The Mayor’s Impact Team
Today Brian Meyers has a piece in the News in which Darryl McPherson of the City Comptroller’s office describes improvements in the performance of the Mayor’s Impact Team.
You might recall that we here started FOILing for documents related to the Mayor’s Impact Team the day before its supervisor, Bill Buyers, was busted by a Channel 7 news team using team members and equipment to do work on his own property during regular work hours.
In the subsequent fracas, City Comptroller Andy SanFilippo vowed to audit the Mayor’s Impact Team thoroughly—basically, to do what I had hoped to do with whatever documents the mayor’s office would release to me. Nearly a month later, SanFilippo released a preliminary audit report that found few or no controls on the way workers signed on and off duty, the use of equipment and vehicles, the procurement of fuel, etc. The preliminary report concluded:
We will provide the Council with the complete audit shortly. The need for stronger controls and oversight is evident and should be implemented immediately. I should note the vitally important work performed by the Mayor’s Impact Team and the need to have them continue to provide their services to the community. I’m confident that with the proper controls in place, the Impact Team will become even more valuable as a city resource. We will have more recommendations in the full audit report.
No full audit report was released—not “shortly,” not ever. SanFilippo’s staff received raises, then his office went silent on the issue of the Mayor’s Impact Team. In fact, apart from the preliminary audit and this Valentine from McPherson, the Comptroller ’s office has not publicly released an audit since June 2007—a cursory review of the police department’s gun buy-back program.
Back in April, when I asked (former TV news troubleshooter, now assistant to the comptroller) Tony Farina how the office decided to do audits, he told that they might do one when someone asked them to. Here’s a plan SanFilippo released in July 2007 to perform eight audits in the course of the year. Were they ever done? If so, why have they not been released publicly?
And how come the findings of the preliminary audit of the Mayor’s Impact Team didn’t lead to firings? It’s a good thing to establish more stringent controls, if that’s indeed what has happened. It’s also a good thing to remove foxes from the henhouse.
July 31, 2008
311: A Reverse Prank Call?
City Hall is making all kinds of technological leaps these days. Whether it’s solar powered parking meter kiosks that are expected to increase revenue raised by charging people more effectively to park on its streets, Citistat meetings posted on the city Web site that invariably fail to play correctly, or the awesome 311 Call and Resolution Center—where “One call does it all.”
I gave it a try this morning. I dialed 311 twice and got no ring at all. I then called 851-4890, the alternate, old-fashioned seven-digit number. A voice answered, thanking me for calling 311.
I was told the call “may be monitored and recorded for quality assurance purposes.”
Well, two can play at that game. Here’s a recording of the two minutes and forty-eight seconds I spent dialing 311 twice, 851-4890 once, pressing the number two to speak to an agent, then waiting another minute through some sort of spacey muzak until a busy signal ended the call. I never got to say a word.
I can’t believe I fell for the old reverse prank call trick. Maybe the Jerky Boys are working down at city hall?
But I’m still left to wonder how I’m going to request a new garbage tote. Or finally get that stump removed from in front of my house.
Hoyt on the Brown Administration
In this week’s AV, I wrote an account of Tuesday night’s public hearing in the Common Council on the City of Buffalo’s 2008 Restore New York grant application. During the proceedings, Assemblyman Sam Hoyt—who wrote the legislation that led to the $300 million Restore New York program—laid some pretty heavy treads on the Brown administration.
Here are Hoyt’s remarks:
I am here to tonight to talk about the original intent of the RestoreNY program, which developed out of legislation I drafted called Repair New York, and to talk specifically about how the City of Buffalo has fallen short for the last two years in producing a thorough, thoughtful application that would maximize the potential of this funding to revitalize our City. This year’s application represents the third and final round of available RestoreNY funding, worth a statewide total of 150 million dollars, and as such there is no more room for error. New York State’s fiscal condition may not permit another round of funding. If the City of Buffalo does not produce a more inclusive and creative application this year, then three years of opportunity to transform the landscape of our neighborhoods and three years of state-funded support will have been squandered.
RestoreNY funding is intended to attract individuals, families, industry, and commercial enterprises to the city. The funding is flexible enough to allow for creativity in putting together a plan that mixes rehabilitation, restoration, deconstruction, and demolition to strategically strengthen neighborhoods. To date, the City of Buffalo has used RestoreNY funding primarily for demolition of properties, and even that has not been done in a particularly strategic way.
Statewide, the first round of RestoreNY disbursed 50 million dollars in funding for various programs. The City of Buffalo received 3 million dollars from that application, used entirely for demolition projects. Round One allocated a total of 11.8 million dollars for demolition, and 29.2 million for rehabilitation. The second round of funding provided 100 million dollars in state funding for this program. The City of Buffalo received 5.7 million dollars for demolition and 4.5 million dollars for renovation of the Trico Building. While renovating one major industrial building shows a slight shift toward rehabilitation, the fact remains that The City of Buffalo’s application requested 30 million dollars in funding and received just over 10 million. To those who say demolition is a crucial component of eliminating blight and making our neighborhoods safer, I agree completely. Demolition HAS to be part of the solution. This is so important I need to repeat it. Demolition HAS to be part of the solution. However, it does not alter the fact that the RestoreNY program was never intended to be used overwhelmingly for demolition and one commercial rehabilitation. There are other funds available for demolition. I secured 5 million dollars for thousands of demolitions that were done in 2007 above and beyond the 3 million dollars awarded through RestoreNY.
It seems to me that the City of Buffalo’s lack of creativity and vision in putting together a RestoreNY application that could be a starting point in neighborhood revitalization is part of a bigger failure of leadership on housing issues. Much of the focus has been on big picture economic development, including a large effort to draw big business to Buffalo. What is the point of bringing big business to our City if we do not have affordable, thriving neighborhoods where people would choose to relocate to work and raise a family? That is the only way to create the holistic economic development that will truly restore Buffalo to what is should be.
As a state legislator, I have always tried to be inclusive in developing legislation that would address the full scope of our housing crisis, turning to the community members and organizations who best understand the breadth and depth of the crisis and who can provide information on their own unique solutions or direct me toward best practices from similar communities. This grassroots-focused development strategy led to the Affordable Housing Corporation’s Block-by-Block program, which is going to bring a few million dollars to Buffalo to do what the City of Buffalo has not yet allowed RestoreNY to do—to acquire and rehabilitate dilapidated but salvageable properties that can anchor neighborhood reinvestment.
This grassroots-focused development strategy led me to draft legislation that would enable creation of a “land bank” to promote the acquisition, rehabilitation, management, and strategic reuse of vacant properties countywide. The City of Buffalo, which owns over 8,000 properties in Buffalo and has proved to be a very poor landlord indeed, has refused to support this legislation in the interest of gaining more control over properties they cannot currently maintain or market. Even when presented with a significant resource like RestoreNY that would enable a more comprehensive strategy for addressing these serious concerns, the City of Buffalo chooses the path of least resistance.
The City of Buffalo seeks no community input, nor does it seek to craft an inclusive strategy that would: promote strategic demolition where necessary; provide resources for rehabilitation to strengthen neighborhoods and encourage additional investment; or develop a greenspace management program to turn the vacant lots created through so many thousands of demolitions into bountiful additions to the fabric of the City.
Demolition is not the only solution to urban blight, despite the City of Buffalo’s efforts to make us believe that that is so. Demolition is an important component for a number of reasons, but we must do so much more. RestoreNY will give us the resources to allow us to do so much more. Combined with powerful community-changing initiatives like my land bank legislation and the Block-by-Block program, we can stop destroying our neighborhoods house by house, stop creating vacant lots that end up as trash-strewn fields that contribute to neighborhood blight, and stop waving goodbye to our neighbors as they move away from home. Demolition is a small part of an immense crisis, and it is time to do more. We cannot wait any longer.
I understand that the Common Council must vote to approve or reject the final RestoreNY application presented by the City’s administration, and that no Council input into the application process save that one vote has been requested nor welcomed to date. I think it is commendable that you have come together now to demand that the community be given a greater say, and I thank you for allowing me to speak to you tonight. Let me just say in closing that I believe the RestoreNY program’s squandered opportunities did not come about because one person thought too small. I suggest that the bigger issue is a broader administrative failure to plan ahead, build partnerships, and foster a sense of direction and leadership in the community. Without these things, we could claim we have attracted billions of dollars in investments and still have nothing to show for it because the fabric of our neighborhoods has been so degraded. In your role as Councilmembers, I ask that you do all that you can to ensure that this year’s application focuses more on raising Buffalo up, instead of razing it to the ground.
I urge the City of Buffalo to make this year’s RestoreNY application a more inclusive process to create a more inclusive application. Thank you for your time.
July 24, 2008
Back to the Money
In two previous posts, we began to look at some of the donors that helped Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown raise more than $192,000 in campaign funds since January. At least $42,000 of about $132,000 in individual donations came from City Hall employees.
$14,925 in individual donation came, apparently, not from people but from addresses. All these donations are logged as being received on the same day, which usually indicates a fundraiser. Strangely, however, these donations are logged as having been received August 15, 2008. (That was dumb misreading on my part: That’s an administrative date for the NYS Board of Elections. Those nameless contributions came in over the course of the six-month filing period. The addresses seem all to be business offices.)
$21,550 came from “other monetary sources.” These sources range from political action committees for a variety of interests ( a theater actors union, $500; HSBC Bank PAC, $500; an HMO called HIP, $1,500; New York State AFL-CIO, $1,000) to developers (Centerstone, which hopes to develop the site where the Glennie Drive project sit, $500; Jim Pitts Planning & Development, $500) to other politicians (DA Frank Clark, $550; County Legislator Tim Kennedy, $500; former Common Council candidate Jessica Magleitto’s campaign fund, $500; many more…)
$38,900 came from corporate sources. Here’s where one begins to draw lines between contributions and favors asked. La Nova Pizzeria, for example, gave $600 to Brown for Buffalo in the last six months. La Nova has been working hard to acquire 366 West Ferry for a new surface parking lot, despite neighborhood opposition. Rural Metro, which contracts with the city to provide ambulance service and is consistently criticized by activists for flouting the city’s living wage law, gave $1,000.
Brown for Buffalo spent very little this filing period: just $2,589.84, mostly for bills, no contributions to other campaigns or to charitable causes. The biggest outflow of money, in fact, came in the form of a returned contribution: $3,500 to Nussbaumer & Clarke, which the local engineering and surveying company had made in two installments.
July 18, 2008
Greening Buffalo
No, not the kind of greening Sam Magavern writes about in this week’s AV. Money.
In the most recent New Yorker (the one that’s generated a flap about the cover illustration depicting Barack Obama in Middle eastern garb and his wife dressed as a terrorist), Ryan Lizza delivers a terrific profile of Obama’s determined entry into and savvy navigation of Chicago politics in the mid 1990s. Here he makes an interesting observation about the ascent in importance of fund-raising ability as a determinant of a candidate’s viability:
Gradually, Chicago caught up with the rest of the country and media-driven politics eclipsed machine-driven politics. “It became increasingly difficult to get into homes and apartments to talk about candidates,” Rose said. “High-rises were tough if not impossible to crack, and other parts of the city had become too dangerous to walk around in for hours at a time. And people didn’t want to answer their doors. Thus the increasing dependence on TV, radio, direct mail, phone-banking, robocalls, et cetera—all things that cost a hell of a lot more money than patronage workers, who were themselves in decline, anyway, because of anti-patronage court rulings.” Instead of a large army of ward heelers dragging people to the polls, candidates needed a small army of donors to pay for commercials. Money replaced bodies as the currency of Chicago politics. This new system became known as “pinstripe patronage,” because the key to winning was not rewarding voters with jobs but rewarding donors with government contracts.
Buffalo, of course, is not “the rest of the country,” though the new Democratic machine built by Mayor Byron Brown and his deputy mayor and chief political officer, Steve Casey, is doing its best to drag our politics into the heavily mediated modern world. In Buffalo, it’s still possible (and necessary) to build support by attending community gatherings, talking at block club meetings, and walking neighborhoods—and, just as importantly, to have folks walk the neighborhood for you. The Brown/Casey organization does that very well. Just ask Barbra Kavanaugh, the former councilmember-at-large who is running a primary challenge to Assemblyman Sam Hoyt: Without the help of Brown/Casey political operatives working out of City Hall to circulate her petitions, she might not have collected a quarter of the signatures she did. (Which, of course, would still have been enough to earn a spot on the ballot.)
Brown and Casey can move bodies, but they can also raise money, a fact in evidence from the moment Brown began his campaign for mayor and affirmed in July’s periodic campaign finance disclosure reports. The Brown for Buffalo committee raised $192,646.33 in the past six months, bringing its balance to $369,965.94. Brown’s other campaign fund, Mayor Brown’s Leadership Council, raised no money but maintained a balance of $239,521.95. It’s generally assumed that Brown would like to run for Congresswoman Louise Slaughter’s seat, if she should retire, but certainly he’d be raising money regardless of his specific ambitions.
So who’s giving Brown and Casey all this money and why? That’s my next post, but if you want a head start, have a look at the Brown for Buffalo disclosure statement for July and scan the donors for yourself.
July 10, 2008
Dick Kern on Buffalo’s Abandoned Homes
Former Buffalo housing activist (and columnist for AV, Buffalo Beat, and Alt) Dick Kern sent around this note earlier in the week, in response the three-part series in the Buffalo News about the city’s plague of abandoned properties. (Here’s part one. Follow the links to parts two and three.)
Here’s what Kern has to say:
The Buffalo News‘ provocative, three-part series on abandoned homes once again does not mention other parts of a dramatically failed housing policy, which is speeding neighborhood decline.
Why is there so little debate about the wisdom of taxpayers paying for a frenzy of new housing construction in a shrinking city drowning in abandoned housing, for which the mayor is planning the massively costly demolition of 10,000 buildings?
Why is HUD so silent, as Buffalo’s poverty fuels a steady stream of lucrative “poverty housing” funding that too often makes things worse, not better? Isn’t Steve Banko ashamed to preside over the second poorest and third most vacant US city as he has watched all those $100s of milions pour through Buffalo? What does he propose his Department of Housing and Urban Development should do?
And why is City Hall’s flagship poverty agency, BMHA, engaged in a costly building frenzy as ever more of Buffalo’s poor live in dangerous, half-empty neighborhoods? BMHA spends over half of City Hall’s poverty housing funds on less than 10 percent of the city’s poor. That is blatantly unjust. What is BMHA executive director Dawn Sanders’ vision for a virtually obsolete agency more fairly reducing poverty and blight among Buffalo’s ever-growing ranks of the poor?
And why are Buffalo’s too-numerous, too-small “neighborhood housing agencies” getting a free pass while being scandalously unproductive? For example, West Side Neighborhood Housing Services has lost more clients in foreclosure over the past several years than it has rehabbed houses, generally slowly rehabbing at the rate of merely two per year. They currently are not rehabbing any houses and have not released any plan.
A dramatic example of the problem is Massachusetts Avenue, where WSNHS has focused more resources than any other street except their Connecticut Avenue “backyard.” Their $50K rehabbed 353 Massachusetts Avenue is currently in both mortgage and tax foreclosure, and WSNHS has been unable to sell their 807 Prospect (at the corner of Massachusetts) for which they paid $7K in July 2002.
After the jump you’ll find a list of 17 city-owned properties on Massachusetts Avenue, and 20 more scheduled for tax auction in October. What does WSNHS plan? Do they have a plan?
(more…)
June 24, 2008
Who Else Will Get Fired?
Here’s what I want to know:
Mayor Byron Brown said that he asked Rich Tobe to resign because the city’s economic development, permit and inspection services department was being reconfigured. Well, then, who else is getting fired? Are any city inspectors losing their jobs?
Brown said that Tobe had done a good job, but that he wanted some economic development measures to move more quickly than they had under Tobe.
Are other department heads also in danger of losing their jobs for not moving quickly enough? How about John Hannon, the city’s real estate chief? He moves like a three-toed sloth, and his inaction costs the city private investment dollars.
If he wants to prove that Tobe’s firing was not politically or personally motivated, Brown is going to have to clean house thoroughly.
June 23, 2008
Update: Tobe’s Resignation
UPDATE: Here’s Tobe’s statement on his departure:
At the request of Mayor Byron W. Brown, today, I submitted my resignation as Commissioner of the Department of Economic Development Permit and Inspection Services.
Mayor Brown indicated to me on Friday June 20, 2008 that he will be announcing a reorganization of the City government in the near future and that my resignation will facilitate his plans.I am pleased that when I leave City government Buffalo will be more prosperous, better managed, and more optimistic than when I arrived two and a half years ago. We have seen record investment in both the public and private sectors, have acquired and are developing over 400 acres of former brownfields, and have faced and overcome many of the problems of the past that prevented Buffalo from moving forward. I am confident that the improvements in the City are continuing and will be permanent.
It has been an honor to have been associated with the many hard working employees of the City who strive each day to make Buffalo a better place and with the dedicated citizens of Buffalo who volunteer so much to help the City.
I will depart in two weeks and intend to conduct a smooth and professional transition. Deputy Commissioner James Comerford will serve as acting commissioner until Mayor Brown makes a determination about the permanent leadership of the Department.
My wife Susan and I will remain in Buffalo where I will seek new challenges that will allow me to continue working to improve Buffalo and the region.
The mayor still has not released a statement on Tobe’s resignation, which was promised for this afternoon.
Rich Tobe Resigns
At the request of Mayor Byron Brown, Rich Tobe is resigning his post as commissioner of Economic Development, Permits and Inspection Services. According to Brian Meyer at the Buffalo News, Brown asked Tobe to resign on Friday. His last day will be July 4—exactly two weeks notice.
Tobe has earned a reputation as a sharp administrator who did good work with a short staff and a monumental workload. It’s not clear when he began to run afoul of Brown and Deputy Mayor Steve Casey, but the first time I heard of a rift was during the city’s negotiations with the Seneca Gaming Commission over Fulton Street. Tobe had been a part of the city’s negotiating team, we were told, and then was booted off. For Tobe, it’s been downhill with Casey and Brown ever since. Casey, in particular, seemed to single out Tobe and his department for sharp criticism during CitiStat hearings.
Whatever one made of Tobe’s policies and his department generally, he was certainly the most responsive public servant in the Brown administration. He responded to email. His voicemail was set up (seriously, not everyone in City Hall bothers) and he returned phone calls, even to tell you he wasn’t authorized to respond to your questions. In a mayoral administration that keeps a tight lid on communications, Tobe frequently was the only one who would answer questions. Once I introduced him to a friend as “the only person in City Hall who’s allowed to speak with me,” and he responded, “What makes you think I’m allowed to?”
The mayor is supposed to issue a statement this afternoon. Brian Meyer has the story at the News.
