Weeding the Backyard
This morning Buffalo police officers tore up hundreds of marijuana plants in Trinity Place. The house has been a magnet for police for many months. The guy to whom the plants are supposed to belong is out of town, and no one else was at home when the cops came.
June 19, 2008
Brian Davis Calls In: When Do I Get to Speak?
Ellicott District Councilmember Brian Davis wasn’t too pleased with this post, about Stillwater’s efforts to get a permit for a giant new patio behind the restaurant. Many neighbors are opposed, because the patio will face residential property and Stillwater’s primary business is its bar. Neighbors expect the proposed 4,000-square-foot patio to be loud. The Preservation Board, the Planning Board, and the Allentown Association all have recommended against granting a permit. Over Allentown weekend, Stillwater employees passed out what looked like a Stillwater business card with Davis’s name and contact information to passersby, asking for their support and suggesting Davis was on their side.
Neighbors seem to believe Davis is taking the part of the restaurant too, but Davis disputes that. He called AV just an hour or so after I’d posted a scan of that faux business card on Monday. He said he’s merely trying to build consensus between the neighbors and Stillwater’s management.
“I’m only encouraging [the neighbors] to come back with something smaller, come back with something prettier, so I can condition the hell out of them and you can get what you want, by minimizing the noise, and everything else,” Davis said. “This isn’t Brian Davis trying to push a patio or anything else. I’m trying to build a consensus as I’ve always done.”
Currently the site of the proposed patio is a parking lot, and Stillwater allows its patrons to step outside into the lot to smoke. In fact, Stillwater sometimes has chairs and tables out there, and even has booked entertainment in the parking lot. In other words, the restaurant uses it like a patio now, though they have no permit. Still, Davis seems to think the neighborhood is missing an opportunity to put restrictions on Stillwater’s use of its proposed patio—even though the restaurant is currently ignoring the laws that prevent its current uses.
Davis says he’s not pushing a patio, but he’s suggesting that neighbors—who oppose a patio and have won the support of a community organization and two city boards—come to the table with a plan for a patio. One that’s smaller, greener, and more quiet, but a patio nonetheless.
He says he building consensus, but at Tuesday’s committee hearing on the issue of Stillwater’s patio, he said he didn’t want to meet with the neighbors or with Stillwater’s management. He told them to meet with one another if they wanted and to submit information to him; he said he wanted as much information on the subject as he could get, but he didn’t want to meet with either party.
In his phone call to AV on Monday, Davis characterized the opposition to the patio as “a personality conflict,” and an “underground campaign” orchestrated by a few because “…well, I don’t like this guy because I represent his former employer or all this other nonsense…”
He didn’t elaborate on that. He did, however, take me to task for not calling him and asking him about that faux business card before posting it. He started the phone call by asking, “Is there anything you wanted to ask me?” and ended it by saying, “This is the third article that’s kind of kicked my ass about something without me even getting a chance to talk about it.”
Well now, that’s a separate issue, and here’s my response: Elected officials like Brian Davis have microphones in front of them all the time. They serve our interests (or are supposed to), but they occupy positions of privilege and power. They never lack for a platform if they want to speak. They submit letters into the public record. They speak to the media. They speak to CitiStat’s cameras. Some of them even meet with community groups and concerned citizens and talk to them. Elected officials get to speak all the time.
I’ve been going to Common Council hearings every other week since I moved back to town in 2006, whenever I can. I miss some, but I’m pretty regular. Many people I know, especially those who work in city government, wonder why I bother. That stuff is all scripted, they tell me. And so mindnumbingly dull. That’s true. Still, I figure it’s government’s chance to talk to the public. I read the documents submitted to the Council, and report on what they say. I report what councilmembers say during their meetings. When they’re done speaking, I look around for someone else who hasn’t had a say yet.
So I base my understanding of Brian Davis’s positions—and the positions of all elected officials—on public statements and on public records. Davis doesn’t need the luxury of 15 more minutes of private discussion with me on the phone, when so many others don’t have the platforms he’s afforded to make their opinions heard.
June 16, 2008
Steve Kurtz Interview
Buffalo artist and UB professor Steve Kurtz appeared on Democracy Now this morning in his first broadcast interview since being accused of involvement of bioterrorism back in 2004.
For more information on Kurtz’s saga with the FBI, you can read our interview with Kurtz from last year. Kurtz was only recently finally cleared of charges back in April.
The full video of the entire Democracy Now episode is after the jump (click “more…”) for those interested in watching, or you can find the transcript here. Various other streaming formats and audio-only versions are also available at the Democracy Now website. (Note: the interview with Kurtz begins at approximately 35 minutes, 30 seconds into the program, and runs about 25 minutes through to the end of the program.)
June 12, 2008
Allen Street Bubble-In
April 25, 2008
First They Came for the Trees…
Last August a tree-cutting crew took a 100-foot maple in front of my house on Arlington Place in Allentown. They took several actually, but this one was unique in that its hollow trunk was filled with concrete from about four feet to the ground. So the crew, who were paid to saw wood and not concrete, left a four-foot-high stump.
At the time, the city didn’t have dime to pay for stump removal, and no one knew if they ever would. So some neighbors commissioned sculptor Michael “Cousin” Kelly to turn the stump into a planter. I wrote about it here.
Cousin did a nice job with some uncooperative wood, as you can see. (The bottom of the planter represents a turtle.) The gash to the right is where the cutting crew hit the concrete.
Two weeks ago a crew of county workers came into the neighborhood grinding stumps. The city, it turns out, has got a hold of some FEMA money to pay for stump removal, and county public works crews are moving through the city. Our neighborhood’s custom-carved flower planter is on that FEMA contract, but we pretty easily dissuaded that crew from turning Cousin’s work into sawdust. I called the office of the acting commissioner of Erie County Public Works, and they agreed to leave the stump alone.
Of course, government’s not perfect: The crews returned a week later to grind the stump, but I called the office of the acting commissioner again, and the crews affably went away—they could see that it ought not to be destroyed, and when they heard it was filled with concrete, they didn’t especially want to go at it with a stump grinder.
The day after that second attempt, I got this letter from Jeff Brett, the City of Buffalo’s newly appointed forester (and entire department of forestry, for that matter). Brett said that my request to have the stump removed from the FEMA contract had been denied. (He seems to think that I wanted all the stumps near our house saved. In fact, the county’s crew removed all the other stumps in the neighborhood on their past two visits.) If I wanted, he said, I could apply later to have the plot declared “unacceptable for planting” so the city would not plant a replacement tree; then I could place “a carving of my own where the stump used to be.”
I’ve been trying to get Brett on the phone all morning, but two weeks into his new job he still doesn’t have his own phone.
UPDATE: Jeff Brett just called and apologized for having written a response to a complaint (which I didn’t file in the first place; it must have come through, garbled, to the city forester via the county Public Works Department) based on a little bit of bad information. He says he won’t take any action. So our neighborhood gets to keep the planter.
April 16, 2008
Allentown Planning
Tonight, Wednesday, April 16, 6:30-8:30pm, the Allentown Association and Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus host a planning work session focused on infrastructure improvements for the neighborhood. The event is at the Hamlin House, 432 Franklin Street.
The Allentown Association is working with the Medical Campus to create an infrastructure plan for the neighborhood that will serve as a guide to secure funding over the next several years to improve, repair and restore much of the public infrastructure that has not seen major work since the last public works improvements in the 1970s.
The ensuing decades have left several areas that need to once again be addressed to maintain Allentown as a premiere livable and sustainable community. This work session will address:
- Physical environment issues including sidewalk repair, street repaving, adequate and appropriate street lighting for the Historic District, etc.
- Aesthetic concerns including clearly marked pedestrian zones at busy street intersections, improvement of the neighborhood’s parks and tree planting
- Quality of life issues related to the dense population of the neighborhood including traffic calming and parking
- Enforcement of Historic Preservation Codes and action to save “at risk” structures
- Marketing the neighborhood’s major public attractions such as Kleinhans Music Hall, the Karpeles Museums, Theatre of Youth, Theodore Roosevelt National Historic site and architectural significant buildings in an effort to promote increased economic development and enhanced retail opportunities.
BNMC has retained the nationally recognized planning firm Sasaki Associates to work with Allentown to prepare a master plan for the neighborhood. We need your input to make certain the plan meet the needs of all residents and business owners. Once the plan is finalized, Allentown Association will work with BNMC, the City and State officials to fund the plan elements.
The Allentown Association asks that you join them this evening. The final plan will work best only with input from citizens.
April 15, 2008
The Best of Buffalo Winners
Last night was probably the biggest turnout ever for an AV Best of Buffalo party. Photos to come shortly of the winners, the crowd, the food, the DJs, the Stripteasers and Babik…in the meantime, all the winners are listed after the jump… (more…)
