Because Carl Paladino’s letters are always worth reading…

Here’s the letter in which Carl threatens to sue the Common Council if it does not rescind its resolution condemning him for saying that Buffalo [but Memphis-bound?] Schools Superintendent James Williams was hired because he’s black.

I think it’s interesting that the reports on Paladino’s threat to sue the Council have ignored this accusation he hurls at Ellicott District Councilmember Brian Davis, who wrote and submitted the resolution:

“The irresponsible Brian Davis wanted to paint [my remark] as racial to spin his community out of their growing distaste for his self-serving special tax benefits and relationship with program workers who were compelled to share their checks with him.”

Come again? By saying “special tax benefits” he refers to the fact that Davis’s family built a tax-free home on a formerly city-owned lot in an Empire Zone. But that second accusation? That he skimmed money from paychecks? Anyone know anything about that?

The Niagara Gazette’s Dan Miner wrote a column on Friday about the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works Restoration Advisory Board (RAB), which the US Army Corps of Engineers is trying to dissolve. Miner got a lot of things wrong—some minor, some major.

To wit:

Bill Boeck is not a chemist; Walter Garrow has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Both were hand-selected for this incarnation of the RAB and are directly associated with Niagara University and/or the contracting company that built the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS) radiological “containment structure.”

The original and most previous RAB was disbanded immediately after an US Army officer grabbed and shoved a member of the public at a RAB meeting on March 13, 2002. A police report is on file.

The Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (or LOOW site—see the US Army Corps of Engineers map to the left) is actually a 7,500-acre parcel of properties that were allegedly used for TNT production during only a nine-month period of the Second World War in 1942-1943. This site did not produce TNT for the “nation’s armed forces during and after World War II.” The 191-acre piece of real estate being mentioned here in this article is formally called the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS) and is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Energy.

No silo is associated, or ever was, with the current subsurface (read: within watertable) “containment structure” burial. The basements of old military buildings on site are now being used to store these high-level radioactive materials and are considered to constitute the NFSS “interim containment structure.” At the time this project was explained to the public more than two decades ago, it was stated that this “temporary solution” was to be an “interim measure.” The silo being mentioned in this article is where the Radium-226 (between 1/3 and 1/2 of the world’s supply) was previously stored above ground for 40 years. It has since been demolished (1980s), and that structure was also buried with the remaining wastes that were known as being scattered around the LOOW site during that time frame.

Plutonium, an extremely dangerous radioactive element created for the most part in a fission reactor, was found by Environment Canada and was reported as being detected in the mouth of the Niagara River at Youngstown, New York. It can be easily assumed to have leached/traveled/migrated through the ditches and groundwater from the LOOW site only a couple of miles away. No testing has ever been conducted to find the source and origin of this plutonium. In fact, it was never even admitted that plutonium had even been on this site until the Rochester Human Radiation Experiments (HREX) lab wastes (see The Plutonium Files by Eileen Welsome) Dell-Random House, 1999) were mentioned as being located there at Lewiston-Porter in a series of Artvoice articles (”The Bomb That Fell on Niagara” by G. Kelly, L. Ricciuti, 2001-2002). The US Army Corps of Engineers found these particular HREX wastes buried at the legacy LOOW site in 2002-2003 after the series of articles was published. Other sources of plutonium, in addition to the HREX materials, have been identified as being on the LOOW site.

The suggestion that the site presents “no imminent health risks” is misleading. There has never been a “safe condition” at this site. The cavalier waste disposal practices of the previous military “caretakers” of the LOOW led to leaks and that spread radioactive materials into the surrounding landscape during the entire time (decades) that it has been located there. It is still leaking. “Abatement” is not removal.

No mention is made by either Miner or the RAB committee members of the recent change to federal Law (2003’s House Resolution 2754) that will allow the radium-226 and other slurried radioactive elements to remain buried in this landscape and within the water table forever.

Day 1 of my FOIL watch was a bust: Friday flew by with nary a word from Peter Cutler, director of communications for Mayor Byron Brown. I filed a request with Cutler Thursday evening under New York’s Freedom of Information Law for all budget and expenditure records for the Mayor’s Impact Team since January 1, 2006. By law he’s got five business days just to acknowledge my email request, then a month to fulfill it or explain why he won’t.

Of course, Cutler must have had a busy day on Friday, what with TV crews taping Mayor’s Impact Team head Bill Buyers and two of his crew working in Buyers’ yard on city time, yielding a followup story in the Buffalo News. Who knew my request would be so timely?

Buyers and his two underlings received 15-day suspensions for the offense, because, according to Cutler, it was a first offense. I’m betting here that a careful audit of the Mayor’s Impact Team, which begins with Cutler acknowledging and fulfilling my FOIL request, will suggest it was not the first time the Mayor’s Impact Team used city time and city-purchased materials for private benefit.

Day 2 of my FOIL watch begins Monday morning.

CENTRAL TERMINAL champion Russell Pawlak is resigning as president of the Central Terminal Restoration Corp. Pawlak, who grew up near the terminal, has been steering the restoration for at least the past ten years. “We proved a band of creative, dedicated people could make a difference,” Pawlik told Mark Sommer of the Buffalo News. Anyone who has been to any of the several events hosted at the Terminal in recent years can testify to the great work Pawlak has done. We certainly hope someone with the same drive, vision and energy steps up to try and take his place.
3 NYC DETECTIVES on trail for the shooting of Sean Bell had all charges dismissed this morning. Bell, who was unarmed and died in a hail of 50 bullets, was killed only hours before he was to be married. The trouble began at a bar where he was having his stag party.

A couple months ago, fed up with the City of Buffalo’s policy on sharing public documents, I wrote a piece about it. Basically the city’s policy is this: There is no such thing as a public document that can be shared with a citizen without that citizen filing a formal request under the state’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL). The City of Buffalo, in fact, pretends that New York State law compels the city to require a formal FOIL request, even for something so innocuous as the minutes of a meeting that are normally posted online but, for some reason or another, have not been.

That’s nonsense, according to the state’s Committee on Open Government, as I wrote in my article. But the policy allows the city to control and delay the flow of information. In the case of the news media, the policy gives the administration time to anticipate potentially negative stories. The policy forces journalists to pursue information through back channels, which opens their sources to the repercussions that attend breaking the administration’s lockdown policy on sharing information.

The FOIL process comes with built-in delays: The recipient of a request has five business days to acknowledge receipt of your request, even in these modern times when most FOIL requests are filed by email. The recipient has 20 additional business days to provide the information you’ve requested or offer a convincing explanation why they can’t. The city often ignores even those fairly generous constraints.

Why am I rehashing all this today, besides that it’s a frustration that nags at me each and every morning?

Because yesterday afternoon at 5:29pm, I filed a FOIL request with Peter Cutler, Mayor Byron Brown’s director of communications, cutting out the middle men. (This is how it goes usually: You ask the person who might have a document if you can have it; he or she tells you to file a FOIL with Peter Cutler; Cutler forwards your request around and copies in Assistant Corporation Counsel Cavette Chambers; they mull it over; when and if they respond, Chambers forwards the appropriate documents and explanations to you.) The requests asks for all budgeting and expenditure documents related to the Mayor’s Impact Team since January 1, 2006.

I thought that, if only for my own amusement, I’d track the city’s response time. So today is Day 1.

You can read the text of my FOIL request to Peter Cutler after the jump…

(more…)

Watch Buffalo’s own Nelson Starr show off local cuisine in his video submission to Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations FAN-atic Special.” Thanks to Starr’s excellent video highlighting some of Buffalo’s best “working man’s” cuisine, our city made the final cut along with places like Thailand, the Phillippines, and Saudi Arabia. Starr’s video landed a top-4 spot out of over 700 submissions.

[HTML1]

Although Starr was informed this morning that Saudi Arabia had won and that Buffalo was not chosen from the finalists this time, Starr is still fighting on, and due to the tremendous response this video generated, we may yet have a “No Reservations” special filmed in our city. Great job on the video Nelson, and best of luck!

In Sunday’s New York Times (April 6) there was an interesting feature about the excesses of blogging and its ill effects on one’s health. It says that many serious bloggers put on weight, develop sleeping disorders, exhaustion, are often on the verge of nervous breakdowns and a few have even dropped dead: Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. The need to compete in a 24 hour 7 days a week cycle is obviously a stressful lifestyle. I’m happy to see such dedication to up to the minute news, but these people might consider getting out of their chairs and going for a walk or a bike ride. It was only less than ten years ago that there was no such thing as blogging. What have we wrought? I don’t really need someone to kill themselves to get me a story an hour or two before it appears on CNN.

Jamie Moses

In the latest edition of Extra!, the magazine produced by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Michael Dolny reports that the 25 biggest think tanks in the US were cited 17 percent less often in 2007 than they were in 2006.

I don’t know what that means exactly—whether journalists are lazier or less trusting of think tanks; whether the think tanks are doing crap work or not promoting it properly; if there is a generally ant-intellectual trend in our public discourse that causes consumers of information to cast a cold eye on what Brookings has to say about, for example, the costs/benefits of cleaning up the fouled Great Lakes. Dolny’s report provides fodder for conversation but no real answer. However, I think one can draw some conclusions from looking at which of those think tanks do get cited most often in the press: The dominant media isn’t liberal at all. It’s middle of the road with a cant toward the right-hand gutter.

(more…)