In the dim glow of the Argos Warehouse lounge’s lights, New York State Assemblymember Anna Kelles (D-Tompkins) announced her run for re-election surrounded by over 50 people on Tuesday evening.
“I don’t write bills that are small tweaks around the edges; I’m a scientist,” Kelles said in an interview with The Sun. “The legislation that I write tends to be more systems changes — transformational.”
Kelles’ district, Assembly District 125, covers Tompkins and Cortland counties and is safely Democratic. Kelles has cruised to reelection in all three of her previous runs for state assembly — in 2020, 2022 and 2024 — and currently has no Republican challenger.
Kelles, who taught at Cornell as a lecturer in the division of nutritional sciences from 2015 until 2017, has been a staunch progressive as a member of the state assembly. She has made environmental sustainability a centerpiece of her time in the legislature and talked extensively about utility prices in an interview with The Ithaca Times.
Throughout the event, Kelles and other attendees stressed the importance of a data center moratorium and combating rising utility costs.
Kelles said her efforts for the data center moratorium are based off of New York’s 2022 cryptocurrency moratorium passed, which lasted two years. The efforts also mirror Lansing’s decision to withdraw its land use moratorium on data centers in November.
When utility companies build infrastructure, “they pass all the costs” to consumers, Kelles said. “For every dollar that we have to pay them for the infrastructure, they get a 9% additional return on their investment, so it’s a complete incentive for them to just build out indefinitely.”
She pointed to her virtual power plant bill, which she said would limit the endless building and put the costs back to the utility companies, in order to combat the increase in energy prices in New York.
Though Kelles has been elected to the state assembly three times, she said she is “just getting started,” because “it takes a long time to learn how the system works, to build the relationships, to pay your dues.”
Power in the state capitol is allocated mostly to chairmanships, which are decided purely by how long an assemblymember has been elected, according to Kelles.
There are 103 other Democrats in the assembly each trying to get their own priorities passed, Kelles said, adding that she believes she is “this close” to a chairmanship.
Kelles is ”a nerd,” Sam Poole ’28, Kelles’ campaign manager, told The Sun. “She cares about the ‘how’ of policy. She cares about making sure that things are evidence-based, and that things don’t just sound good on paper, but they actually work.”
Kelles said one of her “proudest moments” happened in June, when a bill she sponsored was passed unanimously. The bill, A01029B, provides sex workers with conditional immunity if they witness or are the victim of a crime.
The reason that Long Island’s Gilgo Beach serial killer, who murdered more than 11 women from 1993 to 2013, was able to prey on women, Kelles said, “is because there was no immunity for sex workers to go to the police and say, ‘I’ve been a victim of assault; I’ve been a victim of rape.’”
Kelles previously served in the Tompkins County Legislature until 2020, and it wasn’t until that year that Kelles decided to make the leap from the county to the state legislature, joining a crowded seven-person primary.
Emily Adams, Kelles’ friend and chair of the Tompkins Working Families Party club, recalled the moment Kelles told her she intended to run in the 125th, in 2020.
It was “this pure accident running into [Kelles] in the parking lot at GreenStar, right after Barbara Lifton decided to step down, and Anna said, ‘I’m gonna run,’ and I’m like, ‘You’re gonna what?’” Adams said in an interview with The Sun.
“She called a group of us together in her house that evening, and we all sat around with our laptops, and I learned how to organize politically with Anna,” Adams said. “She was the person that turned me on to politics — besides Bernie Sanders.”
Kelles will face a primary on April 28 and the general election on Nov. 3, 2026.
Atticus Johnson is a member of the Class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a senior writer for the News department and can be reached at ajohnson@cornellsun.com.
