The City of Ithaca and Tompkins County have approved funding for the Community Justice Center, a new establishment intended to implement the 19 recommendations from the historic Ithaca Police Department overhaul proposal.
The Tompkins County Legislature voted Tuesday to pass the Reimagining Public Safety Plan, with the county committing to the 17 police reforms that intend to rebuild trust between law enforcement and residents.
Cornell professor Elizabeth Aherne ’95 reflects on her time on the Hill and her career in the lead up to her New York State Supreme Court election this fall.
While Cornell entered its spring semester with the experience of a fall semester that saw fewer COVID-19 cases than expected, 2021 may be off to a more tumultuous start.
As thousands of Cornellians flocked back to Ithaca for the spring semester, the nor’easter that brought heavy snow across the East Coast this week hindered students’ travel plans — creating move-in hurdles beyond testing and quarantine as students drove through heavy snow to get to campus.
On Saturday, the Tompkins County Health Department reported that a TCAT passenger had tested positive, and that the Bus Route 14S could have potentially exposed.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unevenly impact working-class and marginalized communities, it has become clear that no crisis can be separated from the influences of rampant economic inequality. The U.S. climate crises, which are reportedly increasing in frequency and magnitude each year, are no different. For this reason, the promise of the Green New Deal as a policy platform that can address climate change, environmental racism and economic injustice has inspired the imagination of millions across the country. But workers and union leaders nationwide are warning that a transition to clean energy that does not include strong worker protections can create dire consequences, further exacerbating the massive wealth gap by weakening organized labor and pushing workers into temporary, unstable, or unsafe work.
In the aftermath of Ithaca’s 2019 Green New Deal resolution, the local conversation has paralleled the national, with our community’s workers fighting for more worker-friendly policies to be prioritized in Tompkins county’s green jobs agenda. Currently, there is no worker representation on the county’s Industrial Development Agency, which is the department that provides tax abatements to developers seeking to build in the county and incentivizes many green development projects.