Looks like Mayor Byron Brown and Steve Pigeon are together again, again. Their on again, off again political relationship appeared to be down for the count just two months prior to the September 15 Democratic primary, in the fallout of the NYS Senate coup that stalled Albany this summer. At the time, the Buffalo News described Pigeon as “radioactive,” explaining why Brown’s campaign declined a June 25 fundraiser Pigeon was to host. The event might have raised $100,000 for the mayor’s campaign.

Now, Pigeon is on the State payroll for $150,000 as counsel to Pedro Espada (the off again, on again Democratic senator who left and rejoined the party along with Hiram Monserrate this summer), and he is also serving as Mayor Brown’s lawyer, according to this petition filed last Friday. Four people signed the affidavits reporting lines at polling places: Cindy Cooper, Omar Price, Mary Scarpine, and Cavette Chambers. Scarpine notarized Chambers’s affidavit, Chambers notarized Scarpine’s, Cooper’s, and Price’s. They all work for corporation counsel in city hall.

The petition is a follow-up to this order issued by judge John M. Curran late Tuesday night which sought to keep voters at certain polling places from being disenfranchised.

I am listening to Carl Paladino on WBEN as I type this, and recalling that the last time Carl visited AV’s offices, he nearly came to blows with Bruce Jackson. Time does not, in fact, heal all wounds but it does create strange bedfellows. On Friday, Jackson—who has endorsed Mickey Kearns for mayor of Buffalo—sent out an email urging the recipients to vote for Kearns in tomorrow’s primary. Rather than explain why, he attached Paladino’s letter to the Buffalo News in support of Kearns:

Next Tuesday’s Democratic primary will decide who will be mayor of Buffalo for the next four years. The two candidates are incumbent Mayor Byron Brown and South District Councilman Michael Kearns. I am writing to urge you to vote for Mickey Kearns.

I am not writing as a UB faculty member for more than four decades, or as the editor of Buffalo Report for the past seven years, or as the author of more than one hundred articles on civic issues for Artvoice and the Buffalo News. I am writing as a long-time Buffalo resident who loves this city, whose children grew up and went to school here, who hates what has happened in and to the mayor’s office in recent years, and who believes Mickey Kearns can and will make a difference.

I’m asking you not only to go out and vote for Mickey yourself, but to do what you can to take everyone in your household with you. And to pass this letter along to at least 10 friends, asking them to do the same. Byron Brown has amassed a huge warchest; perhaps we can use email and our own networking to restore some of the balance.

I could offer many reasons why you should vote for Mickey Kearns, but Carl Paladino—a man I’ve had strong disagreements with over civic issues in the past—has made the case as well as anyone might. This time, Carl and I are in complete agreement. I will attach his Another Voice essay, “Kearns offers alternative to city’s poor government,” which appears in today’s Buffalo News.

Paladino’s “Another Voice” column in the News.

A new telephone poll commissioned by WGRZ TV has already been posted with a story in the online version of Buffalo Business First. This, the “final poll” commissioned by the TV station from Survey USA, puts Mayor Byron Brown ahead of challenger Mickey Kearns.

Survey USA also conducted a poll for WTVD-TV in Raleigh-Durham, NC last fall, for the Presidential election. There, three previous Survey USA polls had put McCain up by eight, five, and four points, while the fourth one put him up 20. Said McCain would get 58% of the vote, Obama 38%.

On election day, Obama won North Carolina and picked up 15 electoral votes.

So remember, polls are good space fillers for media outlets, but they aren’t always accurate, and they don’t even have to be, no offense to Survey USA.

People seem to love ‘em, though, so I figured I’d get a little mileage off this one, seeing as somebody else paid for it.

Byron Brown has jumped ahead a few point on Mickey Kearns, according to a new poll conducted by SurveyUSA. The new poll has Brown ahead 51 percent to 44 percent, with five percent undecided and a margin of error of four percent.

This poll is no more reliable than last week’s poll, which showed the race in a dead heat, 48 percent for Brown and 47 percent for Kearns, with the same margin of error and five percent undecided. SurveyUSA acknowledges that polling loses some significance when so few voters are likely to come to the polls:

Only a fraction of Buffalo’s 112,000 registered Democrats are expected to vote in the primary. In a low-turnout municipal election, a small mis-measurement can result in a surprise on Primary Day. The winner’s margin will ultimately be decided by which city of Buffalo voters actually show up on Tuesday.

I think it’s interesting that the percentage of undecided was the same in each of the two sample groups.

According to a story in today’s Buffalo News, Buffalo Police spokesman Mike DeGeorge “declined to comment on reports that Derenda had directed the police officers to bring Stokes to Brown’s office.”

In the same story, mayor Brown’s spokesman Peter Cutler “referred questions to Sciolino.”

According to Merriam Webster’s online dictionary:

It took a while for Mickey Kearns to draw a round of genuine laughter from the crowd at True Bethel Baptist Church last night. He’d come at the invitation of the Buffalo Association of Black Journalists, whose three-person panel peppered him with questions about policy and race and qualifications and expectations. He also fielded questions submitted online and from the audience of about 100, including a couple heavily loaded questions from Masten District Councilmember Demone Smith, who replied to Kearns’s “It good to see you, Demone” with “It’s not always good to see you, Mickey.”

Many of the questions were one-size-fits-all: What managerial experience do you have? How will you fund the quality-of-life centers you propose? Will you reduce or eliminate the garbage fee?

Kearns handled these well enough. It may be too generous call the South District Councilmember “plainspoken,” however. Sometimes, speaking in environments like this, one would guess that his hero was not Jimmy Griffin but Yogi Berra. Still, he made his points, and his points made sesnse.

Many more of the questions were laden with race issues, which is hardly surprising. An Irishman from South Buffalo is taking on the city’s first African-American mayor, citing Griffin—a man widely disliked on the East Side—as his political mentor.

The mayor had been invited, too; the event was supoosed to be a debate. The mayor did not reply to the invitation, according to initial accounts. At the event itself, another story was offered: Someone from the mayor’s office had replied, but after the deadline for a reply had passed. No one seemed to buy that.

Was it true, a young woman asked, that members of his campaign staff taunted fellow South Buffalonians for supporting Byron Brown? Why, asked Demone Smith, had he not voted for any minority representation in the Common Council leadership? Why had he voted against several African-American nominees for various city jobs. (Demone also asked him why the Council majority had not address a complete lack of African Americans working in the City Clerk’s office, but his premise was incorrect: There are in fact several African Americans working in the City Clerk’s office, as well as several Latinos.)

By and large, Kearns handled these questions well, too. The rationale he offered—that he looks not at a person’s skin color but at his or her qualifications—is threadbare, and might have been irritating from someone who seemed to be excusing himself from thinking about why race matters in one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. But Kearns did not seem to be excusing himself. As much as Smith tried to paint Kearns as a typical South Buffalo Irishman who didn’t give a damn about the black East Side, those colors kepts peeling away. Instead, Kearns returned again and again to his themes: poverty and education,  crime and housing.

But the conversation kept returning to race. Finally, Kearns said, “Okay, let’s air this out. You want to talk about this? Let’s look at the current adminsitration.

The fire commissioner, he said, is a Caucasian from South Buffalo. So is one of his deputy commissioners. The commissioner of public works is a Caucasian from South Buffalo. The manager of sewers is a Caucasian from South Buffalo. The director of real estate, the commissioner of assessment and taxation, the deputy commissioner in charge of inspections—all Caucasians from South Buffalo.

“It looks to me like you’ve already got a mayor from South Buffalo,” Kearns said.

The room roared with laughter. Even Demone Smith cracked a smile.

Business First has an online poll that asks its readers whether Mayor Byron Brown deserves re-election.

At 2:53, 84 percent of voters said he did not. There had been 270 votes.

Polls like this are nonsense, really, but I am interested to see how quickly the numbers tilt in Brown’s favor, once the second floor of City Hall gets wind of it and orders the legions to start voting.

Here’s an AP story picked up by the Buffalo News, describing the expanded use of surveillance cameras in the People’s Republic of China.

“No debate over privacy rights has taken place in China, where the ratio of cameras to people stands at only one to 472,000, and where tight communist political control and broad and intrusive police powers have long been the norm,” the writer observes.

He adds: “Such systems have proved controversial in other countries, especially in Britain, which reportedly has 4.2 million surveillance cameras installed – or about one per 14 people. British police say the system has in fact done little to bring down crime.” Read more here.

Mayor Byron Brown disagrees with the British police, siding with the communists on this issue. His re-election Web site touts the “67 state-of-the-art surveillance cameras in high crime areas and important commercial districts with an additional 53 set to debut this summer” as one of the ways to reduce crime.

Good for Buffalo News editor Margaret Sullivan, calling out Mayor Byron Brown for his administration’s habit of stonewalling on the release of public records to the press.

We’ve been complaining about the problem for two years, and we published a cover story about the problem in February 2008. One AV editor was forced to FOIL minutes to a meeting of the Planning Board, which usually posts its minutes online, when the links to the minutes he needed were broken.

I had always imagined that Brown administration officials treated us more poorly than they did the News, because we’re smaller and have fewer resources with which to demand our rights under the law. I guess I was wrong.

Out of fairness, however, one city agency has always responded quickly to FOIL requests: BERC, under both Rich Tobe and his successor Brian Reilly, has never dragged out the process past deadlines, always provided the documents requested. The law department, too, under Alisa Lukasiewicz, was generally quick to respond, at least if the documents requested had been generated in the law department.