Renewal is key as winter continues

It’s a girl!  At 2:12 am on January 13^th, Lillian Hazel Sigler, our newly minted daughter entered the world.  Why am I telling you this?  First, I’m telling everyone!  It’s either cute or insufferable depending on who you talk to.  It also has me feeling something the country and Tompkins County desperately needs, renewal.

I walk on the commons and see empty storefronts, businesses that have been there for decades, gone with nothing to replace them.  Graffiti greets me on iconic Ithaca artwork, on public buildings, an economy not serving most people with household budgets tightening with increased energy, food, tax costs.

Republican View by Mike Sigler

Crime is still up with police force numbers in the City of Ithaca making the department barely functional.  You can have the best officers in the world, but in part it does come down to numbers.  It’s a similar situation in road maintenance, including plowing, and bus service.  There’s simply not enough people to get the job done.  I’d suggest this extends to public office with a lack of people stepping forward to serve in these offices.  It doesn’t have to be this way.

When I first felt my daughter move at seventeen weeks, hope was what we embraced.  Just three weeks later, she would have developed all the eggs that could one day be my grandchildren.  When she was born, just as when my first daughter was born 18 years ago, all I could think was, it’s a miracle.  It’s the closest I’ll come with my wife to making a miracle.  It makes the problems we face as a community smaller and smaller, which in this case is good.  Smaller is easier to overcome and easier to manage.

For some time I’ve seen a decline and in some cases, lack of vision in our community, but several recent events have given me hope.  The county legislature has talked about a mental health crisis center for the past year.  Thanks to a $1.5 million expenditure of federal COVID-19 money and Cayuga Medical Center investing millions of dollars in it, we will soon have a 20 bed center to help address the mental health crisis in our county.

I recently went to a meeting on redesigning route 13 from Boynton Middle School to Purity Ice Cream.  For decades that route has separated the city from Cayuga Lake.  As a community, we’ve driven past the potential of our greatest asset.  At this first meeting I saw some residents with vision with ways to connect the community to the lake.  To quote one woman, “I just want something beautiful.”  Sometimes that’s all vision takes.

These are big, multi-million dollar projects, but even small projects can have enormous impact.  I’ve been working with my park director in Lansing to get the swim area in Myers Park dredged.  It’s become too shallow to really swim there.  A little thing, maybe, but I think that families without boats or lake houses should be able to swim in the lake.  In Ithaca we have a city planner pushing for a commercial kitchen with a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Many of our startup companies that have become successful are in food.  You can now find some county produced foods across the country.  That takes vision, both for the startup company, but also from the planner on providing the tools to get those businesses off the ground.

Our community is now reengaging after a long COVID winter.  Just as the groundhog will come out in less than two weeks, our community is coming out of its shelter.  The challenge now for our community is to not be frightened of our shadow and go back into hiding.  If you have an idea, cleaning up an area of the community, a bit of graffiti, garbage, something that will advance the community or make it easier for other to express their vision, do not tuck it away.  We need this to revitalize Tompkins County and Upstate New York.

On Saturday, I went to the ceremonial swearing in of our Congressman Marc Molinaro.  In his remarks, he quoted Benjamin Franklin from the constitutional convention.  He was remarking on the depiction of a sun on the chair George Washington was sitting on.  “I have often looked at that picture behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”  That should be just as true for Tompkins County today as it was more than two centuries ago for the nation.

If you want to get involved, call or text me.  607-339-7978.