The Secret Cornell

The Town of Lansing Comprehensive Plan has all the “fact-based” believability of Chariots of the Gods.

While New York State Town Law § 272-a clearly states:

“The development and enactment by the town government of a town comprehensive plan which can be readily identified, and is available for use by the public, is in the best interest of the people of each town.”

The approved version of the Town of Lansing Comprehensive Plan substitutes a very different policy scenario:

“The best way to plan for the long-term future of the Town of Lansing is to decide regionally where the major commercial, educational, shopping, recreational, health care, agricultural, manufacturing and residential sectors will be located. The reality is that our municipalities are not in competition with each other; rather they survive in symbiotic relationships. We should build upon these cooperative relationships in land-use decisions as well, while respecting a town’s right to home rule. New York State Law delegates planning decisions to the town and city levels but does not forbid a more coordinated process.”

A comparison with the comprehensive plans of the other municipalities in the county shows a very different “reality”: every other municipality in the county subordinates regional decisions to the best interests of that municipality.

Cornell’s relationship with the Town of Lansing is not a “symbiotic” one: it’s predatory – and any claim of “cooperation” is belied by the creation of a comprehensive plan that denies the needs of Lansing’s rural community – while forcing a runaway urban sprawl development that every other comprehensive plan pledges to avoid.

Cornell University’s Survey Research Institute, Cornell Cooperative Extension, and Cornell Design Connect are the architects of Lansing’s future – heavily supported by Cornell led studies and planning groups.

There is not one “Town” policy that was not designed by an outside source — and not one policy that had any meaningful public participation or oversight by the town’s residents.

From the Town of Lansing Comprehensive Plan:

“The Town of Lansing has an extensive history, dating back to the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. Settled in 1791, Lansing began as an agricultural community . . .” and there the history of the rural community stops. Two-hundred years of growth and social change is entirely unreported. More than 95% of the residents in the chunk of Lansing that Cornell carved out for CAFOs are not involved in agriculture. But the walls that imprison them are more than just a corrupt and unilateral zoning decision – like the Berlin Wall; it divides those who have freedom from those who are oppressed — a rural community whose rights, and very existence, is denied by the planners of Lansing’s future.

It’s a Form Based Plan that presents a vision of Lansing as one-half “bucolic” corporate CAFOs, and one-half “rural character” Urban Node housing – with a fringe of rich Lakeshore incomers replacing the tax and code evicted locals.

Every policy in the Comp Plan is legitimized by citing the same publicly rejected Cornell survey that comp plan writers claimed would never be used.

The Town of Lansing Comprehensive Plan is a meaningless babble of double-talk surrounding Cornell’s plan to displace the existing rural community; and resettle the town for their own use – using local government to enact repressive and marginalizing policies that they can’t publicly defend.