Paul Szmal: Good morning, it's FLX Morning at 8.37, brought to you by Enstac Automotive and Trailer, your go-to destination for hauling and vehicle services, 2567 Edwards Road, Waterloo, online at enstacautomotive.com. Well, right before New Year's Day, Amy Fuller, Keuka County Chamber of Commerce was guest 659, so here's guest number one of 2025, Abe Bauder, good morning.
Abe Bauder: Good morning, Ted. That's a great honor.
Paul Szmal: So this came about, there's been some discussion that when the county budget is put together this year that your agency might get only level funding, and certainly you'd like to do a little better than that, so you kind of started putting together an argument to show the supervisors about the things that you do, so we're going to share some of that with the listeners this morning.
Abe Bauder: Yes, so I'm happy to report that thanks to the great support that we ultimately do get from our Board of Supervisors in Seneca County, we were, so far, everything goes as planned, we do have an increase in our budget coming up this year that will cover some COLAs for staff and increased rent and things like that, and so what I did was to put together some figures from the past year, and it seemed like this first one of the new year seemed like a good time to talk about it.
Paul Szmal: So let's start with this, because you actually didn't even think about it and left it out of your notes, and that is the move to the new office this year, which was big.
Abe Bauder: Yes, the move to the new office. We are so happy to be in the same space as Huntington Living Center, for those who know where that is in Waterloo, 369 East Main Street. It is the old Taylor Brown Hospital site, and absolutely wonderful. We have roofs that don't leak, and heat in the winter, and air conditioning in the summer, and just one of the things that it can be confusing, I guess, for people when they first make that turn off of Routes 5 and 20, basically you just keep bearing to the left. Don't make a hard right once you get into the driveway, that will take you to a circle and a flagpole, which is where Huntington is. You just keep kind of going to the left. Big parking lot. You'll see the old main entrance to the hospital. It says Taylor Brown Memorial Health Center. Big stone. You kind of can't miss it, and we are the set of double doors that say CCE Seneca right underneath the walkway.
Paul Szmal: I mean, I'm biased here, of course, but the wide swath of programming that you provide for such an important industry, and I still say an undercovered industry, probably nationally and here in the Finger Lakes. We should be talking more about agriculture, but we do in these segments, and we have people like Hans Walter Peterson come in, and all the things that Ryan Stachok is doing environmentally, and the 4-H programs, and the Master Gardeners. It just goes on and on.
Abe Bauder: That is the thing that I have found most exciting and most fulfilling about working for Extension, is really our mission ultimately covers absolutely everything.
Paul Szmal: Yes, people think of Extension, when they think of Extension, they think of agricultural support, 4-H, those are the two biggies, but you know, in Seneca, we have a nutrition program, we have our Master Gardener program, we have the environmental program, we support community and economic development, and so those are some of the things that I reviewed kind of with the supervisors. I think the program I am probably the proudest of, and is an excellent example of what the state tries to do when they give you a grant, which is ultimately you want to be sustainable, you want to be able to get off of the grant. Our Farm to School program, thanks to Moe Tidball, who is now off in Ontario, but Candace Regal, who is just an amazing educator, and also the support of everybody else in the office though as well, because what often happens, and has happened, Rachel Williams, our 4-H educator, Paige Podgorski, another 4-H educator, and Judy Wright, they have all kind of chipped in with doing various pieces of this Farm to School program.
Abe Bauder: I think we figured out it's eight years ago now we got one of the first grants from New York State to start Farm to School in each one of our four school districts. And the point of that program is to introduce more local produce and foodstuffs into the school lunches, school breakfasts.
Paul Szmal: Well, and it's amazing to me, not just in school, but in society in general, that it took this long. I mean, I've been in the Finger Lakes since 2003, and it was the wine place, and somebody woke up one morning and said, wait a minute, we have all this great food, why aren't restaurants serving it, and why aren't the schools serving it, and now they are.
Abe Bauder: Exactly, now they are. What we were able to do, and it wasn't easy when we started those eight years ago, to get in the door, and there were times when the food service people looked at our educator walking and going, what are you doing here? It's like, well, we're here to encourage kids to eat these fresh apples that we give you the slicer for, and the kids can slice them themselves, and they'll eat them more than they would if you just throw an apple at them. And so we finally have gotten to the point where it is just truly incredible. We have teachers calling us saying, when can you come into my class to give a dairy lesson? When can you come into my class to talk about fresh apples? And we have school districts, three of our four school districts have sent teams to the, let me get my thing right, the New York State Farm to School Institute, which is very competitive. There are only ten schools across the state each year that get picked. It's only been in existence four years. We have had three of the forty have come from Seneca County, which is really impressive.
Paul Szmal: So we have the food service directors all on board, and I also need to give a shout out to the Seneca Falls food service director, Stephanie, whose last name I'm going to suddenly forget. But anyway, I wanted to make sure I recognized her. She's actually now the head of the group of food service directors that is promoting farm to school across the state. And so it is just really, it has gotten to that point where we are teaching lessons to the kids, we are getting the products into the school districts, the food service workers are getting training on how to prepare from scratch with all sorts of fresh vegetables and fruits. And this year, currently, we are actually now being supported by the school districts and not the New York State grant.
Abe Bauder: Oh wow, I didn't realize that.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, and that is my point of the sustainability, where you're supposed to ultimately go. There's always an issue and there's always a question when you get to that point of the year when you're looking at, okay, what happens for the next two years of funding, where is the state going to issue an RFP? Are you going to win one after eight years of getting them? Is the state going to say, well, you know, really, at this point, you should have been able to, you should be all set, and we're going to give the money to somebody else. So I went to the superintendents and the business officers last spring and said, we're not sure what's going on with the grant. And at that point, we didn't. And we said, here's what we've been able to provide, and you know what the quality is of what we give. And they unanimously looked at it and said, you know, okay, it's going to cost us $12,500 each, which, in a $26-plus million school budget, is really kind of a drop in the hat for what, ultimately, the school districts get from what we provide.
Abe Bauder: Maybe so, but it's also, it's a tremendous vote of confidence, because it's one thing to say, oh, we like what you do. It's another thing to say, you know, pay for it. I mean, my history at the radio station, I've been approached by a thousand different people that want to do a program and are sure that everyone they know will support it financially, and then the reality hits.
Paul Szmal: Exactly. And so that, it really was an enormous vote of confidence in what we do. And now we're going to, I'm going to be working with the school business directors so that we can figure out how it can be BOCES-edible. We're going to figure out how to do that. So it will ultimately cost the districts even less and bring that all down local, which is great.
Abe Bauder: Switching to, you mentioned Ryan earlier. You know, one of the great things that we've been able to do is to leverage and cooperate with our sister associations. So when Ryan came along, he came along because of the fact that the state legislature had added on, finally, to our state 224 funding. So that is direct funding that we get from the state. For 20 years, it had been stuck at $3 million across the state. And the governor allowed us, gave us about a half million more at one point, but then we went back to the legislature and did a larger ask. So there was an increase of 1.7 million across the state. For that, for us, that meant about $26,000 or so. But one of the things that we desperately needed, given where we are with landfills and HABs in the lakes, and at that point, there was also, you know, people that wanted to build incinerators across from Romulus Central School and all sorts of things. I went to my colleagues in Cayuga and Schuyler and said, okay, we each have a little bit. Each of us could use an environmental natural resources educator. What if we pooled our funds and hired somebody? We all have similar needs. And so Ryan has just been amazing, and it's been wonderful to have him be able to work with all three of us. He's technically a Seneca County employee, so everything kind of runs through us, but everybody gets ultimately what they need.
Paul Szmal: Our big thing that I mentioned to the supervisors was the latest electronics recycling and shredding event that we had that we partnered with the county to have it at the county office building. They provide us lots of help in terms of forklifts and cones and a couple people to help that day. And then Seneca Meadows also provides a crew and ultimately pays for the electronics being recycled by Sun King. We ended up that weekend in October, 344 vehicles participated in the recycling. We had, I have never seen it, we had bumper to bumper the entire time, the entire three hours. It was pretty incredible. Recycled 21,272 pounds of electronics. We handed out 250 bags of recycling information and 10 tons and 3.2 tons of shredding from documents. It was really impressive. And again, all that stuff is diverted then from the landfill, which is amazing.
Abe Bauder: I think, let's see, just looking quickly at the 4-H program, we had 7,109 direct contacts with youth, whether that was club programming or after school programming or school programming. It's pretty amazing.
Paul Szmal: I've got to say, you know, the staff that you have and have had over the years, I mean, they're as energetic as can be, they're smart as can be, and they care. I mean, just these programs are amazing. I mean, the educational piece, I've learned more about agriculture on some of the tours I've been on and these presentations I've gone to. And it's just, it's tremendous work all the way around. And we probably should do a whole other segment. We're just scratching the surface on some of these things.
Abe Bauder: We have just a couple of minutes left, and we wanted to talk about, you're a big lacrosse fan, and we got the news right after we got off the air on the 31st about the passing of Rick Gilbert, one of the greatest scorers, still the leading assist man in all of Division II history, and you saw him play.
Paul Szmal: I saw him play. He was truly an amazing player. That was one of the great things about growing up around here. I saw him when they used to regularly play Syracuse and Cornell and Penn State. Any of, so I would make an argument that any of the records that somebody wants to say, well, he was just playing Division II and III, it's like, no, the Hobart schedules back then were at least half Division I schools, and the other half were all the top Division II and III schools. They were truly amazing. Rick would, if he would have an open shot, and he would give it up to pass it to B.J. O'Hara or one of the other players to take the shot so that he had the assist. The other thing to note is, those were the days, he was playing with a wooden stick, so just really amazing. Actually, I got to meet him when they brought back one of the championship teams. I think one of the biggest, maybe there'll be a move to correct this, I think one of the biggest disservices to him is, he's in the Rochester chapter of the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame kind of thing, which, weirdly, they have these different chapters. He should be in the national, the big one with Babe Kraus and all of those guys. So hopefully, maybe the Hobart Athletic Department and Sports Information Department can work on that, but it was just amazing watching him play.
Abe Bauder: Sounds like a plan. Hey, thanks for everything, and like I said, we didn't give everybody as much treatment here today as they deserve, but we'll catch up as the year goes on, and just a tremendous congratulations to what your agency's been able to do in the time that I've been here.
Paul Szmal: Thank you so much, and we're going to miss you, Ted, very, very much, and hopefully-
Abe Bauder: Just don't call before like 9.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, that's right. We will do that. Alright, thanks very much.
Abe Bauder: It is 8.52 now. It's FLX Morning.
