Kirchgessner runs for state senate

By Jamie Swinnerton
Tompkins Weekly

 

Amanda Kirchgessner asks to meet at the Jacksonville park. The quiet park is tucked behind the Namaste Montessori school in the middle of the hamlet and is very much a symbol of her campaign. The “hidden gem” of her community has a wide-open field, a sparkling lake full of tadpoles, and a simple gazebo that offers some shade of a day growing increasingly hotter as the afternoon progresses. The park was built and continues to be maintained by the community through the Jacksonville Community Association. It’s local and it’s for everyone, just like Kirchgessner.

It’s not hard to find an interesting angle in Kirchgessner’s story. She’s been a waitress for about 16 years, the last 10 at the State Street Diner in Ithaca, and now she’s running for a seat in the New York State Senate in the 58th district. It’s her first time running for anything and she has a very go-big-or-go-home attitude about it.
Before deciding to run for state senate, Kirchgessner’s closest interaction with politics was as an activist, often attending local municipal meetings to get a feel for what’s happening and give her input as a citizen.

“I love my three-minute comment,” Kirchgessner said, referring to the three-minute time limit often put on community comments at the county, town, and village meetings.

Often working in the morning, she had time to attend meetings in the afternoon and evening. Knowing when the meetings are and having the time and transportation to go to them can be barriers, she said, between citizens and their representatives. She began to learn more about housing, homelessness, and tax abatements, and jail expansion, among other local issues, by attending municipal meetings. She observed how legislation passed into law at the county level, first traveling back and forth between different committees.

She started attending meetings when she saw large local tax abatements being given to local businesses to then be used to expand the business, not trickling down to the local employees.

“It’s money that everybody is losing out on,” she said. “One wealthy or two wealthy people at the top are greatly benefitting from and everybody else is kind of like ‘Well you can keep working at minimum wage because that’s the least that New York State says we have to pay you.’”

Kirchgessner believes that affordability is the number one issue in the area. Instead of tax abatements meant to increase the tax roll, she argues that the solution to lack of affordability is to employ people and pay them a living wage.

“We can talk about affordable housing but in reality, you have to bring wages up and you have to bring costs down so you need to figure out a way to reduce the property tax burden,” she said. “Which, by and large, is what they tell you is why they’re doing all these tax abatements.”

Getting beyond attending meetings, Kirchgessner came to be on the board for the Jacksonville Community Association late last year after it was decided that the executive board needed some new faces to recommit to the JCA mission. This is where she came to be introduced to now county legislator Anne Koreman, a supporter of her campaign.

Kirchgessner grew up in Enfield but found herself in Jacksonville after her father passed away and she was awarded a small life insurance payout and found that the Hamlet was the only place she could afford to live. Back in the 1970s, a gas well leak in the heart of the hamlet poisoned several local wells. Seven families were displaced. It’s not easy for a small community to bounce back after such an event, Kirchgessner said. She has stayed in the county because of the natural beauty, the services, and the people.

Jumping from a local activist to a community association board member, to State Senate is a leap, she doesn’t deny it. But the people she has served at the diner, people she serves with in her community, and other local elected officials they kept asking her when she would run for something. But she likes the Ulysses Town Board, she didn’t want to replace anyone there.

“I admire that we have this dedicated group of people and they’re doing their best,” she said. “What I run up against all the time though is, any of the ideas we’ve come up with to improve affordability everybody says you have to go to Albany. So, this is a very literal bent on that.”

One of the biggest issues she sees with current politics is that the everyday people doing the work don’t get a voice in crafting legislation that will affect them.
“It would be a lot different if we had cab drivers and bus drivers helping us dictate transportation policy,” she said.

The divide between constituent and representative is a theme that runs through a lot of Kirchgessner’s political ideas. State Senator Tom O’Mara currently holds the seat in the 58th and although she said she believes him to be a good person, and that they do have overlapping opinions, she doesn’t think O’Mara effectively represents the people of the 58th.

“O’Mara has had eight years to do his job and he’s not doing it,” she said.

Without hesitation, Kirchgessner said her first act if elected to office would be to co-sponsor the New York Health Act. A summary of the bill from the New York State Senate website describes it as follows: “Establishes the New York Health program, a comprehensive system of access to health insurance for New York state residents; provides for administrative structure of the plan; provides for powers and duties of the board of trustees, the scope of benefits, payment methodologies and care coordination; establishes the New York Health Trust Fund which would hold monies from a variety of sources to be used solely to finance the plan; enacts provisions relating to financing of New York Health, including a payroll assessment, similar to the Medicare tax; establishes a temporary commission on implementation of the plan; provides for collective negotiations by health care providers with New York Health.”

“Health care is a basic human right,” Kirchgessner said of why she supports the bill. “We could save massive amounts of money in property taxes because of the 13 percent of Medicaid funding at the state level that comes from all the counties in New York State.”

County legislatures across the state, including Tompkins, have been urging Governor Cuomo to take the Medicaid burden off of counties to help lower property taxes.

Kirchgessner’s second big idea, if she wins, would be a jobs program similar to what was enacted during the New Deal. A New Deal Democrat is the kind of politician she said she wants to be.

“We are spending tremendous amounts of money to pay private contractors to do state jobs,” she said.

Giving those jobs back to local residents is what she wants to see. But beyond that, she wants guaranteed employment for those currently unemployed. Where will the jobs come from? At least in part, investing in technology to move the country away from fossil fuels and into a sustainable economy, and opening up competition for services like broadband by allowing local municipalities to create their own networks.

Kirchgessner supports higher taxes on the wealthy to help support programs for low-income residents. She wants to see more power and money go to local boards of education and teachers to develop more creative curriculum. She supports building more rural health clinics, halfway houses, and detox facilities. She wants to end standardized testing but isn’t sure what the best replacement would be yet. She doesn’t claim any outside interests and plans to run her campaign on small donor donations. She doesn’t see the necessity for pomp and circumstance and wants to find ways to help constituents meet with their representatives in a meaningful way. She wants the industrial contamination at Elmira High School to be addressed yesterday. She’s in it for the underdogs and she doesn’t see her lack of pollical experience as a detriment, she sees it as a reality check on today’s out-of-touch politics.

“I’ve been serving all kinds of people my whole life,” is her response to possible criticism of her lack of experience. “It’s my job to meet and exceed their expectations. I honestly believe that anybody can learn what they put their mind to.”

Neither Kirchgessner nor Michael Lausell, a county legislator from Schuyler County also running as a Democrat for the 58th state senate seat, were endorsed at the May 31 meeting of the Tompkins County Democtatic Committee.