Candidates for Lansing district, part 2: Deborah Dawson

Update: Deborah Dawson’s former opponent John Dennis, who is the Democratic Party nominee for the Seventh Legislative District, announced Thursday that he is endorsing Dawson for reelection, asking voters to write in her name at the polls Nov. 7.

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of two articles covering the race for the Seventh Legislative District seat in the Tompkins County Legislature. An article highlighting the campaign of Democratic Party nominee, John Dennis, appeared in the Sept. 17 edition of Tompkins Weekly.

Tompkins County Legislator Deborah Dawson, LD-10, says that she found renewed confidence in her ample experience in government, both at the county level and in her career as a longtime federal employee — amid a sea of calls at the national level for younger leadership in the Democratic Party. 

Earlier this year, Dawson had sought to retire from the County Legislature after almost eight years of service to make way for younger county residents with legislative ambitions. 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 have renamed the district as the seventh.

“There is this idea that there is a gerontocracy ruling America,” said Dawson, a retired lawyer and federal government employee. “I thought maybe I should step down and let somebody younger step in. I certainly strongly support the younger people that are running, particularly the ones who are working and raising families, because that’s a demographic that we really need to be governing for.”

The county legislature will likely have several freshmen lawmakers at the start of next year. County government is also undergoing major attrition, with the relatively recent appointment of Korsah Akumfi last fall as county administrator and other new faces in charge of county departments.

“All of these upper-level staff at the county started retiring, and I’m looking at a new county administrator, a new director of finance, new commissioners of social services and Whole Health, a new highway director and, on top of that, potentially more than half of the legislature being new and inexperienced,” Dawson said. “I thought to myself, ‘This won’t do’ — especially given all the fiscal and economic uncertainty we’re headed into the next three years.”

The county is projected to face a multimillion dollar revenue shortfall in the next budget year, according to media reports, and county residents will likely also face the vanishing of important services — such as food assistance and health care programs — that have seen significant cuts in the proposed federal budget.  

“So, I changed my mind, but it was too late to get on the ballot,” Dawson said, noting that she decided to mount a write-in campaign to retain her seat in the legislature earlier this summer. “People may know me, but getting the word out that they can write in my name is a challenge.”

The candidate who received the nomination for the Democratic Party line in district seven, John Dennis, said that he welcomed the competition from Dawson and felt glad that voters had options to choose from. 

“We crossed paths at the Labor Day picnic that the Tompkins County Workers’ Center holds. I wanted to tell him I am running in person, and I felt that he deserved to hear it from me directly. He took it in stride,” Dawson said. “I think he was surprised.”

If re-elected, Dawson said that she will focus on the financial health of the county. 

“The county government needs to stay sound and sustainable, and the community is headed into hard times,” she said. 

Dawson said the median price of a home in the county is too high to be attainable for a household that makes the area’s median income. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than half of the households in the county are paying a third of their earnings toward housing costs. 

“You have to look at all the mandated costs that the county has … all the programs we have to provide at our taxpayers’ expense, the amount of money that we’re sending on our homeless population and the increased need we’re going to see in the next couple of years for Medicaid and [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] coverage that may be disappearing,” Dawson said. “We need to start looking at what the cuts to those programs at the federal level are actually going to cost us.” 

Election day is Nov. 4.