Sheriff Lansing wants to finish what he started

By Jamie Swinnerton
Tompkins Weekly

Eight years down, but Sheriff Ken Lansing said he’s not ready to retire just yet. Soon, but not yet. First, there are a couple of things he needs to finish first.

Lansing was first elected in 2010, coming out of retirement from his many years in law enforcement as the chief of police for the Village of Cayuga Heights to run against incumbent Peter Meskill. In his last election, he ran unopposed. This time around, Lansing’s former undersheriff, Derek Osborne, is running against him. Despite making comments to The Ithaca Voice in 2015 about possibly quitting, Lansing said he is running again this year to finish what he started.

“I’ve got a great bunch of people that work here, I’m proud of the men and women who work here and I am committed to finish what we started,” Lansing said.

Finding a solution to the jail overpopulation while filling the need for more program and office space, while not breaking the bank, is one of the biggest projects that remains unfinished for Lansing. Since discussion of this project started several years ago, the parties involved have looked at buying a nearby building to renovate into more office space for the civil and road patrol departments, freeing up space in the current Public Safety Office on Warren Road for program and office space, not cells. But, the building they wanted wasn’t available. The search for an affordable solution is back on.

Lansing is concerned that a new sheriff could decide to abandon some of these projects that he wants to see finished.

“I make a commitment, and I have made a commitment to do just what we’re doing,” he said. “Somebody else comes in, doesn’t mean he or she is going to do that. They can say whatever they want during the election time, but when you’re the sheriff, you are somebody that has the power to say ‘No, I don’t care to even look at that.’”

But will another four years be enough to take care of all the loose ends that Lansing wants to see tied up? He hopes so.

Lansing is proud of the long list of programs taking place at the Tompkins County Jail and said he wants to continue working with local community organizations to create more programs and further the goal of reducing the population of the jail through alternatives to incarceration, and other programs working to reduce local recidivism. Some of these programs, in collaboration with BOCES, aim to give incarcerated individuals skills they can use in the job market. Others, like the Vivitrol program done in conjunction with Cayuga Addiction Recovery Services (CARS), aim to help reduce drug dependency.

The conversation around Safe Injection Facilities in the area would be lacking without the input from local law enforcement, and as sheriff Lansing has come out against SIFs, but that’s not a concrete and unmovable opinion.

“Right now, for me, one, it’s not legal and I have to take that position,” Lansing explained. “I’m a treatment person because I spent 20 years with CARS and I’ve had people that are close to me that had addiction problems. They all were able to do the treatment, fortunately… That’s my mindset. I’ve been talking to a doctor and she was giving her explanation, we were doing a panel thing, and she knew what my position was because she knew I was with CARS. She was starting to explain to me things that I really didn’t know, and how they perceive it can work. So, I’m always open to those.”

He maintains that if the issues he has as a law enforcement agent, like his concern that a SIF could bring more crime to the area, are mitigated that he is open to ideas that can help save people’s lives.

One of the issues that Osborne is running on against his former boss is the sheriff’s department budget. Under his watch, Osborne takes credit for maintaining a tight budget. After leaving in 2015, the sheriff’s department overtime budget went up. Lansing maintains that overtime is difficult, if not impossible, to predict, making it hard to budget precisely for.

“There are certain things that you can plan on,” Lansing said. “The driving factors of overtime you don’t have control over. Disability and illness, people off on leave maybe for disciplinary reasons or whatever, big cases, drug cases, murders. Huge. And thank goodness we work together with the other police departments, the state police, and IPD.”

Recently, a negotiation with the road patrol means more part-time officers will be taking shifts, which Lansing said can help the department save some money down the line. Past budgets that went into the red were nobody’s fault, Lansing said. A new financial director had just started and had a different way of reporting budgetary items.

“I’m responsible, I am, I’m the sheriff,” he said. “But no one person below me is responsible for either end of it. The saving or being guilty of overspending.”

Osborne decided to run, he said, because he was unhappy with the news coming out of the sheriff’s department and felt that Lansing’s comments back in 2015 were not indicative of good leadership. During a wide-ranging interview three years ago in which he said he did not plan to run for re-election, Sheriff Lansing also told the Ithaca Voice that he kept files of information on various people in the county to protect himself. Now, Lansing can’t leave until he closes the books on several projects.

While he told the Voice in 2015 that his record is not perfect, there are a lot of the things Lansing is proud of from his time already spent as sheriff that aren’t headline-making issues. Some uniform changes, allowing shift-swapping, finding private money to create an honor guard, re-implemented the canine program, implemented an open-door policy for his office, increased the vehicle fleet, and worked with county District Attorney Matt Van Houten on a new policy regarding marijuana arrests that typically do not get prosecuted, are just a few.