ITHACA, N.Y. — Officials are working to revitalize the City of Ithaca’s long-defunct public works oversight board. However, the current proposal scales back the board’s authority, reducing it to an advisory commission.
The change preserves an avenue for public input while increasing the efficiency of public works projects in the city, but for some on council an advisory commission offers too weak of an authority to provide effective oversight.
The City of Ithaca’s Board of Public Works (BPW) had controlling authority over spending and property related to public works projects, like sewers and drains, creeks and bridges, street lighting, and parks.
The eight-member board was composed of citizens, as well as the Mayor of Ithaca. It had the power to direct the department of public works to fix certain sidewalks if it deemed it necessary, and presided over transformational infrastructure projects like the redevelopment of the roadways on the city’s west end, once known as the “Octopus” for the bottleneck of busy streets.
The disruptions that the COVID-19 pandemic caused to city government operations has been blamed for the operations of the oversight board ceasing, but former BPW member David Warden accused the city of “quietly sabotaging” the board in a 2023 op-ed published in The Ithaca Times. He wrote that thin agendas and unfilled board positions led the body to repeatedly fail to meet quorum, languishing until it “slowly became an atrophied limb.”
The most recent BPW agenda available on the City of Ithaca’s website is for a December 2021 meeting. Meeting minutes for the BPW have not been uploaded to the city’s website for all of 2020 and 2021.
Mayor Robert Cantelmo created a working group to recommend how to reconstitute public works oversight in city government. The Working Group on Public Works Governance began to meet in late March and sent a memo dated May 15 to Common Council recommending to officially dissolve the BPW and replace it with a commission with diminished oversight powers that would be focused to promote and facilitate public engagement on public works projects.
Council discussed the recommendations at a July 17 Common Council committee of the whole meeting.
An advisory commission would seek public input on projects, and advise the Common Council, but the commission would like decision-making powers that the BPW possesses under the charter. Council, and the Department of Public Works, would not legally have to follow the advise of the commission.
The high level of oversight of the BPW has been the subject of criticism from city officials like Ithaca Superintendent of Public Works Mike Thorne.
Thorne, who was a member of the working group, has noted that the BPW is unique to the City of Ithaca, and has expressed concern that the board hinders the administration of public works projects. Thorne did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
The board creates an additional hurdle for public works projects to meet approval, and the BPW’s authority competes with Common Council’s in some instances. For city staff, this has at times led to confusion when setting priorities for the Department of Public Works, according to the working group’s memo.
Scott Gibson, the Assistant Superintendent of Public Works for Water & Sewer and another member of the working group, was unavailable to respond to a request for comment before publication.
Alderperson Tiffany Kumar, who chaired the working group, framed the proposal to form an advisory commission as an effort to “balance” facilitating public input on oversight projects with complaints from city officials that the BPW created confusion and inefficiency within the city’s Department of Public Works.
“I’m not in the business of ignoring public input to the goal of just making things completely easy for staff,” Kumar said.
Dissolving and replacing the BPW would require a city-wide referendum. Kumar said everyone in the working group signed off on the recommendation to form an advisory commission instead of reinstating the BPW.
“This is something that Mike and Scott have signed off on, even though Mike was the one who, from the beginning, has been saying publicly that we don’t need a BPW, we don’t need any oversight,” Kumar said. “He’s very happy with this solution.”
However, some council members have expressed hesitation about reducing the public’s level of oversight over public works projects.
Alderperson Clyde Lederman said he worried that the proposal of an advisory commission is too weak and was “pretty hesitant” to support replacing the BPW.
“I think the BPW, where it succeeded, was in doing something different, which was providing oversight and actually setting the direction but it’s hard to provide oversight and direction if you don’t have any formal power,” Lederman said.
He added that he wanted to see the city charter’s language clarified so that there was less confusion about the BPW’s and council’s authority.
Cantelmo said that he intends for a multi-month long discussion to take place on whether to reinstate the BPW or dissolve it and form an advisory commission in its place will draw on for months.
The post Ithaca’s defunct public works oversight board might be replaced by an advisory commission appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.