This is not my typical column. In fact, I had a column about schools that was ready to go this weekend, but then, a tornado ripped through my hometown throwing that plan into chaos.
I know. That doesn’t happen every day.
For the non-locals reading this on Substack: I grew up in Seneca Falls, New York. It’s a small town in Upstate New York that has a lot of unique — and, not so unique — small town problems.
For my Finger Lakes contingency reading today’s column — you know that town has provided me plenty of material over the years. Going back to my early days as a columnist for the Finger Lakes Times in 2013 and 2014 — I wrote about Seneca Falls, and its trials and tribulations often.
This week Seneca Falls was hammered by one of the worst storms I’ve ever seen there in 36 years of life. Even though I’m not a resident anymore, I work in town, and because of that work — have seen basically everything that’s happened there for decades. The National Weather Service confirmed Thursday that Seneca Falls and Waterloo were hit by two tornadoes — an EF1 and EF2 — bringing with them winds of 100+ mph.
The storms hit Wednesday night around 8 p.m. There was plenty of coverage leading up to these storms — a tornado watch had been posted 4 hours earlier by the National Weather Service. And obviously, it goes without saying that confirming one tornado in a place like Seneca County — much less two of them — is not normal.
So, there was plenty of coverage of clean-up.
But through that coverage there were lessons to be learned. I’ve thought a lot about a couple of them in recent months, as I’ve been writing this column and talking with folks around the region.
Here’s the first: We spend a lot of time analyzing, discussing, and scrutinizing plans, while our most impressive efforts are the ones that just happened.
Those storms ripped through Seneca County, and within minutes first responders were in the streets. Within an hour or two chainsaws were running, generators were being fired up, and neighbors were helping neighbors.
Obviously, responding to a natural disaster of sorts is a lot different than executing an economic development plan or town comprehensive plan. But how different should we allow them to be? Communities spend hours-and-hours, weeks-and-weeks — oftentimes, months-and-months — scrutinizing, criticizing, and just talking about plans that have already gone through the community approval process.
That leads me to the second: A lot of elected officials across Upstate New York are looking for confirmation that it’s O-K to act. You were elected to make decisions. You already won that approval. Take new information that comes to you, add it to the equation, but don’t sit in a state of paralysis because there hasn’t yet been a new, sweeping endorsement of every idea before you.
It would be ludicrous if after those storms ripped through Seneca County — people waited to act. If municipal workers didn’t take to the streets to clear them, if NYSEG didn’t show up ready to get power back online, or residents didn’t take to their neighborhoods to start cleaning up.
We would collectively look around us and say, “What on earth is going on here?”
That’s basically where I am today. I’ve listened to electeds who read these columns say “We need to get to action. We can’t just talk about our problems.” And yet on the whole, action is largely missing. And that’s the difference between a crisis like a tornado tearing through a small town in Upstate New York, and the larger crisis that is unaffordable housing, aging infrastructure, an economy that hinges on jobs that can’t sustain families, and schools that are falling victim to aging populations and fewer students.
I’ve seen lots of committees be formed in recent years by communities setting out to address those issues. Yet, not a lot of real action or results.
A tornado is messy, but at least it inspires immediate, swift action. Issues that get delegated into the ether are weird ways of democratizing inaction. And that just won’t get the job done.
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