Ithaca native Prof. Judith Hubbard, Earth and atmospheric sciences, announced that she will be running for Tompkins County Legislature District 5 on Feb. 24. Her campaign will center on protecting funding for academic institutions, defending the environment and reevaluating property taxes.
Tompkins County District 5 includes parts of Fall Creek, Cornell Heights and Cornell University. Hubbard looks to fill one of two seats that were added to the county legislature in 2022 after a county-wide redistricting process.
After graduating from Ithaca High School, Hubbard majored in geology at the California Institute of Technology before earning a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard. She spent the next 10 years as an assistant professor at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, where she focused her research on how earthquakes affect vulnerable populations of Southeast Asia.
Three years ago, Hubbard returned to Ithaca. She is now a visiting assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell.
In an interview with The Sun, Hubbard said that she was inspired to run when the “chaos started to happen at the federal level.”
“I can see that given what's happening in the outside world, it's going to be especially important to have local voices who are able to deal with a lot of the complicated issues we're seeing today, to protect the local communities,” Hubbard said.
Since President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, his administration has impacted universities throughout the country. Recent work by the administration includes an executive order calling to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs at federally funded universities, the National Institutes of Health cutting funding to “indirect costs” of research and the Department of Education demanding universities end race-based programming.
Protecting funding for academic institutions such as Cornell is an important issue for Hubbard’s campaign, she said, especially as someone who has personally felt the effects of grant cuts.
“A lot of people are going to be impacted by the federal attack on higher education,” Hubbard said. “There's a lot of risk of people who are employed on grants being laid off because there's no more money.”
Hubbard also said that she is concerned about attempts by the federal government to defund environmental research.
“As an Earth scientist, I'm seeing the broader attack on science and science research that could impact us in terms of our environmental safety,” Hubbard said. She noted that she will use her analytical data background to keep “all of the people who depend on resources secure so that they can weather this current storm.”
Hubbard said that as a county legislator, she wants to work with the state to come up with energy plans that balance consumer convenience and benefit the environment.
“One way that I would like to be engaged in the county legislature is working with the state on figuring out how the state can come up with energy plans that are not too difficult for consumers to engage with, but do eventually let us into a greener future,” she said.
Hubbard also proposed reexamining the county’s property assessment strategy to shift the tax burden away from people who cannot afford it.
She said that the county needs to have knowledge of the changes in home value to see where previous assessments failed to track the market. According to Hubbard, this will allow the county to “figure out what the fair way [is] to redistribute this [tax].”
Hubbard has spent significant time on her campaign trail going door to door in her district, but she would like to connect more with student voters as Cornell is part of her district, she said.
In her press release, Hubbard said that while the greater political environment is uncertain, Tompkins County is in need of strong leadership to help the community stay strong during this shifting political time.
“Many Tompkins County residents are dealing with unprecedented uncertainty about their lives and livelihoods,” Hubbard said in the press release. “The increasingly unpredictable political environment will have real impacts for many people who live and work here. We need proactive leadership to help ensure that our community stays resilient and can even thrive during trying times.”
