This particular event has been one that I have been looking forward to all semester. The Student Assembly City and Local Affairs committee, which I have been a member of all year, organized a town hall meeting between students and the city council. The purpose of this was to increase communication between students and city government and give students a platform to voice their grievances regarding government matters. Things like housing, parking, road maintenance, are all issues that affect students that the school has little control over. These issues can only be resolved with the aid of city government and students rarely communicate with the municipality.

At the town hall, Mayor Svante Myrick spoke about his highly controversial legislation known as The Ithaca Plan. His effort to eliminate the drug problem in Ithaca has caught the attention of major news outlets such as the New York Times and CNN. The most notable clause in the plan is the implementation of heroin injection centers, were addicts will be able to use heroin under medical supervision. The aim of this plan is to prevent deaths from heroin overdose, which occurs far too often than it should. Whenever people visit the site, they are under clean and safe medical conditions, and are given a chance to talk about their addiction. The goal is then to help wean people off the drug. Hearing the Mayor talk about the plan that I had heard all over the news was a great experience and I loved having the chance to talk to the mayor himself about the plan. This event made me feel like I was a part of the larger Ithaca community, not just Cornell. Up on the hill, it’s easy to get caught into a bubble on campus. Ithaca is a “gorges” community that many Cornell students do not take the time to explore. After the town hall, I felt like I really was an Ithacan.

We’ve all noticed some changes happening in Ithaca lately, a few of which include the seemingly excessive construction in collegetown (or the excessive construction everywhere…) and the new Ithaca plan that Svante is attempting to put into action. While I recognize the need for new housing at Cornell and the improvement of the look of collegetown, it’s a little sad to realize that while I will be here for all the pain of the construction, with the noise, the detours, and the general inconvenience, I won’t be here when these projects are completed. But even so, Ithaca is taking steps to make itself better. As a student in a Drugs and Society class, I was most interested in hearing Svante speak on the Ithaca plan. The Ithaca plan is designed to reduce drug use in Ithaca and to keep drug users safer in Ithaca. The controversy of the plan is that it involves a safe injection room – a room where people can go to inject where a trained staff member will be on hand to treat patients in case of an overdose. The upsides of this are big: first and foremost it will save lives. You can’t help dead people. In addition, when injectors are put into contact with these centers they are also put into contact with people who can help them quit if they want to. Ithacans are worried that these centers will increase drug use: but in Vancouver, where one of these centers has been active for year, they found that there was no increase in use. Another part of the plan is for police officers to have a choice when they make a drug arrest – they can send the user to a judge and trial or they can put the user directly into treatment. Purely from a public health perspective, this plan has the potential to help a lot a of people. And in our current position in the war on drugs, where we have arrested thousands of people with no reduction in drug use, we need to try something new.

I became a part of CiLo this year when the Student Assembly committee was formed by a great friend of mine, Milicent Kastenbaum. We do things to better community relations between Ithacans and Cornellians, and to try to kind of gray that very bolded line by doing events like this one. Most Cornellians barely even think about the City they live in, but it really is an astonishingly vibrant community and great place to live.

That said, it does have its issues. And there are issues that pertain to students, and there are issues that pertain to the community at large. Our group wanted to aim for a student based discussion, but at the same time acknowledge the big changes that are coming (Related to the new drug program here).

The panel was great. Plenty of great questions were asked and plenty of even better answers were given. It seems a big step to try to prove to students that the government is actually trying to help fix the housing market, or to help boost the economy in the area, or to give incentive to landlords to renovate their homes.

The best part about these events however, is that after they’re over, you can actually reach out to the community to get a sense on their situation, and how they feel about anything mentioned in the talk. There are always two sides to these issues, and there is a huge population in Ithaca that some people barely know about.

I initially came to “Townhall: Embracing a Shared Community,” with the hopes of learning more about the “Ithaca Plan.” After a conversation surrounding city planning, police relations,  and college town, Mayor Svante Myrick began to discuss in detail his new initiative.

Two years ago, an angry mayor brainstormed with a group of people from around the community – law enforcement, hospital, business owners, university administers – to solve the war on drugs. Together through municipal power, they created the Ithaca Plan. It was a completely innovative way to reimagine drug addiction as a disease.

A victim to the brutal impacts of heroin addiction, he had a glimpse into the struggle of addiction. He described addiction like a fast moving river, that many people fall into. And for some, the river will pull them under with no chance to rise above. In my opinion, Mayor Myrick is looking to extend a hand to those wanting relief.  By  building a facility that provides a safe space for heroin addictions to slowly wean themselves off this addictive drug in a medically supervised manner, he hopes to reduce death rates. Moreover, his four step plan aims to reduce crime, drug usage and stimulate local economy.

This past Tuesday, I attended the Ithaca Town Hall meeting in Klarman Atrium. It was my first time going to a town council-type event, and it was so interesting! It was really awesome to be able to hear about Ithaca-wide development projects directly from the officials in charge and seeing that Ithaca has an easily accessible platform for residents to voice their questions and concerns on.

One of my favorite parts of the meeting was the bit about Collegetown development. City officials predict the area will be positively transformed in the next five years. There are six residential properties in the works right now.

During the Q&A section, a graduate student asked about the recent closing of storefronts that, for many Cornellians, were at the center of their social experience. These included Stella’s and Dunbar’s. Mayor Svante Myrick answered this question by first saying he was embarrassed about the current conditions of Collegetown. However, he followed with, “Retail follows people.” If six residential properties are being built or are in the pipeline, then storefronts will most likely follow.

One of the speakers noted that Collegetown has a list of rules and regulations regarding what and how properties can be built. For example, residential properties cannot be on the ground level. I really love this rule, because the ground floors of residential properties don’t interact with the street. It dampens the energy and culture of the surrounding area.

I will probably live in Collegetown my senior year, so I am excited to hear that the City of Ithaca is consciously developing the area for the betterment of the community.