Credit: Mary Jenkins
Heather Brenner wears many hats, and often works 60-hour weeks. As community horticulture program coordinator for Cornell Cooperative Extension of Dutchess County, Brenner manages the Master Gardener program, publishes the monthly newsletter, “Dutchess Dirt,” and organizes horticultural events. And she fundraises. “It’s a lot,” she said, “but I love what I do.”
Since last September, Brenner and nearly a hundred volunteers have been busy selecting, ordering, potting, pricing and babying thousands of transplants and seeds in preparation for the annual Master Gardener volunteer plant sale. The May 17 and 18 event, which takes place at the extension service’s Millbrook, N.Y. headquarters, is popular: more than 1,000 attendees are expected. Given that it serves as the primary funding source for the extension’s community horticulture program, the stakes for its success are considerable. This year, Brenner hopes the sale will bring in $40,000.
Fundraisers and grants are especially important to the Dutchess extension: It no longer receives “unrestricted” county appropriations — funding that gives an extension the autonomy to develop, maintain and finance community programs — like all other Cornell extensions. Appropriation expenditures are tracked monthly by Cornell University and quarterly by local governments.
In 2010 the Dutchess County Legislature, facing a $50 million deficit, slashed the extension service’s funding by $800,000, effectively cutting its then $1.6 million annual budget in half. Since then, all funding from Dutchess County has come with restrictions.
Credit: Mary Jenkins
“In the beginning, it was heartbreaking. That first year was hell,” said Jennifer Fimbel, an agricultural program leader with the service, where she has worked for 38 years. Half of the 40-member extension service staff was laid off that year, and educational programs were cut. The extension currently has 35 to 40 employees, many of whom started as volunteers; it offers a broad range of community services despite funding challenges.
This year, Dutchess County will provide close to $1 million to the extension service through a combination of partnership grants, restricted appropriations and direct financial support from departments like the Office for the Aging. However, the restricted nature of the funding, which limits financial flexibility, has complicated the extension’s ability to maintain a balanced budget. The extension’s 2023 budget was $5.4 million, with expenditures of $5.7 million, leaving a $300,000 deficit.
Cooperative extensions have provided science-based education and resources to communities at little or no charge for more than a century. Operated through land-grant institutions like Cornell, with at least one such college in every state, local extensions partner with federal, state and local governments to provide practical information and training in farming and food production, child health and nutrition, water and land conservation, and financial literacy. In New York, the extension service connects communities with research from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Human Ecology.
The Dutchess County extension also manages Taste NY, a program that supports local food producers, oversees the 4-H program, and participates in such initiatives as training dogs to sniff out lantern moth larvae. According to its annual report, the extension’s programs provided services to 150,500 people across Dutchess County in 2023.
Following the 2010 budget cut, one of the first programs the Dutchess extension service eliminated was its popular agent program. Historically, extension agents have provided over a century of service to rural communities, visiting homes to offer expert advice to farmers and backyard gardeners. Now, due to funding reductions, these agents are limited to serving only commercial operations.
Pine Plains resident and dairy farmer Barry Chase said he used to depend on his extension agent. “Everyone had an extension agent back then,” he said. “My wife, Rosey, and I were scared when we started out. We owed a lot of money on an FHA farm loan. Our first agent sat down with us and proved that we could afford the farm.” Chase had three extension agents over his 40 years of farming, including one agent who served him for 20 years, offering personal help choosing fertilizer and crops.
Gregg Pulver, a former Dutchess County legislator, current county comptroller and third-generation farmer, said that former County Executive Marc Molinaro revised the funding mechanism for the extension agency, shifting it to a grant-based system. This change required the agency to apply for county agency partner grants and other competitive grants aimed at community nonprofits.
Pulver said that the funding changes were implemented before he became a legislator, while he was Pine Plains Town Supervisor, and that Molinaro oversaw the budget cuts. Regarding unrestricted county appropriations, Pulver said, “There was no control of dollars in the old system, and too much money spent. We needed more control, which would make for easier [financial] tracking.” Molinaro, now a member of Congress, declined to comment, deferring to County Executive Sue Serino.
Colleen Pillus, communications director for Serino, said that the extension service should be “very proud” of the money it secured through the county partnership grants, which totalled $284,000 in 2024. She said that Dutchess County invests significantly in the extension, and cited an increase in funding this year from $917,000 to $988,000.
Credit: Mary Jenkins
Executive Director of Cornell Cooperative Extension of Dutchess County Mary Lou Carolan highlighted funding challenges: “We have never had a fundraising infrastructure and to get a county [partnership grant] our staff has to write grant applications. They expire in one or two years, then we have to reapply.” Carolan added that the extension service not only competes for grant money with 60 other Dutchess County nonprofits but also faces internal competition as its programs vie for the same pool of county funding. “Our staff spends precious time applying for agency partner grants to cover their programs and salaries instead of working out in the community,” she said.
A challenge for nonprofits on a tight budget, these county grants are reimbursable, meaning the organization must first spend the money in order to receive it back at year’s end. “We have to borrow from our savings,” said Carolan, “until reimbursement is received.”
New York Law 224 allows the state to allocate funds to the extension service by matching a portion of its county appropriations. The Dutchess County legislature gives the extension service restricted, meaning dedicated, appropriations. The county government chooses the extension programs it wants to fund and sets the dollar amount, which is then matched in part by the state. Several agricultural and environmental projects, and 4-H special needs, fall into this category.
“Cornell Extension was a big part of my community when I grew up in Clinton Corners,” said Dutchess County legislator and liaison to the extension service, Chris Drago. “It’s involved in many things without getting credit for it. [Its] budget problems can’t wait any longer, it may affect their Cornell accreditation, and needs to be fixed this fiscal year.”
The extension service’s accreditation would be at risk if they continued to run a deficit budget for a number of years. Carolan said that their board has implemented a 2024 “Balanced Budget Plan” to work toward a sustainable financial future.
Lisa A. Gallina, the executive director of the Columbia/Greene extension service, which spans both of those counties, told the Herald: “Both of my counties provide strong appropriations to support our mission. This allows us to offer programs that are free or low-cost to our community in agriculture, parenting and nutrition, 4-H, and our Master Gardener program. I don’t know if my two county [extensions] would be able to stay open if we lost our appropriations (over $853,000 in 2023). I hope the … funding situation is revisited.” The Columbia/Greene extension service has unrestricted funding, and therefore doesn’t need to apply for agency partnership grants.
Carolan expressed cautious optimism about the future funding of Cornell Cooperative Extension of Dutchess County. “I am excited to work with County Executive Serino and the new legislature,” she said. “I’m hopeful that they will be able to take steps to return our [unrestricted] appropriations to some extent moving forward. These changes happened well before their tenure. We have a much more positive situation than we’ve had in almost a decade; this is a real opportunity.”
Heather Brenner, along with Mary Lou Carolan, have mismanaged the Master Gardener Volunteer program so badly that half of the volunteer educators have left. There were “almost 100” volunteers prior to a mass exodus earlier this year. Now there are probably about 40 on paper and not nearly that many who are putting in the service hours.
While Extensions do a lot of good work, this one has managed to disenfranchise their own volunteer work force. Word of this has gotten into the community which will make recruitment that much harder.
The plant sale has historically been used to subsidize about half of the salary for the position currently held by Ms. Brenner – which is probably why Ms. Brenner is so dedicated to its success.
Should CCEDC be the recipient of unrestricted funds, I do hope oversight is taken seriously by the CCEDC Board and Dutchess County government.
Gloria is absolutely correct no her response.