challenges in the world that we would be better served by working together- (global warming, running out of oil, etc…). These are things that are important to me as a voter. It sounds like many town and village officials need a team-building retreat with some mediation/communication skills thrown in. ( i have a social work background, what can i say?!)
I don’t know, Jonathan, I don’t expect to go to a meeting and talk in all cases. Your comments seem oddly naive, since you seem to understand quite well how government works in all your other posts.
I don’t go to the capitol to speak during session. I elect my representatives to do so. Yes, I can sit in the gallery, no I can’t talk. It’s assumed that I would talk to my REPRESENTATIVES, BEFORE the meeting, to register my input.
my $0.02
Both “x” and John Hrubos are technically correct. A board meeting is a meeting of the board to which the public is invited. The public may witness their elected representatives govern, but they are not actually allowed to weigh in at will. Even the school board meetings are like this.
That being said, I go to village, town and school board meetings in many different municipalities and in most of those places, and have found Trumansburg and Ulysses to be unlike most places. In most communities if there is an audience and they do want to make a comment, the board members almost always either recognize the community member and let them speak, or (more or less) politely tell them that it isn’t appropriate for them to have input at that juncture and they are told to wait for the “open to the floor” segment of the meeting.
In other words, the letter of the law is not followed, but folks just fall back on old-fashioned etiquette and propriety. In many other more demographically homogeneous municipalities there is a unspoken understanding of what constitutes civil discourse. In Trumansburg there doesn’t seem to be that sort of understanding.
I put “more or less” in parentheses above because there is a sort of gruff directness in the manner of many life-long residents of rural central New York that I happen to appreciate. This appreciation is apparently not universal.
Well, X, I regard village government as very different from national, state, or even county government. I guess I have the idea that we’re small enough in a village to have more openness. When our top elected official is appointed, it’s a special case, and due to the lack of an election, it makes sense to do more than extra to hear villagers’ opinions.
More than a mere insistence on silence from the public, what bothered me is that the silence was selective -some people got to speak, while others was denied. Also, as I’ve written, some statements from board members were surprisingly harsh in tone. The tone, as much as the content of what happened, concerns me.
Carissa, as far as divisiveness is concerned, I think that we do need more opportunities for community members to interact and debate vigorously on local issues. A lot of people seem to be arguing against partisanship, and I don’t know if that’s any more healthy than disrespectful debate. If people do have different opinions, I’d like to see them present their opinions forthrightly and honestly, rather than maneuvering under the cloak of false moderation.
Thanks for the thoughts, Bill.
As I understand it, there’s nothing in the law to forbid a board from taking public comments. My experience has been like yours – I’ve found that most boards understand that they need to manage public sentiment by being open to public input, especially when there are controversial matters.
A successful village board, just like a successful romantic suitor, can’t just be technically correct.
I don’t think Mayor Levine ever saw his role, either as Mayor or when he was Trustee, as a political one. He made very little attempt to connect directly with residents, he never actively campaigned for anyone (including himself), he almost never interacted much outside of meetings. He was primarily a technocrat, and a pretty good one at that. Note his comments: “I can fix the budget, I can fix the water tower . . .” He
could! Unfortunately, politics, and the notion of having to expend significant energy connecting with a constituency, was not part of his psychic vocabulary. So, it’s not very surprising that Board meetings
would come to take on a semi-corporate, closed aura or that the skate park imbroglio and its consequences would disorient him and ultimately cause him to say it’s not worth it.
Of course, John Levine isn’t the first technocrat we’ve had in a leadership position on this side of the lake. Ferrentino was one when he was Mayor, and Austic is a classic. Too bad for us that they have thicker political skins than John! It was a while ago and memory is often rosier than reality, but I keep thinking it would be nice if our new Mayor and our new (and continuing) Board member(s) would maybe look to Marty Luster’s time as Town Supervisor as a possible model for how best to walk the line between allowing for robust constituent input AND effectively managing Village government.
Article 7 of the Public Officers Law requires that the public be allowed to attend any meeting of a public body in order to provide them with information on the functioning of government. It does not address the issue of public participation, but leaves it up to the individual bodies to determine whether they will allow public comment. NYCOM (the NYS Conference of Mayors) says in its “Handbook for Village Officials” that “The Village Board of Trustees…should adopt local rules of meeting procedure.” Further on, it states “By having written rules in place everyone involved knows what may or may not be done, and much controversy can be avoided. Some Villages have adopted Robert’s Rules of Order although they may be more cumbersome than what is necessary for municipal purposes.” NYCOM’s sample Guidelines for Public Comment are:
-The public shall be allowed to speak only during the Public Comment period of the meeting or at such other time as a majority of the Board shall allow.
-Speakers must step to the front of the room.
-Speakers must give their name, address and organization, if any.
-Speakers must be recognized by the presiding officer.
-Speakers must limit their remarks to 5 minutes on a given topic.
-Speakers may not yield any remaining time they may have to another speaker.
-Board members may, with the permission of the Mayor, interrupt a speaker during their remarks, but only for the purpose of clarification or information.
-All remarks shall be addressed to the Board as a body and not to any member thereof.
-Speakers shall observe the commonly accepted rules of courtesy, decorum, dignity and good taste.
-Interested parties or their representatives may address the Board by written communication.
Why do you suppose NYCOM suggested these guidelines? Probably because, over time, villages have seen that they work in keeping order and allowing village business to get done.
The Trumansburg Village Board last year adopted meeting guidelines following most, if not all, of the above points, but if you attended a meeting of the Village Board in the past year, you never would have known it. People routinely interrupted Board deliberations, addressed members individually, shouted at Board members, went on-and-on-and-on-and-on-and-on about matters that concerned or interested them, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the board’s function, as delegated to them by the electorate, was to decide the village’s business at board meetings. The purpose of board meetings is not so that board can carry on a dialog with the public about what they should be doing, they exist so that the board members can DO things. Don’t forget that there is routinely only one day out of the month when the Board meets to discuss and debate the issues facing the Village. (Personally I don’t think that’s enough time, but my suggestion in years gone by that we meet twice a month fell on deaf ears.) With that small window of time, it’s a real necessity to make best use of it, lest you end up in meetings that run between 4 and 5 hours long, and you’re exhausted and too tired to think straight by the end of the evening. In my time on the Board, meetings got longer and longer in the past few years. Partly it was that we were dealing with more and more difficult issues, the water district and a secondary source of water, or the main street project, or site plan review, just to name a few. Partly it was because the freewheeling nature of public comment dragged the meetings out. We routinely had meetings that ran until 11 pm. That’s tough when you have a 9 to 5 job and a family to take care of too.
So… what happened over that period of time to make Village Board meetings take on this abrasive tone? As one person leaving the Tuesday’s meeting said to me, “There’s really something wrong when we have to have police at our Village Board meetings.” Well, like the parent who has no boundaries, who lets the children run around screaming and smashing things, and then when he can’t take it any more, blows up and gives the kids a good thrashing out of frustration, I believe the Village Board (and in particular the Mayor) failed to enforce the boundaries it earlier established in dealing with the public, and in frustration they snap at meeting attendees. It’s hard not to. It’s a tough job and it’s also rare when your good work is recognized. Slip up, though, and the public and the press too, are all over you. You’re out there in the public eye, many people view you as public property, your every word is scrutinized. And I don’t know if it’s the whole tone of disrespect that started with — who? Nixon? — where we just love to pick apart the people we elect to public office. This tone of disrespect is rampant in Washington, and is made manifest locally in angry political signs that periodically sprout on lawns in Trumansburg, and ultimately in the tone at village meetings.
Another problem with having meetings in which there are no boundaries enforced, is that you then attract to those meetings people who use dysfunctional methods of interaction because that’s what they know best — threats, manipulation, fear mongering. People whose notions of decorum are next to nonexistent. The screamers and shouters, the people with major axes to grind. And because this is a public meeting, you can’t just walk away the way you could if some person who was “certifiable” approached you on the sidewalk and started ranting at you. So you make rules, and then you enforce them, consistently, for everyone.
The Board is made up of ordinary people (this is how the framers of our Constitution wanted it!) and sadly, ordinary people have many of the ordinary failings we are all prone to. As much as we would like to have perfect government, we don’t, because we are governed by people, and people are by their very nature, imperfect. But with some rules and boundaries around the behavior of the public who are invited to observe the workings of the Board, I think things can improve greatly.
I, too, think Marty will make a very good mayor. I wish him all the best in bringing the community back together and in bringing order back to Village Board meetings.
Mary, I agree that if those rules had been applied to Tuesday’s meeting, things would have been much more civil. Unfortunately, Hrubos chose to shut out the public from speaking at the public altogether, and then didn’t enforce that equitably.
Criticism of public officials has been shown, time and time again, to be warranted at all levels of government.
Smart public officials respond to criticism through outreach. I haven’t seen much of that from the village board. I’ve seen them huddle and get defensive. I saw John Hrubos, on TV the other night, refusing to talk to Geoffrey Hart.
Citizens who attend village board meetings typically have day jobs and families to take care of, just as much as board members do.
Rordan Hart ran for village board saying that he would change the tone of the village board with the sheer force of his good character. I don’t think that will work. What will help is if the process of the board is improved, and rules like those you propose are applied consistently and equally for all involved.
Jonathon,
One thing that always frustrated me as a citizen attending the board meetings is that the ” open to the floor” on the agenda was very early on. On the 3/12 Agenda it was first! It also took place BEFORE alot of issues were discussed. I think that is why the board got alot of unnecessary interruptions. The board does have the ability to change the order.
It may be best to address the order of business first, get reports from department heads and committees. Approve bills and minutes and address the other issues that come before the board. This way it gives the citizens and opportunity to take notes, think of questions and be prepared for the “Open To The Floor” part of the meeting.
As Mary stated there are guidelines and rules for how to proceed, how much time a person is given to speak etc. I think the order of business would help alot.
So the answer is yes Jonathon, I think changing the order of things which would definately address the issue of people feeling they have time to speak and ask questions that they have had time to think about.
If you look at the composition of the town and village boards, the supervisor and the mayor. You see two people, Rose Hilbert and Doug Austic, who work in Trumansburg. Everyone else works in Ithaca. Working in Ithaca apparently leads people to spend more of the time in Ithaca (socializing, shopping etc.) and reduces the amount of time they have to spend in Trumansburg. There are only so many hours in a day; you can’t be everywhere you want or need to be.
It is my perception that the distance between the angry residents and the local government officials is a social distance. The residents do not see these officials in their daily social discourse (because those people are in Ithaca so many hours of the day) and therefore do not feel they know them nor do they feel comfortable simply walking up to them (on the rare occasion that they actually see them) and either complaining or otherwise commenting on local affairs.
They know, however, that they can go to the regular public meetings and find the officials there. It is a formal setting, although ,as noted, many residents are rather too informal in their conduct there. I would put that down to some extent to bottled up emotion getting the better of them. Frankly, a lot of people don’t like to speak in public; their nerves get the better of them and they behave more extravagantly than they perhaps intended.
But you can’t resolve things very easily if your only contact is during public meetings where the actual interaction between the officials and the public is limited by protocol.
At the village board things have now changed. Chris Thomas has a home-based business in Trumansburg, as does Rordan Hart. Marcia Horn’s connections to the community are so deep (Sue Henninger’s article said she had a “municipal family”) that it seems unlikely that anyone would hesitate to approach her with their concerns outside of a public meeting.
I can’t say that I have nothing against working in Ithaca and living in Trumansburg. While I understand that the economic dynamic of this region has evolved to make doing otherwise quite difficult, it frustrates me that so few people seem interested in reversing it. I believe that the social distance between residents and Ithaca-employed local residents is only one consequence of the phenomenon.
I am on the board of the Trumansburg Area Chamber of Commerce and would like to see more local business owners join and take an active role in addressing this socio-economic situation. We need economic development in the immediate Trumansburg area so that people can live and work here.
I think it’s a good idea that the police are at the meeting.
I think that if somebody tries to bring their disfunction in and hijack the meeting, they should be removed.
The board, on the other hand, does have the respobsibility of scheduling meetings so that there is a balance between times that “business” is being conducted , and times where the public can speak and be heard.
Mary – where can the public find a copy of the meeting guidelines that the board adopted that you mention above? Perhaps there is a better way to publicise them? Give a handout when people come to a meeting? Post them on the wall? Summarize them at the start of the meeting? If the public doesn’t know what the rules are, how can we follow them?
X – I believe we passed those meeting guidelines at the organizational meeting last April. I think Village Clerk Tammy Morse could probably get you a copy.
Marcia – actually, we used to have public comment at the end of the village meeting, but we changed it because people complained. They complained because they would have to sit through lengthy discussions of things they had no interest in, and with our meetings getting longer and longer, public comment might not come up until 10:30 pm by which time most people had given up and gone home. We changed it for the convenience of the public. Actually, if you check you’ll see that the Town of Ulysses also has public comment early in their meeting. They meet at 6:30 to approve payments and minutes, and at 7 they take public comment and then proceed to irregular items of business. If you’d like to change how things are done now, well that’s your call.
Bill – Actually, of the board elected to serve through this April, only John Hrubos and I work in Ithaca. David is a grad student, and John Levine is self-employed and therefore like Chris and Rordan could be considered “working in Trumansburg.” After all, most of the residents of Trumansburg don’t make their living IN Trumansburg, so this board would be fairly representative of the population. Would it not make sense to have village officials reflect the demographic of the population?
And, although I work in Ithaca, I do most of my socializing in Trumansburg, and I also do a fair amount of my shopping here. There are many, many more avenues to community connection than just through work — think of it. There’s the school which provides a very strong community focus, and if you have kids and they play sports, you meet even more people through sports — sitting through weekly soccer games gives you lots of talk time. There are the churches, and the library and the Conservatory, the Fire Department, the Farmer’s Market, and the list goes on and on. If you ride the bus regularly into Ithaca there are the bus regulars (a really fun group a/k/a the “TCAT 21″ — a reference to the bus number, not the number of regulars).
To think you have to have deep roots in the community order to be approachable or in order to be “connected”, well that’s just not true in this day and age. This is the 21st century. All of the village board members have telephone numbers listed in the phone book. All of them have email addresses (links to their “official” village email addresses are on the village website.) And some people still resort to the old-fashioned method of communication known as writing a letter. That works. When I was a village official, people would approach me at the Shur-Save, at the post office, at Grassroots, at the Fairgrounds, in the library, at TCFA, and just walking down the street. People also called me and emailed me about things, even people I’d never actually met. The fact of the matter is that if you have a concern that can’t be explained in less than 3 minutes, the village board meeting is not a very good place to bring that up, due to time constraints, and also given that it’s not in meant to be a “town meeting” or a general public hearing.
Mary, I also didn’t like this newly proposed “work in Trumansburg/work in Ithaca” distinction. Isn’t that rather like the native/newbie divide proposed by one of the newly elected Trustees? This struggle to somehow define the “authentic” T-burger with simplistic distinctions strikes me as odd. Is the idea that whoever has the most “authenticity” is therefore somehow entitled to more deference? more power? more votes? People make the decision to live in, raise families in, stay in, work in, retire in Trumansburg for lots of good reasons. Every one of them has an important stake in how the Village is run and if they pay attention, get involved, vote, and engage, that should be enough authenticity to be taken seriously by anyone.
Bill Chaison’s comments here are interesting, when viewed in terms of how they represent the T-burg Chamber of Commerce. I’m considering a return to self-employment– in the decade I was previously self-employed, I maintained a home office in my house in Ulysses– this time, I might go for an out-of-home office. I paid more attention to this recent round of village elections than I have in the past, for a couple of reasons: 1- I have been considering possibly renting an office in Trumansburg and 2- as a Ulysses Democratic Committee member, some folks had told me that they were concerned about some behavior by board members, the public at meetings, and candidates (and hoped I could maybe help improve things).
So…. I attended a couple of meet-the-candidate events, read newspaper coverage, and, I just returned from visiting Chicago, and read through some recent blog postings…. and I repectfully ask any Chamber or other local boosters: WHO in their right mind would want their money or their community service time caught up in all of this he-said-she-said nonsense? I might just as well go try to mediate the disagreements between the Enfield Fire Company and the angry over-taxed residents of that lovely adjacent township. If any potential residents looking for real estate happened to run across this blog looking for a sense of what the community was like…. or, another potential office renter…. well, let me assure you that we in Southern Ulysses (aka “Glenwood”) are more easygoing, and have interests other than talking about each others’ behavior, manners or lack thereof, etc.
Please, let’s all try to behave better, work together better…. and, how about focusing a bit on the work instead of personalities and episodes of bad behavior? There are some actual issues (Village comp plan and zoning ordinance, commercial space utilization, water issues– for water, it would be ideal if adjacent municipalities could work in concert to effect mutually-helpful solutions to a number of local problems… )
The bickering and the bad feelings are just what future residents and future businesses do NOT want to see. Show some “village spirit” and clean up your act, so you can have an image that matches your beautiful architecture and pretty new sidewalks. Or, blame each other for the empty storefronts; your village, your choice. Think I’ll skip the T-burg office idea– too much angst.
mary said “X – I believe we passed those meeting guidelines at the organizational meeting last April. I think Village Clerk Tammy Morse could probably get you a copy.”
this is clearly unacceptable. Again, how can the public follow the “rules” if they are not easy to get?
POST THEM ON THE WEB.
X,
You’ve hit upon something important. Posting more information on the web would help the village board a great deal.
For weeks and weeks now, the most recent meeting minutes posted have been from a meeting on January 8, 2007 – almost three months ago.
How can the members of the Village Board expect us to come to them and ask informed questions when they aren’t willing to share information about what they’re doing?
I’ve got three kids and work that requires me to take trips out of town. I intend to do my best to attend more board meetings, but I can guarantee you that I won’t be able to attend every one. There are a lot of other residents in my situation. We need more ways to get information about Village Board activities than just attending meetings.
Bill,
I see your point about accessability to our local officials. I work in two places in the village.
The Village Greenhouse and at The Roadhouse waiting tables. Im not taking away from anyone who works outside of Trumansburg at all. One does have to admit it is nice to “be around”. When people have access to you daily, you may seem more approachable. Even though people may not know me personally, they say ” Oh yeah, I know you, you waited on me at dinner” or say “you took care of me at the flower shop”
The familiarity is nice for them other than just being able to see you once a month at a board meeting.
Working out of town does not limit ones ability to contribute to where they live. It is nice though when people do recognize you from some other experience they have had with you.
Jonathon,
I agree the village website needs a great deal of improvement and that is something I have talked about with alot of people. If I am able to stay I will definately work on that to get the public access to the information they need. Very important!
Functionally, this work-in-town vs. work-out-of-town distinction just doesn’t hold up very well for a lot of people in Trumansburg. Does John Gurche, who works at the Museum of the Earth, really work out of town? Literally, yes, but he’s in a place where I hope a lot of us go, and just ten minutes down the road.
Then there are people like me. I do an awful lot of my work in my house in Trumansburg, but I don’t have an office or a shop on Main Street. Also, I frequently travel out of town to do research. So, do I work in Trumansburg or not? It’s hard to say.
Year after year, exceptions like this are coming closer to be the rule. With the Internet, we’re seeing a return of cottage industry as a meaningful economic force, and places like Trumansburg can benefit a great deal from this shift.
If the Chamber of Commerce is shifting its focus to deal with this new small town business reality, I don’t see it. Economic planning in general is also overlooking this trend, and it’s a shame, because it’s something that people of all economic backgrounds in our village can take advantage of, given a little training and some creativity.
The new Main Street in Trumansburg is wireless.
All,
I’m am sticking to my hypothesis. I think that working and living in the same community is the optimal condition. And by “working in the community” I don’t mean sitting at home and primarily communicating with people who are remote from the community.
Dave Filiberto is a grad student at Cornell. That means he works at Cornell.
John Levine is a computer consultant. He has absolutely no need for local resources in his work.
John Gurche has a studio at his home, but regularly reports to PRI/MOTE where he has an office.
There is hardly any commercial development in this town/village beyond retail and service. That is not a sustainable condition for a “rural community”. That is the recipe for a bedroom community.
Real rural communities should have industry in them. Both Trumansburg and Ulysses did between 1792 and WWII. Industry doesn’t have to be smokestacks and outfall pipes spewing. Industry can be something like MacKenzie -Childs, a pottery that employs >80 people in rural Ledyard outside Aurora in Cayuga County. Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream is made in North Waterbury, VT (pop 1,700).
Working locally has nothing to do with “authenticity” (which is a figment of everyone’s imagination). It has to do with simply being familiar to your fellow residents and being familiar with the economic and social dynamics (historical and present) of the town/village. If you “do your business” here, then you learn the appropriate tone for conducting business here. If you do your business elsewhere and trying using that tone here, you upset people.
Bill, I don’t think that the term “bedroom community” aptly describes a community where a large number of people live and work independently in their homes. A bedroom community is a place where people mostly leave during the day and return at night.
I also must contest your claim that people who do their business here find a more appropriate tone for being here and don’t upset people.
Do you really think that the Barney the Dinosaur sign in the window of the Napa auto parts sign is an example of appropriate tone that doesn’t upset people?
I get the sense from that sign that the owner of the Napa on Main Street doesn’t really give two hoots about residents like me.
I’ve worked with too many people in too many lines of business in too many places to agree to the idea that people who run businesses necessarily make better neighbors. Business owners are just as likely to be callous and crude as the rest of us.
“Real rural communities?” I don’t know what that is. Sounds like a phrase that’s awfully close to the idea of “authentic” to me.
What’s the point of this exercise? Now the hypothesis has changed to “if you do your business here”? First it was “if you work here”, then it was “if you work here, but not in a business in which you sit ‘at home primarily communicating with people who are remote from the community’”. Which is it? If you really mean “do your business here” then that covers a lot of people who work elsewhere, but in fact “live” here. Trumansburg’s street-front business community survives solely because people who work elsewhere “do their business” here. School events, the churches, the bank, the post office, the grocery store, the bars, the pizza shops, etc. are filled with people who “do their business” here, but work elsewhere. So, it seems to me that your original hypothesis has now become so watered down that it’s pretty much vacuous.
The question is whether someone truly engages the community at multiple levels, not where they happen to be employed. Indeed, I wouldn’t necessarily agree with it, but I think it’s possible to make the case that people who truly live and work in Trumansburg are actully more likely to be insular and parochial in their views than those whose jobs consistently expose them to a richer range of experience. But, I’m back to where I started: what’s the point of this exercise? Isn’t it really to try to prove that your views are somehow entitled to more weight because they’re more authentic? I think true T-burg authenticity is much, much more subtle than where one happens to work. The evolution of your so-called hypothesis suggests that you agree with me.
It seems that Jonathan, Richard, x and others wish to re-imagine Trumansburg as something quite different from what it was as recently as the 1960s. That’s fine because obviously you can’t turn back the clock. That is an exercise in dangerous nostalgia.
The types of industry that once made Trumansburg a more well-rounded economy than it is now polluted both creeks very badly. They were a source of employment, but the environmental price was high. I named specific artisan manufacturing enterprises that I think would be viable, acceptable alternative industries for a future Ulysses.
I am only enthusiastic about home-based businesses if their proprietors are using their homes as starting points. It would be nice if they wanted to grow their businesses locally rather than just get them to a certain size and them move them to Ithaca.
I was disheartened at the comprehensive plan public workshops to hear people say that we needed to provide affordable housing for young people, as if the reason young people leave is because they can’t find a place to live. In fact, they leave because there is no work for them here.
The economics of starting your own business are more difficult for present-day 20- or 30-somethings than they were for their grandparents. But it isn’t impossible. When local “young people” complained to me about the building of the Family Dollar and Movie Gallery, saying that locally-owned businesses should have go in there, I said, “Well, start one.” The universal response was “I can’t do that.”
I regard “working independently” has being emblematic of the problem of home-based business. In a functional small town people have to work interdependently to build what David Putnam (Bowling Alone) called ‘social capital’.
The late Christopher Lasch (The Revolt of the Elites) described the idea of ‘third places’. We all have work and home, but fewer of us have a ‘third place’ that is neither home nor work, but the site for interacting with your fellow community members.
Gimme Coffee! is a third place, but if you just go in, get coffee and leave, then it is not a third place for you. You have to hang around and catch up on other people’s lives, complain about the weather, pass along rumors, and generally build social capital.
The “why can’t we all get along” banner is supposed to be funny. It is teasing community members who can not seem to communicate with each other without misunderstanding each other. I don’t think the banner is that funny, but I do think that the teasing is deserved.
Bill,
I have no wish to reimagine anything that happened here in the 1960s. I wasn’t alive in the 1960s. The 1960s are not part of my personal experience, and recreating them is not part of my agenda. I see things as they are now, I compare that to Trumansburg when I first came to know it, and I imagine what could be.
If that banner in the Napa store window was supposed to communicate what you say it was supposed to communicate, then it sure looks like an argument against the idea that business owners are better able to communicate effectively with a tone that residents will appreciate. If Dick/Barney wants to tease people who can’t communicate without misunderstanding, then is it a self-referential piece of art? How does it fit in with his support of a savagely partisan campaign? I don’t get it.
I don’t think you grasp the profound economic possibility in independent at-home businesses for young people, and the way that they present profoundly fewer hurdles than opening up a storefront. I don’t think that most people here do – and that includes young people. There’s no need to move to find work, when you can find your work and build it independently. Not everyone’s suited to that attitude, and it doesn’t fit the traditional economic development model, but it’s of growing significance. More and more work occurs without particular location being a factor. That ought to be a source of economic renaissance in small communities like Trumansburg – or for that matter, Ovid, Interlaken, Romulus…
For those of us with children, opening up a storefront business is an especially daunting task. At home businesses enable much more flexibility in schedule, and children require that.
Something you haven’t experienced is that families with children do have a lot of third places in Trumansburg – not just in each others’ homes. There’s a very rich social network, among children, but even more importantly and permanently, among their parents. It’s something that makes me laugh when Mr. Auble, from the comfortable distance of Interlaken and his business interactions, proclaims that no one here knows each other any more.
It is my goal to start up a storefront business on Main Street, eventually, but it’s going to have to be in addition to the two professions that I’m juggling currently. It’s also going to have to be done when I have a substantial amount of capital I can invest in such a project, as I’ll need to hire a day-to-day manager. The way I do business is not to start out on a bank loan – that’s a recipe for a business that’s too vulnerable to serve its customers well and too close to extinction have time to find its feet. A good startup needs freedom to develop without immediate income, much less immediate profit for reinvestment. I won’t open a storefront here unless I can do it the right way – no cutting corners or compromising on the quality I want to produce.
Storefront businesses are important, but good storefront businesses won’t survive here unless 1) The family car is outlawed or 2) We have a substantial number of residents who are able to do well economically through businesses they run in their homes that bring in money to Trumansburg from the outside world. I think that the second option is more likely. It does involve raising the standard of living in Trumansburg, but not by driving anybody out. Rather, there is the opportunity to lift up a lot of people who are already here, but it requires a more innovative economic development model than what’s been proposed so far, and it has to go beyond reinvigorating Main Street.
People say that Trumansburg has to get bigger in order to survive. I say that idea is based on a lack of imagination.
Bill,
Great, we’re off the moving “hypothesis” into something interesting. By my reckoning, most of the 1960s were 40+ years ago. (I don’t think I need to catalog for you the changes that have occurred across the board since then in every aspect of our lives.) David Putnam didn’t coin the term ‘social capital’, but I think he was right to focus on it. It is in fact the glue that binds communities in both large cities and small towns. “Third places” are part of the matrix of things that can grow a community’s social capital. As Mary and I commented in previous posts, and as Jonathan points out in his most recent one, your view of “third places” seems to be very narrow, perhaps (as Jonathan suggests) because your experience here (like that of many residents)is a relatively narrow one. The school and the large networks of intertwining relationships between parents, kids, and teachers is an incredible third place. One which, because of the geography of the school district, includes a huge demographic range and a very rich concentration of social capital. But what about the churches? What about the bars & restaurants? What about the local art and music scene? What about the volunteer fire department? What about the laundromat? What about the library? What about the golf course? What about the Farmer’s Market? And, what about the Internet? True, some people will continue to “bowl alone” and then carp about not being included when something happens that they don’t like. But in T-burg, there are plenty of places for committed citizens to engage the community even though we’ve moved beyond the classic model where local industry was a bigger part of the community’s social capital.
Some of my comments have been misconstrued. My mentioning of the 1960s was (1) not a reference to the counterculture and (2) not a suggestion that we should restore the village to its 1960s state. I am solidly against nostalgia of all kinds.
I was surprised to have “re-imagine” received as a pejorative. I think that small communities do have to re-imagine themselves precisely because all models don’t work. But continue to believe that home-based businesses of the type allowed (see zoning ordinance) will simply not add up to enough assessed worth to create the tax base necessary to maintain the local schools or the infrastructure of the village/town.
It is fine for some people to have “work where location is not a factor”, but I think it is very important to have a part of the economy that does depend on location. I believe that it is important for the economy to notice the physical environment and use it wisely and sustainably. I dislike treating the environment as mere scenery.
As for both Richard and Jonathan’s praise of families with children. Obviously, raising children is an important way of perpetuating the community, but you have to realize that the category families with children is a minority in nearly every community, including this one. Most of the population is either pre-child-rearing, post-childrearing or not-childrearing.
Furthermore I talk to a lot of school teachers and administrators and they wish that more parents would get involved in their particular third place. Maybe it is just the people that I know, but I can think of several who are very, very glad to be done with the social aspects of school when their youngest child graduates from high school.
Trumansburg has more vibrant third places than most communities of its size. It is perhaps the main reason I chose to live here. The school is probably one of the most important ones because everyone goes there. The rest of the village is socially balkanized in a way that irritates (but ultimately saddens) long-time residents.
The Barney banner is an expression of this irritation and I believe that it has a double meaning. It is meant on hand as a straight question (Why, indeed, can’t we all get along?), but also, by citing an inane television character as a reference, I think that the banner is suggesting that getting along might possibly be an absurd idea at this point.