Candidates for Tompkins County Legislature Lansing district, part 1: John Dennis 

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of two articles covering the race for the Seventh Legislative District seat in the Tompkins County Legislature. An article highlighting the write-in campaign of incumbent Deborah Dawson, D-LD-10, will appear in the Sept. 24 edition of Tompkins Weekly.

Environmental consultant and local landlord John Dennis is vying for the Tompkins County Legislature’s Seventh District seat in November on the Democratic Party ballot line. 

Dennis, who announced his candidacy earlier this spring, has lived in Tompkins County for 31 years. He said he decided to run because incumbent Legislator Deborah Dawson, a Democrat currently representing the 10th Legislative District, announced that she would be retiring this year.

Dawson’s retirement would have likely made for a breezy path toward the Legislature for Dennis, but Dawson recently announced that she is trying to mount a write-in campaign to retain her seat — effectively calling off her retirement. Dawson’s announcement to seek re-election has not deterred Dennis, he said.

The district, which encompasses the villages of Cayuga Heights and Lansing, is currently listed as the 10th Legislative District. That will change after the election in November, following newly redistricted maps that renamed the district to the seventh.

“I’ve always been interested in running for the county legislature, and so when I learned that the incumbent legislator was planning to retire, I decided to run in February this year,” Dennis said. “I began attending the twice monthly legislature meetings and some of the committee meetings.”

The election of President Donald Trump last November also caused Dennis to spring into action, he said. It instilled in him a need for direct action.

“It made me more aware of the need to think globally but act locally,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to the possibility of serving the county as a legislator.”

Dennis is the co-founder of the Cayuga Lake Environmental Action Network (CLEAN), an environmental organization advocating for the health of Cayuga Lake and the surrounding communities. At CLEAN, Dennis draws from his expertise monitoring agricultural development projects. He has had experience with the technical aspects of irrigation and fertilizing, as well as the education, health issues, nutrition and access to family planning aspects of development in other countries. 

Dennis owns a rental property on North Aurora Street in Ithaca and several others in Corning. 

“That is always engaging for me to work at decarbonizing my own buildings, getting them more energy efficient, and just making sure indoor air quality is of high quality,” he said. “I’m probably one of the few landlords that monitors air quality parameters for such things like radon. I take steps to mitigate any kind of adverse air quality there might be.”

If elected, Dennis said that he wants to improve government operations, improve employment for the county’s more than 840 workers and prepare that workforce for the future. 

“From a general perspective, I want to foster a collaborative, flexible, organized, effective government of Tompkins County that invests in its employees and promotes the culture of belonging,” Dennis said. “We want to make sure we have a highly skilled and accountable workforce.”

Dennis said that having Cornell University, Tompkins-Cortland Community College and Ithaca College in the county is key to “producing really highly qualified people” in the area.

“We want organizational excellence in the county,” Dennis said.

A steady pipeline of workers and a focused approach to service delivery for constituents should be the future of the county, he noted. A part of that is the county’s planned $50 million Center of Government in Ithaca. The project would see the county’s services consolidated in one place. Dennis says he has heard county residents question whether the move is the most convenient for the people of the county to access services.

“We need to make sure that all residents have full and convenient access to person-centered county services,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, downtown Ithaca is the appropriate place to keep most things like the County Board of Elections, the Department of Assessment and overall economic opportunity. We want to ensure that Tompkins County remains attractive to businesses.”

On the other hand, Dennis said, the county should be careful with how it allocates tax exemptions and benefits for corporations and developers.

“We need to be careful about giving tax waivers to large projects when you know there’s a host of smaller companies, smaller projects that also need attention,” Dennis said. “We need to make sure businesses and residential properties are paying their fair share of property taxes.”

On Dawson’s write-in campaign, Dennis said he welcomes the competition.

“I think it’s always a good thing when voters have choices,” Dennis said. “I think [Dawson] is highly competent, and I welcome her to throw her hat back into the ring. I will continue to campaign hard for the position.”

Election day is Nov. 4.