Paul Szmal: Good morning, it's 8.38, it's FHALX Morning Wednesday, and joining us in studio is Chris Lavin. We've got both some Boys and Girls Club business and city business to attend to. Good morning. And we also have a little history. People are always asking me, Ted, why I could move back to Geneva from San Diego or St. Petersburg, Florida, where I lived.
Chris Lavin: Yeah. Well, the house I lived in in St. Petersburg was damaged in the first storm and is now evacuated in the second, and here we are in Geneva. Yeah. So we're having calm afternoons and enjoying the cool temperatures and grape harvest. I haven't heard yet from our former colleague, Steve Penstone, in Tampa. He's probably getting ready to bug out, hopefully, because it could be very difficult with Hurricane Milton.
Paul Szmal: So coming up, you have your annual Boys and Girls Club dinner, which is, it's a chance, it's kind of a state of the club time, a time to recognize everything that's been done, and a time to beg for much-needed funds.
Chris Lavin: Yeah. It's a good tradition, and it's one that I'm proudly, that we get the work done and have a good time and get everybody back into bed by 9 p.m. too, so we don't bore our best supporters. But we can use a little bit more attendance next week. It's on Thursday at Club 86. Good food and a guarantee of fast programming.
Paul Szmal: Yeah. 86 chicken, can't go wrong. And we'll be introducing a new management team I'm putting in place.
Chris Lavin: Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, for the club, we have three new managers who are, because of my age and to sort of have a succession plan in place, it's a much bigger organization now than it was, and with many more tentacles in the community, and we need to build the infrastructure to go on after the Lavin era ends.
Paul Szmal: So let's talk about some of those things, because we haven't really had an in-depth conversation in a while. You've got your feeding project going on that gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and more and more partnerships. We've talked about how you educated yourself into being a food industry guy. We've got programs like the First Thousand Days and all the initiatives that you're doing with the school district on education, so bring us kind of up-to-date on these.
Chris Lavin: Yeah, we're a multi-pronged operation with a whole lot more different sources of funding. Generally, as nonprofits are, no matter what you earn and what you raise, you spend, because the job, the work, and the need always exceeds what you're capable of doing. So we're a much bigger organization and much more important in the community. We serve, feed about 1,700 people groceries for the month, and at a time when the costs have gone up so high, you'll see cars out our driveway and down Carter Road all the way to the firehouse about a mile away when we start doing our food distributions.
And our toddler time is identifying families, particularly early on, who could...much of the damage that we see in first, second, and third graders' inability to learn can be traced back to the first, second, and third years of life. And so we're in that space now trying to do more, trying to get food into houses that need it, but also giving great play places for all Geneva's kids. And you see it on Saturday mornings, particularly, you'll see kids from all over, from college professors' kids to the poorest people in Geneva, all in the gym together, letting the kids run, learn, develop their own balance, learn to walk. I love being there for the first steps.
Paul Szmal: Yeah. Has the first 1,000 days begun to show results? Are you turning around? Because that's one of the things I love is that you've really, while you're providing these services, you've also been trying to dig in hard to the causes. Like you said, why do kids come to school unable to learn? And like you said, you've identified that it starts very early in the households with just basics like good food.
Chris Lavin: Yeah. The first kids in our first 1,000-day program are now moving into Head Start and to Pre-K, and we're starting to get to a point where we're going to try and measure their performance versus kids who didn't come to our program over time just to make sure that what we're doing is worthwhile. But anecdotally, we have a lot of amazing cases of kids who are doing well but would not have been doing well without the community's interventions, not just the club. This community is supporting our good work. We now have 500 families in the first 1,000-day program. That actually exceeds our Boys and Girls Club enrollment. So we're just doing more good stuff, I think, and we're going to keep track of it.
Paul Szmal: So as you begin to lessen your role, and do people come on board, what are you coming up with together as a vision, or what vision are they bringing to the table? How might the clubs change, and how will they evolve in the next decade?
Chris Lavin: Well, hopefully we become a little bit more mature. We've always been a mom-and-pop operation with a little bit better funding and more diversified streams of funding. I think we have to become more mature in terms of our consistency, the number of kids we can handle, the way we're doing it, our relationships with people like the school district, where we can really augment their efforts. My efforts are going to have to just, simply because of age and health, move towards helping support on the development side, as others do the real work, which is work with kids day in and day out.
Paul Szmal: That was the part I was going to ask next, is all these things you want to do require the funding? Are you identifying new or bigger sources of funding? Are there grants or foundations out there that are untapped, or do you need more from the public, or probably all of the above?
Chris Lavin: A little bit of all of the above. We do have outstanding, still waiting for the state contracts, a significant grant that will help us over the next four or five years to be a little bit more stable as an organization. But in the end, as I said, you always spend what you can bring in because the needs exceed whatever funding a small organization like this has. So annual dinner's a nice, gets us a payroll out of the way and things to keep us stable, so it'd be great if, and it's a nice dinner out if you want to have a Club 86 chicken.
Paul Szmal: Absolutely. That's October 17th, by the way, at Club 86, and if you go to the website BGCGeneva.org, you'll see the ticket information.
So let's shift over to city council business, budget season, and you've been trying to kind of sound the alarm that what's been happening isn't sustainable. Are you getting anywhere in that effort, or are you just seen as the crazy man over in the corner ranting at the moon?
Chris Lavin: Well, I am the crazy man over in the corner ranting at the moon, but I think, you know, it's funny, economics moves like an iceberg in a lot of ways. It's profound, it's almost immovable, but it also has to be watched. And that's what's happened in Geneva with the reassessment last year of people getting the real value of their homes or the perceived value of their homes on the books. The city's raising of a tax levy will have profound effects on some of the people. So that, for some reason, the manager and the mayor are pushing for a 20% tax raise right on top of assessments that will mean that that raise, kind of tax raise, will almost, in some cases, seniors won't be able to stay in their house.
Paul Szmal: So when you talk about this tax impact, are there some assessments that are rising in relationship to others? Because, you know, we talked about you have assessment times tax rate, so in a perfect world, if you double the assessment, you halve the tax rate and raise the same amount. But are there some types of properties that are rising more of a percentage than others?
Chris Lavin: Yes, there are. And there have been, for example, in the town of Geneva, which is not even in the city, there's a bunch of people who have lakefront homes whose houses went up so significantly that the families no longer want to own the home. They have a $25,000 annual tax bill now on the second home on the lakefront. And so there are specialty homes like that at the high end. But the overall value of homes in Geneva was undervalued for a long time. So as you raise that assessment, it becomes very important that you let the rate go down and keep people where they are. Instead, for reasons I haven't yet tied down, they decided to propose a 20% tax increase this year with the city budget.
And as I've said a number of times, the only 20% tax increase I've ever seen in my life — it was actually before my life — was FDR after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And when we were getting ready for war, nobody raises taxes 20%. So you're talking about the tax levy, the total amount of taxes going up 20%. A levy is what the city takes from the pockets of the people of Geneva. That is your taxes. The rate can go up or down based on the assessment. That determines how much money is taken from. So that the levy, with the reassessment, if you had just done what you said, kept everything — the rate would have been around $11,000. Instead, they kept it at $13,000 and are trying to take that $2 million more from the taxpayer this year, and it's just the wrong time.
Paul Szmal: Is there kind of a sleight of hand going on, where the magician is saying, you know, watch the rate over here, don't watch the...
Chris Lavin: Absolutely. People don't understand, until they get their bills, what they're going to be paying. In this case, if they had let the rate come down to $11,000 or something, which would have been equivalent to what it was before, virtually everybody in the city would have seen the tax decrease.
Paul Szmal: So what's the rationale for the increase? Is the city going to try to provide more services? Is the cost of some existing services rising quickly? You know, you can get into real theoretical discussions about this. The only answer I've gotten out of them is they feel like they've cut for so long and now it's time to build back. The problem is, the city has never been as good at building back on the revenue side of going out and finding new sources of support. They just go to the taxpayer. And the taxpayer, the taxes in the city, are already 20 to 30% out of line with surrounding communities.
Chris Lavin: So you can't build a house in Geneva right now. You can't attract many developers, because the cost of the taxes make the projects less, don't pencil out. They all come in and ask for pilots, and that, you know, the services are then spread over the rest of the town. And that's the conundrum of development is that race to the bottom, you know, it becomes a bidding war. We'll give you this for free. Well, we'll give you twice as much, and we'll give you three times as much. But it's a sheer sign that in a time of housing need, their houses in Geneva are still falling down, because if they were fixed up, the taxes on them would keep them from being marketable.
You'll see right now there's a bunch of homes along South Main Street in Geneva that are going up for sale, because they're so expensive now that the seniors who own them can pay their entire social security across the year to pay for their taxes. So they're going to try and sell them, but I don't think they're going to sell unless somebody comes in and turns them into Airbnbs, because the economics are still not what, you know, somebody wants to pay $25,000 tax bill.
Paul Szmal: It sounds like, anecdotally anyway, in my own community of Rushfield, that there's beginning to be a big impact on the rental market, that a lot of owners have decided to get out of the regular rental business and do Airbnb. You don't have to evict anybody, and if you rent the place out, you know, ten weekends a year, you make the same money you might if you rent it the whole time, and then exacerbated by the state's well-intentioned rent moratorium during the pandemic. But the rent moratorium is great for the tenants, not great for the person who owns a duplex and still has a mortgage payment on it.
Chris Lavin: Yeah, it's that Geneva's making a terrible mistake on that front, too. They're allowing Airbnbs to be formed within residential neighborhoods. That takes houses out of the market, and it puts more pressure on the rental market that does exist here. And much of that, frankly, is Section 8 low-income housing, and those landlords now have less incentive to keep up the properties while they're getting the Section 8 money. So we're in a challenging time, a difficult time. I can say, the one thing I can say for certain, we're not in the time where a 20% tax increase on the people of Geneva is warranted.
Paul Szmal: I know one of the things that makes budgeting difficult is that a significant percentage is mandated spending that you couldn't cut if you wanted to. What is that at the city level? It's generally like 60%, isn't it?
Chris Lavin: Well, it depends on how you look at it. They've boxed themselves in over the years into some contractual obligations with a fire department that's got to be a certain size according to contract, even as the city contracts. A police department that's always had this many people and any movement from that is seen as a diminution of safety in Geneva, even though, frankly, the crime rate in Geneva, particularly violent crime rate, is next to nothing. And has been for years. And I've been trying to make that argument on this program with a lot of people and getting nowhere. But I really do think the answer is the hard thing, which is regionalization of services to get real savings in the cost of government, including school districts that could and should be combined, at least at an administrative level.
Paul Szmal: I know we've talked about that a lot at the school level. At the municipal level, what does that look like? What's an example of service that could be shared among, you know, Geneva, Waterloo, Seneca Falls, or whatever?
Chris Lavin: Well, definitely the town of Geneva and city of Geneva have a lot of incentives. This town has the land, the city has the water and sewer. If they want to create development that will spread the tax burden over more people, they need to work together. And they don't need two DPW campuses for one little town. They don't need six fire departments for one little town. But we're stuck in this mode of this is the way it's been. We don't change. Everybody has their own perception of where their interests lie. I can tell you that the city and town working together would be a service to all of the people of the city and the town in meaningful ways.
Paul Szmal: All right, Chris, we appreciate the time as always. Thank you for coming in. And I'm glad to be able to raise these issues. If anybody has other voices they want to add to the conversation, they know they're welcome. Come to dinner with me Thursday. First drinks on me, Ted.
Chris Lavin: All right. That's Thursday. I probably have a game or something. Thursday, October 17th at Club 86, the Boys and Girls Club's annual dinner. It's 8.53.
