Paul Szmal: Good morning, it's 8.37, it's F-LX Morning Wednesday, and it's a guest-o-rama day. All four guest slots are filled, and the final one is filled with Chris Lavin. Both of the Geneva Boys Club and the City Council are going to talk about both today. Good morning and welcome back. Thanks, Ted. Nice to see you.
So let's talk about this. The news is going to break soon about a new grant. It's a grant to the community, but the Boys and Girls Clubs is going to kind of take the point on it to address a whole bunch of issues. So what's this grant, where is it coming from, and what are you going to use it for?
Chris Lavin: It's a new state grant that comes to the community, and that's why they're using us, the club, as the hub. It's done in partnership with the City School District, and it really is what I, the grant I wrote was to acknowledge that the school district is an education institution and not necessarily a social service operation, and that the community could do more to focus some of its resources on addressing the impediments to school attendance and school performance at the source of the problem, which is often in the early years and in homes.
So we're going to be putting together a consortium of local organizations working closely with the school district and Bo Wright at the schools to address the softer side of some of the impediments for white kids. We still have a pretty dual school where the white middle class kids do well, go on to Harvard and some of the best colleges in America, but the poor struggle to meet early reading requirements and performance and don't graduate at the same rate and don't end up at the same places at the end.
Paul Szmal: I've thought for a long time that we're asking too much of our schools in terms of services. They were never designed to be the primary feeder for families, for example. So you agree that we should try to get the schools out of some of these social services and let them focus on education and let someone else provide the social services?
Chris Lavin: Well schools and education are a core part of our social endeavor here as a community, but what are their strengths and focus and what is the community's responsibility for addressing the pangs of poverty and the needs of transportation, needs of families without cars and things like that, all the things that stand in the way of making good use of the school. This is a good school district. I hear people saying I'm going to Canada because it's a better school district. It is not. The Geneva schools are as good as any place in upstate New York. It's the poverty rate in Geneva that is a struggle for any school that's facing those things.
Paul Szmal: I remember a few years ago I read at North Street School to I think it was a group of second graders and they said, you know, thank Mr. Baker for coming and next we have our Mandarin Chinese lesson. Wow. We have, as always, we're uniquely urban and we have a lot of the challenges of bigger districts without all of the same revenues to address it. So this is really a community-wide effort to support families in their engagement with the school district.
So where does it start? You've been into some of these homes. Where does the problem start where a kid isn't going to school?
Chris Lavin: Well you got to remember these are generational things. Parents who did not have a good experience in school themselves, weren't comfortable there when they were there, certainly don't feel exactly at home bringing their children in. Early reading efforts, access to good education, good nutrition, all the things, the concomitants of success in school are well known. It's a more stable family, a better nutrition, clean living, transportation, ease of getting to school. Those things are known. How do we express those things where they're not present now in the community?
So it really is owning up to, as a community-wide effort, to create the conditions throughout the community that we know lead to success in schools. And this is going to be a new effort, a paradigm shift. It's going to be uncomfortable. Not everybody's going to get the services. We have to decide where the resources are best expended. So there's a lot of work to be done. The first staunch of this grant is five years. So we'll be working hard. I've hired a new executive to the club to just focus in on dialing in this new grant for the community. And we're meeting with partnership groups, St. Peter's Arts Academy, the Catholic Charities, and others to say, okay, how do we do this? How do we get more counseling available to families? How do we improve our transportation issues when there's crises in the morning in a family?
You've brought on our fellow Rotarian, Stephanie Hessler, and that's a very good catch. Right. And she's going to help us mature a little bit as an organization as we take this work on. But we're going to be working very closely with the school district. And Stephanie Aneer, who is a former school board president, has joined us as well to help see if we can bridge the divide that often exists between educational institutions and the community they serve.
Paul Szmal: When you roll out these services, do the families widely want them? Is there any resistance? Is there anyone saying, you know, I don't need no help from the man or from the city or whoever?
Chris Lavin: We are not Child Protective Services. We're not the Department of Social Services. We actually want to make sure kids are fed well and that the family has the resources to have the characteristics in the home that we see where success does come from. Early reading, access to the right stuff, support and help for the family, not judgment, and lecturing. We do not do classes in parenting, and I don't plan to do that. We want to help. The kids are our clients. The parents can help us with them, but getting into these places early and bringing resources that help the family and reduce stress in the house are easy calls to make. And we've been doing this for a couple of years now as a Boys and Girls Club, and we've seen that when you go in with no judgment and take the family as you see it and say, what can we do to help that kid today? Clothes, sneakers, whatever is standing in their way, let's do these things.
Paul Szmal: You've mentioned those judgmental attitudes a couple of times, and I think that's one of the biggest barriers that we still have in society is the public attitude toward the poor. Can we change that?
Chris Lavin: Yeah, we're the largest food distributor in the Finger Lakes now, and when we do our food distributions, it's very interesting to see how deeply inculcated a sense that the poor are getting what they deserve, that they're poor because of decisions they make. Right, if anybody drives up to the food distribution in a half-decent car, it's like, whoa, look at this. Yeah, instantly people say, well, yeah, right, they're ripping us off. I blame it on Ayn Rand and this American tradition of blaming the poor, not the system. And I tend to see the poor as hardworking and struggling and fighting depression over their conditions. And we just need to do a better job as a community.
Paul Szmal: If you do, it's going to create a momentum, because like you said, it's generational. If the dad went to Harvard, the kids are going to go to Harvard. If the dad didn't go anywhere, the kids aren't going to go anywhere. Once you get that first generation of college attendants, for example, it's way more likely the next generation will go to college. And so this whole program includes a wide variety of things, an expansion of our junior staff program to get more kids into jobs in their teen years. Hobart, William Smith Colleges, Cornell, FLCC, everybody's, the Geneva General Hospital, we're all on board just to re-examine how we deal with families that are struggling in the schools. And so it'll take some time, and it'll be a challenge to us to do things differently. This is not a program where we're going to announce everybody gets something. This is going to be a strategy on our part to move the needle in ways that hasn't been moved in the past.
Chris Lavin: So coming up on the 17th, you have your annual dinner and meeting, which is always a great event to attend to just to get an overview of what you've been doing. But now, with this initiative ahead, I'm sure a lot of that's going to be unveiled and it's a chance for people to maybe ask a couple of questions and learn more about some of the specifics and nuts and bolts of what's going to happen here.
Paul Szmal: Absolutely. It's on the 17th at 530 at Club 86, our usual place, but it's going to be a different year. We'll be introducing the new executives, we'll be some of the new partners in the community, and trying to make this point. You know, I'm an old Irish hardhead. I'm willing to suggest that in 25 years, the Boys and Girls Club has done a good job, but it could be better. And we've seen some of the same families come through over that 25 years, and the second generation come through where we hadn't moved the needle. And I think that we have to all own up to the fact that best of intentions don't always bring best of results.
Chris Lavin: I want to switch over now to your City Council hat, and you've argued on this show many times that there's a lack of, I guess for lack of a better term, of professional management within the city. You've just discovered recently that there was an account that contained $19 million that has been sitting in a non-interest-bearing account for several years.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, and it's not, my comments about management are not the individuals, I'm a big fan of Amy Hendricks, who's the city manager, and David West, who's doing the economic development. Right, I understand. I'm talking about the council as a group, that they just maybe don't have the training and the skills or mindset needed to manage some of these huge numbers. And they've resisted what I consider to be best practices. There's no finance committee for the city, so that money sat there for two years, and I don't think anybody knew that it should have been making up to $50,000 a month in interest. So we're talking about more than a million dollars that was lost at the same time you're about to roll out a new budget and ask for a tax increase on top of our reassessments.
So this instance of seeing how wasteful inattention can be has made me reiterate my call for a finance committee with outside experts on it, with council people and the mayor, and to, one, look at how this happened, how this loss occurred, so that we can tighten up the finances of the city. But secondly, I do think with $19 million in excess funds sitting around at a time when your taxes are 30% higher than your neighbors down the road, we need to next year reduce the levy, reduce the amount of money we're taking from the taxpayers by at least 10%, to signal that we're taking the tax issues important in Geneva.
Chris Lavin: And again, there's an educational part here too, because we talked about this last time you were here, that people, the tax rate is the thing that gets quoted most often, and the tax rate doesn't really mean anything, because if the assessments double and the tax rate stays the same, the tax levy is the total amount, you know, the tax levy, your grocery levy is what you pay when you go to Wegmans. You really don't care how much tomatoes are per pound, you care about what your bill's going to be at the end.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, and I think that's just an artifice of government. If you double the, the assessments went up almost 48%, by definition, your rate is going to come down, because you don't need all the money that that rate would, so the rate comes down and you yell success. Exactly, it sounds like a great win, until you dig into the math. And then you dig into the math and realize that last year the levy was $8 million, and this year it'll be $9 million, and you've taken another million from the taxpayers when your tax rate's already way out of line, and there's, it's also a lack of urgency. We're going to have, I'm forming an ersatz committee to start meeting with the town to discuss any areas where combination or partnership can result in savings for both sides of the equation. One good thing about the current situation is that taxes in the town are getting very high too, and they don't have as much control of the, because they don't have a town tax in Geneva, so working to reduce the cost of government is of interest to both the city and the town.
Chris Lavin: I've wondered this for a while, as a scout leader, I've taken scouts to get merit badges and part of some of those merit badges are attending meetings, and I've gone to school board meetings, and I've covered council meetings over the years, and it's a very complicated management job. Would we be better off if instead of elected amateurs, no offense, that we had just a hired professional staff of managers?
Paul Szmal: Well that's what, we have that in the city, it's a city manager form of government. Amy Hendricks is a seasoned professional, so is David West. But I mean, she doesn't have a vote on management policy. Right, and I think that we do, I mean if I could wave a wand, we would revisit the entire structure of city government. We have nine council people in a city of 11,000, 12,000 people. It's a lot of people to elect, it's a lot of people to try and find a coalition about things, and it's too many, and in a small city you don't always get people who can do the homework and have the time to do it. So I think having fewer council people, like most cities in America do, would be more focused. Auburn is a slightly bigger city and they have five.
Chris Lavin: Yeah, most cities I've been in have four council and a mayor, and that's the way it's done. But those are, you know, things down the line, but if we're going to really attack the source of impediments to economic growth in the Finger Lakes, you're going to have to take on things like combined services, combined school districts. The school taxes went out this week, and a lot of people who didn't expect a big increase but had a big assessment increase found out, oh my gosh, I'm going up $1,200, $1,400 this year because of what's been happening in the community. That sentiment is, I think they defeated the budget down in Ithaca this year, the school budget, they did it in Waterloo, and I think we'll see more of that unless the region can come together and say, look, we're going to work as a region to bring down the cost of government through every possible means possible.
Paul Szmal: And people instantly yell at me, well, you couldn't even get Romulus and South Seneca to combine as school districts, and they're eight miles down the road with each other and now combine football and now combine other athletic teams, and yet you still have two superintendents sitting there. So I think we're at a Rubicon in the Finger Lakes, and I'll bring these things up, I don't know, they're not always welcomed, and I'm sure the city feels attacked by me discussing publicly that they lost a million dollars.
Chris Lavin: Well, and so I want to say at this point, as always, I think people know this by now, any responsible point of view is welcome here, so if somebody wants to come on and refute any of these things that Chris has said, we'd be happy to have you, and Chris, we're always happy to have you, so thanks.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, I appreciate your time, Todd, and I can't believe you're a Boy Scout leader on top of all the sports you have to do. I'm not anymore. I used to, my son went through Eagle and I kind of stepped aside, had to give up something. 853 FLX Morning.
