Let’s dispense for a moment with the “it’s the people” canard about why Buffalo is great – the City of Good Neighbors. 

The reality is that some people are great and neighborly, and others aren’t. Buffalonians are no more or less great or neighborly than any other Americans. Sorry, but you’re not special. 

This comes into stark view as we find out about the violent racist harassment that drove a Black family out of Lovejoy last week. When you have a lost generation of people who can no longer rely on steady industrial work in now-dormant or departed facilities, you get anger and resentment. Young, angry, and resentful people develop irrational hatreds and sometimes act out on them. 

That socioeconomic fact is, however, no excuse. The Coopers of Lovejoy have every right to live wherever they please, without fear of constant harassment from small-minded racists. The Buffalo News stories (here and here) about the issue were well done and provided extraneous details, such as the muttering of racial epithets within a News photographer’s earshot. 

Neighbors thought the family was a “gang” because, well, the Coopers are a large Black family. 

We shouldn’t be tolerating pogroms in 2012 in Buffalo, and another matter comes into stark view. Where is our political leadership on this issue? Rich Fontana is the city councilman from Lovejoy, and he laid blame on the victims. 

“The family was originally harassed, but when they called in other family members for protection, they turned the situation upside down, and they became the aggressors by sending two Lovejoy youths to the hospital and robbing fast food delivery people,” Fontana said. “After that, I got involved and told both sides to stop the aggression. It was calm until 4:30 this morning.”

Cooper took issue with Fontana’s assessment.

She said that white youths and adults threw rocks and bricks at one of her sons and a nephew, prompting family members to fight back, adding that it occurred after months of racial slurs. “It wears on you,” she said.

As for the allegations of fast food thefts, Cooper said no one at her home ordered the pizza or Chinese food and that no one on her porch attempted to take it.

But the delivery workers filed police reports late Tuesday night, with one claiming an order of pizza and chicken wings was snatched from him and the other reporting that he managed to flee with the Chinese food before it could be taken.

So, the Coopers certainly didn’t find any help or sympathy from Fontana. It’s their fault someone pranked them by ordering food for them. It’s their fault they fought back against harassment. Yet that contradicts this: 

“I’m telling all the residents and every kid I can pull into my arms to stop the attacks, unless you’re attacked first. You do have the right to defend yourself, but don’t be the aggressor against anyone in the neighborhood,” [Fontana] said.

Well, too late. The Coopers moved away. Mayor Brown got briefly involved, but this was an opportunity for him to use his bully pulpit for good. Seeing no ribbons to cut, he has shown zero leadership on yet another critical issue facing the city. 

Good people are good, and bad people are bad – and they come in every hue, from every nation. One would have thought that, in 2012, we’d all be on the same page with that. And in Buffalo, we reserve our outrage for important matters, like footballers’ criticisms of our hotels and the giggles of a different Cooper – Anderson, of Manhattan. 

It’s only been a few short weeks, but I’m already absolutely sick & tired of hearing about, talking about, or thinking about the decaying, unusued Trico factory. Empty now for a decade, it stands as an overgrown, brown headstone honoring the memory of industries lost to the cheap labor and lax environmental regulations of Mexico’s borderlands. Trico assembles wipers in Matamoros. Trico is dead. Oishei so loved Buffalo that they moved the wiper business – which employed people and created local wealth and economic activity – and set up a foundation. 

Battle lines have been drawn, and the forces of “preservation” have selected an old building as a “must-save”, and will go to every length to prevent even the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus from demolishing and replacing the dormant Buffalo factory building. This despite the fact that BNMC is driven by innovation and knowledge, and employing people in something other than piddling service jobs or anachronistic assembly positions. This despite the fact that much of what BNMC has built in recent years has been architecturally as innovative as the work done within the buildings. 

Sure, I could point out that the work that BNMC and its people do is today’s version of building wiper blades, but that doesn’t matter. Trico must be saved! I could point out that the cavernous Trico building’s design could just as easily be described as an eyesore as it can be held up as an example of a factory design that was innovative 100 years ago, but that doesn’t matter. Trico must be saved! Even hypothetically – if a company was saying it wanted to move to Buffalo and create a zillion jobs at $50,000 per year, but wanted to be downtown on a large plot of land and build something designed by Frank Gehry on the site of the mothballed Trico site, and it wouldn’t matter. Trico must be saved!

This despite the fact that Trico has been sitting there for a century, and it is so significant and historical and historically significant that there exists nothing on the books that would legally prohibit its demolition. 

There is no winning in this argument. Only headaches. Buffalo’s activist class have temporarily united to combat anything but Trico’s adaptive reuse. Even Rocco Termini – whose entire business model is based on (a) being friendly with Byron Brown; and (b) using subsidies to render adaptive reuse economically feasible shamelessly says he has a dollar in his pocket to buy Trico and then save it – using government subsidies to do so. 

There seems to be a belief that because Trico can be adapted and reused, it must be adapted and reused. I don’t think that’s true, but it doesn’t matter. Trico must be saved!

Usually, when populations and stakeholders have some sort of disagreement, political leaders will step in and show some leadership on the issue. Not here. Anyone know where Byron Brown stands on this controversy? With whom will he side – with jobs and innovation, or with the defenders of a “daylight factory”, which was innovative in its use of windows?

Buffalo Rising’s April Fool’s joke involved Trico “saving itself”, and flying away because the city is so mean to it. I wish it were true. I wish we could ship our unused industrial detritus elsewhere, but we can’t.  We can either turn it into the “Trico lofts”, or tear it down. But a vocal and well-organized minority has decided that Trico is important and must be saved – not because it’s in any way attractive, but because of its “good bones”. Because of a leadership vacuum in City Hall and no one much caring, BNMC will be bullied into submission. There will be no peace until the state subsidizes cut-rate rental apartments, maybe offices, and vacant street-level retail space in that massive building.  Or perhaps BNMC will decide to put its 21st century people in a century-old factory. 

In inadvertently picking a fight over historic preservation, the BNMC – the future of Buffalo – never had a chance. 

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Empire State Development Vice President of Public Affairs, Austin Shafran, explains why the first meeting of the Western New York Regional Council—which is taking place at UB as I write this—is not open to the public…

“As part of our community-driven, competitive approach to economic development, regional councils are serving as advisory boards to design local development strategy and help prioritize projects. But they are not subject to public meeting law requirements.”

Why not?

“The answer speaks for itself. They are advisory boards who are tasked with designing local development strategy and their purpose is to help prioritize projects so ultimately the state can better guide the allocation of resources. They’re not the ultimate arbiters in the allocation of resources. And they’re not subject to public meeting law requirements. But one point that I do want to make sure that I’m clear on is that future meetings are going to have a strong public involvement.”

You’re keeping the public out. How can you claim to have a strong public involvement?

“In future meetings, there’s going to be a strong public involvement. We’re going to do an avail today, following the first meeting. The first meetings, so you know, are organizational. An orientation for the members so they can begin to discuss the future agenda.”

Why not open them to the public? What can be gained by the secrecy?

“They’re organizational. So they can move forward with setting a structure where they can help design the local development strategy that’s going to benefit each of the regions and allow them to tap local assets and resources and harness the best potential for projects that will stimulate job growth.”

So why can’t the public come to the meeting?

“As I said, they’re not subject to the public meeting requirements, but in the future meetings there’s going to be a strong public involvement. And what we’re really doing here is changing from a top-down development strategy into a community-driven competitive approach.”

Yeah, right.

Click here to see who’s on this Western New York Regional Council.

UB president Satish K. Tripathi

Howard A. Zemsky, managing partner at Larkin Development Co.

Aaron D. Bartley, executive director, People United for Sustainable Housing Buffalo.

Jeff Belt, CEO, SolEpoxy.

Robert T. Brady, chairman & CEO, Moog.

Deanna Alterio Brennen, president & CEO, Niagara USA Chamber.

Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown.

Paul Brown, president, Buffalo Building and Construction Trades Council.

Erie County Executive Chris Collins.

Allegany County Legislator Curtis W. Crandall.

Colleen C. DiPirro, president & CEO, Amherst Chamber of Commerce.

Niagara Falls Mayor Paul A. Dyster.

Dr. Charles M. Edmondson, president, Alfred University.

Chautauqua County Executive Gregory J. Edwards.

Robert D. Gioia, president, Oishei Foundation.

Dr. Rosa Gonzalez, owner/assistant professor & chairwoman, Emergency Management Program, R. Gonzalez Consulting/Erie Community College.

Pamela R. Henderson, managing partner, Henderson-Woods.

John R. Koelmel, president & CEO, First Niagara Financial Group.

Thomas A. Kucharski, president & CEO, Buffalo Niagara Enterprise.

Brenda W. McDuffie, president & CEO, Buffalo Urban League.

Cattaraugus County Legislature Chairman Michael T. O’Brien.

Jennifer J. Parker, CEO, Jackson Parker Communications.

David B. Porter, plant manager, Cummins.

Duncan J. Ross, president, Arrowhead Spring Vineyards.

Niagara County Legislature Chairman William L. Ross.

Andrew J. Rudnick, president & CEO, Buffalo Niagara Partnership.

Jamestown Mayor Samuel Teresi.

Constance R. Vari, executive vice president & chief operating officer, Kaleida Health.

Dr. Raul Vazquez, founder & CEO, Urban Family Practice.

_____________________________

Question: How did Aaron Bartley get mixed up with a crowd like this?

In the interest of making public documents available to the public, here are links to Carl Paladino’s July 8 letter to Hon. William Hochul, US Attorney for the Western District of New York, regarding Buffalo Public Schools, complete with attached exhibits:

Letter to Hochul

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

Exhibit D

Exhibit E

Exhibit F

Unlike the Buffalo News website—which only provides a link to the letter—we here at Artvoice believe in full disclosure of public documents to our readers.

Plus, our paper is free.

Here is a link to “Paladino on the Warpath” in today’s print edition.

Today NRP Development, the  Cleveland-based firm that claimed that Mayor Byron Brown nixed an East Side housing development deal when NRP refused to hire an ally of Brown’s to consult on the project, filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking damages.

Here’s the complaint.

We’d heard that the city had recently submitted a lowball offer to settle NRP’s complaint. Apparently that didn’t work out. The RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Organizations Act) suit alleges that a plan to construct and manage 50 single-family homes on the city’s Masten Park and Cold Spring neighborhoods was  canceled after the company refused to find a way to include (that is to say, pay) Reverend Richard Stenhouse or the Jeremiah Partnership, a coalition of East Side ministers with interests in housing development. Stenhouse was allegedly looking to consult on minority participation goals for the project, a contract which was warded instead to Dr. Henry Taylor’s UB Center for Urban Studies and J.W. Pitts Planning, headed by former Common Council president Jim Pitts.

More on this tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy the use of direct quotes in items 50, 51, and 52 of the complaint:

50. During the course of these events and in making the illegal demand, Brown said:  “If you do not hire the right company [i.e. Stenhouse and/or the Jeremiah Partnership], you do not have my support for the Project.”

51. Brown also said: “Make Stenhouse happy or the deal will not go through” and further stated that he was “sick of seeing those fucking white developers on the East Side with no black faces represented.”

52. After the Development Team selected the UB Team instead of Stenhouse, Brown said:  “I told you what you had to do and you hired the wrong company.”

No “on information and belief,” no paraphrases. Do they have a recording? The statement in item 51, if true, is not without merit: Developers in the city have often paid lip service to minority hiring laws and agreements while finding ways to ignore them. But if, as the suit alleges, the Brown administration demanded that NRP Development prefer a particular contractor as a minority hiring consultant, that’s a serious offense.

This is not an analysis of the message Governor Andrew Cuomo delivered yesterday morning at Buffalo State College. For that, I suggest an unmediated look at his People First campaign. Cuomo never strayed off-message, so you’ll get the gist from browsing that site or reading any of the dozens of analyses that his campaign will generate.

This is about how his visit underscored the rivalry between Assemblyman Sam Hoyt and Mayor Byron Brown, and the roles into which Cuomo cast each yesterday.

If the anti-union strain of education reformers in New York State ever perfect that robot fourth-grade teacher they hope will usurp the role of humans in the classroom, I imagine its speech patterns may resemble those of Byron Brown.

Brown is a smart guy, certainly, and as the audience at Cuomo’s address yesterday were reminded, he’s got a college degree. (From Buff State. “Go Bengals!” Brown said near the beginning of his brief remarks, referring to an unspecified athletic team at his alma mater, and drawing mild approval from the audience.) But his delivery of scripted remarks isn’t simply wooden: He reads his scripts slowly, as if his audience were incapable of absorbing more than one word per second, and hits certain words with such pondering emphasis that one suspects he is suggesting there may be a vocabulary quiz later. Yet at the same time, despite his intelligence, one feels that Brown himself is not conscious of the meanings of the words he uses.

His lack of affect is, simply, robotic.

Perhaps Brown’s heart wasn’t in his performance, as Cuomo came to town on his statewide tour stumping for the next four items in his legislative agenda: a property tax cap, public workers pension reform, ethics reform, and marriage equality. (The last drew a loud standing ovation from the audience, excepting the orange-shirted guys from Laborers Local 210 and one woman seated right in front of me who stood and shouted, “No! No! Don’t do it!) Brown was not even second banana in Cuomo’s roadshow: Instead, he was forced to be the opening act for the opening act. Hoyt, Brown’s hated rival in local Democratic politics, was given the honor of introducing the governor.

As the host, Buffalo State’s new president, Aaron Podolefsky, opened with a few words, then introduced Brown, who made his remarks to an appreciative but not especially inspired crowd. Then the mayor sat down while Podolefsky summoned Hoyt, also a Buff State alumnus, to the podium. One can think what one will of Hoyt as a legislator; he’s been around a long time and has won many friends and many enemies, many supporters and many critics. (Cuomo heaped praise on him, as might be expected of a visiting politician.) But whatever one thinks of him, he is not wooden. He’s engaging and funny, and his speeches rarely feel scripted. In short order he had the crowd laughing, and clapping, and ready for the main event.

Brown must have been miserable.

When the governor took to the stage and asked the audience to give hand, in turn, to Podolefsky, Brown, and then Hoyt, the crowd clapped politely for Brown and roared for Hoyt. I could not see Brown’s reaction from where I sat, but I looked quickly to where Deputy Mayor Steve Casey, Brown’s chief political advisor, stood beside the stage. Casey tepidly brought his hands together once, then started fiddling with his phone, as if checking for messages.

Cuomo said kind things about the mayor, calling him a “superstar” among elected officials, but he always referred to him as “the mayor” or “Mayor Brown.” He called Hoyt “Sam” or “my friend Sam.” The difference in the relationship was clear.

There was a brief press conference in the basement of Upton Hall after the speech, and there Brown managed to occupy prime real estate right next to the governor as he took questions, while Hoyt stood behind both men. But, in the political world where appearances and semantics carry so much weight, Hoyt already had won the day.

Do any of these political flocking patterns and ceremonial arrangements mean anything? Well, they won’t get your sewer system updated, or create new slots for nursing students at ECC’s city campus, or result in a property tax system that rewards downtown property owners for developing their lots instead of selling parking spaces on them. But they shed a little light on whose claims to a close working alliance with the governor ring most true.

It has been suggested, right? Even before the curtains closed on Tuesday, Carl Paladino’s local partisans were suggesting that their man might run for mayor of Buffalo in 2013.

How would he do? There’s no predicting such a thing: The political environment three years in the future in an utter mystery. But at least we can look at the numbers Paladino racked up in the city on Tuesday and compare them to the last two candidates to challenge Mayor Byron Brown, Democrat Mickey Kearns in 2009 and Republican Kevin Helfer in 2005.

Both Helfer and Kearns, of course, were heavily financed by Paladino.

Overall, Andrew Cuomo destroyed Paladino inside city limits. That’s to be expected: Buffalo’s got about 107,000 Democrats and just 15,000 Republicans, with a smattering of third party voters. Cuomo won 37,253 votes and Paladino won 18,777.

That’s not quite as good as Helfer did in the 2005 general election for mayor—19,853. Of course, there were almost 75,000 votes cast in the 2005 general election for mayor, compared to just shy of 60,000 votes cast for governor in the city on Tuesday. Paladino did better by percentage of votes cast than Helfer. And Paladino did better that Kearns did in 2009 Democratic primary—14,866—though Kearns took a a bigger percentage of the votes cast in his election (about 42,000) than Paladino managed on Tuesday.

And that’s the best news Carl’s got. In raw votes, both Kearns and Helfer outperformed Paladino in the Delaware, Ellicott, and Fillmore districts. Kearns did better in the Lovejoy District by percentage of votes cast. (And that’s where Paladino was born and raised.) It’s comical to compare the three men’s anemic performances in Masten, but Kearns beat Paladino by percentage there, too, and Helfer scored more votes. Same thing in Niagara, North, and University.

The South District is the only place where Paladino beat Cuomo, taking 5,173 votes, or 62.7 percent. That’s better than either Helfer or Kearns in raw votes. In percentage of votes cast, however, Kearns did far better, with 77 percent.

Okay, you may say, but isn’t this a big basket of apples and oranges? Maybe so. But some of the data from these three elections obtain: In an election open to his Republican and Conservative base, Paladino did not poll as well by percentage as Kearns did last year. He didn’t poll as well by percentage as Helfer did five years ago, when turnout was comparatively heavy. And his candidacy didn’t inspire a record number of Buffalonians to hit the polls—turnout for the governor’s race in the city was down slightly compared to 2006.

In any case, the real numbers Paladino, or any challenger to Brown, must mind are the mayor’s: 46,613 in the 2005 general election, and 26,314 in last year’s Democratic primary.

There are always rumors of fissures within the Grassroots political machine, but on election day Grassroots and its juggernaut of a get-out-the-vote operation always seems to hang together. A lot can change in three years, but it’s hard to see, based on Tuesday’s results, how Paladino, or any Republican, can break Brown’s hold on the office in 2013—assuming he’s still in office and running for re-election. Maybe a Democrat running in the general election could give him a run for his money, a model that seems to have succeeded for Mark Grisanti in his challenge to State Senator Antoine Thompson.

But a Republican like Paladino? No way: Demographics matter.

In today’s Buffalo News, Brian Meyer writes about the letter written by Karla Thomas, Buffalo’s Human Resources Commissioner, in which she calls Deputy Mayor Steve Casey “a cancer” and asks Mayor Byron Brown to fire him.

Meyer writes that the letter was published in The Challenger, which is true. He doesn’t mention that it was also published in Artvoice yesterday.