The print edition of today’s Buffalo News features two extra editorial pages. Resembling two full-page ads, the “Buffalo News Editorial Opinion: Say No to State Government Incompetence” lists over 75 new taxes, fees, and other “revenue raising items.” But rather than let the figures speak for themselves, a large upper-case font, superimposed over the list shouts “THE STATE BUDGET IMPOSED $8 BILLION IN NEW TAXES AND FEES ON YOU.”

Makes your blood boil, doesn’t it? Here I am, Joe twelve-pack, working my fingers to the bone, and now those fat cats in Albany are trying to steal my hard earned money with the following measures sure to keep the little man down. They want to raise:

$4.78 billion by increasing the personal income tax rate by 1-2% on people making over $200,000 (We all know how hard it is getting by on 200 grand a year.)

$200 million by limiting itemized deductions, except charitable, on incomes over $1,000,000 (I work hard for my million dollars a year. Now some politician wants to limit my tax deductions? WTF?)

$10 million by imposing a tax on the sale of partnerships by nonresidents (I was in Miami over the weekend, bitching on my buddies yacht about how the founding fathers would never stand for such BS)

$5 million by closing timetable loopholes for claiming state residency (Now they want to tell me where I can and can’t live receive my mail? TYRANNY!)

$6.3 million on sales tax avoidance affecting vehicle, aircraft, and marine sales (Thank God I bought that Learjet last year)

$29 million by closing the captive insurance corporation tax (One more income-sheltering provision stolen from us little guys.)

$171.6 million by placing a 1.75% tax on accident/health premiums on for-profit Health Maintenance Organizations (Nobody gets into the health insurance business for the money. For example, Alphonso O’Neill-White, local CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield is forced to make due on $8,300/day. Now they want to cut into that narrow profit margin?)

$124 million by restoring a .35% assessment charge for hospitals (A hospital bed costs as much as a new car. How will they make ends meet if we resume this outrageous tax, especially when you consider that most of the money hospitals make comes from the State and Federal governments in the first place?)

$240 million by hiking health care premiums $45 for a WNY family policy (The money has to come from somewhere. Don’t look to Alphonso to eat some of that charge—this ain’t the USSR, yet.)

$1.2 million by increasing penalties for food safety violations (Is it not enough that my frozen hamburger company works around the clock slaughtering cows? Now I have to make sure there are no cow patties mixed in? Don’t come crying to me when you run out of food at your 4th of July cookout—I tried my best to provide.)

$5 million by increasing fees for pollutant discharge permits (Great. My company creates an insane amount of pollutants. Now I’m expected to pay more for the privilege of pouring them into the Niagara river? No thanks. Same goes for the $5 million they want to raise by doubling fees on all the pesticides I need.)

$500,000 by increasing fees for facilities that emit contaminants (See above. Let’s not forget the $300,000 they expect to raise by heaping fees and penalties on explosives handlers. Good luck with that one. Are you gonna be the one to ask for a dime from a man holding a stick of dynamite? Don’t tread on me!)

$2.7 million by nearly doubling the fees to run my nuclear power plant (Mr. Burns would never stand for such an outrage in Springfield.)

$400,000 by slapping a fine on uncertified crane operators (What’s next? Raising the cost of trying to win a stuffed animal from the Claw machine at Chuck E Cheese? I mean, how hard is it to operate a crane on a high-rise above pedestrians?)

$50 million in fees on non-LLC partnerships (Communism, plain and simple.)

$1 million by charging $10 to enter horses in races (Looks like it’s time to sell the mansion in Saratoga and move the thoroughbreds down to Florida.)

$115 million by charging a five-cent deposit on bottled water  (How many people will die of dehydration at the gym thanks to this cruel and short-sited policy? Don’t they know that water is better when it comes encased in a petroleum-based product?)

$476 million by “sweeping” cash from the NY Power Authority into the general fund (The Authority has worked hard for decades earning that $476 million. Now the state wants to take it away? Write your elected officials and demand that money be quickly returned to the Authority. THEY didn’t get us into this mess. ALBANY did.)

The list of outrages perpetrated by our elected officials against the common man goes on and on.

And look how these seemingly little changes can effect the entire economy. You ride a motorcycle? It’s gonna cost you $3.50 more to register it, Easy Rider. That will translate into fewer motorcycles on the road. Fewer motorcycles on the road translates to fewer trips by Mercy Flight next summer. Fewer trips by Mercy Flight translates to fewer hospital procedures combined with loss of revenue in the funeral home sector—not to mention fewer clients for physical therapists. Who pays in the end? YOU!

Last but not least these sickos in our state capital want to raise $14 million by bumping up the tax on a gallon of beer by 3 cents. Which one of them is gonna have the guts to explain to my daughter that her college fund will be effectively eaten up by their irresponsibility and unbridled greed?

For the second time in four days, New York State Senators sat at a table in Western New York to listen to locals beg for money. On Friday, Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Martin Malave Dilan held a hearing at the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society to hear idea on how the state should spend $25 billion in capital project funds over the next five years. (Joining Dilan were local senators Thompson, Stachowski, Ranzenhofer and Maziarz, and a well-heeled delegation from NYSDOT.)

The day’s headlines, forecasting a $10 billion deficit in the state budget over the next two years, were largely ignored until the last speaker, former State Senator and Buffalo Common Councilman Al Coppola, spoke his piece. He’d been waiting three hours to get to the microphone. He and Dilan exchanged senatorial pleasantries (Dilan politely pretended to have heard of Coppola, whose stint in Albany was brief), and then Coppola held up a copy of the day’s paper, and mentioned the climbing deficit. “Kind of changes everything we’ve been talking about here today, doesn’t it?” he said.

Dilan shrugged and nodded. “It changes everything.”

Not that transportation spending has been well managed in recent years anyway. From today’s Rochester Democrat & Chronicle:

Highway and motor vehicle taxes dedicated to road and bridge repairs continue to be raided to pay the state’s operating expenses, leading to a deterioration of New York’s infrastructure, according to a report from the Comptroller’s Office.

Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said that since 1991, only 35 percent, or $11.6 billion, of the money in the state’s Dedicated Highway and Bridge Trust Fund went to repair roads and bridges.

The majority of the money went to cover debt payments and expenses at the state Department of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Transportation, DiNapoli said.

He warned that the percentage of capital spending on roads will decline to 21 percent by 2014 and the state will need to pay $4 billion from the general fund just to pay current bills over the next five years.

“This is not acceptable,” DiNapoli said. “This money should be used to keep our roads and bridges safe.”

Using most of the $33 billion fund for other expenses has left the state unable to pay for a proposed $25.8 billion five-year capital plan for roads and bridges.

Gov. David Paterson recently rejected the new capital plan presented by the DOT, saying the state simply can’t afford it.

The state Association of Counties said nearly 40 percent of the state’s 17,000 bridges are in disrepair and urged state leaders to invest in the capital plan.

Which brings us to today’s hearing, already underway at the UAW office on George Karl Boulevard in Williamsville. Senate Finance Chair Carl Kruger and State Senator Bill Stachowski (the man Kruger muscled out of the powerful committee’s chairmanship) are taking testimony on Governor David Paterson’s deficit reduction plan, which aims to cut a projected $3 billion deficit in the 2009-2010 budget by whacking 10 percent off of basically everything.

Here’s the Senate’s description of Paterson’s plan.

And after the jump is the list of groups planning to testify.

(more…)

When Erie County Executive Chris Collins called Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver an anti-Christ last Saturday night at a Republican dinner, it wasn’t the first time he’d pulled the line out of his bag.

He recently made the exact same comparison to a group of Buffalo State political science students, who were visiting the Rath Building. Two Buffalo State faculty member were present.

Yesterday I asked Grant Loomis, the county executive’s director of communications, if Collins had ever made a similar reference to Silver before. He assured me that Collins had had not, that the remark was “unscripted” and “off the cuff.”

He then paused a moment and backed off a little, adding, “…to the best of my knowledge.”

I told Loomis about the Buffalo State students, and the two members of the faculty, and Loomis said, “Oh.”

He told me he’d look into it and get back to me. He did not, until this morning, when I wrote to him that I would take his failure to reply as a refusal to comment. He replied to that email immediately: “The CE has said everything there is to say in the statement,” referring to the apology Collins issued on Monday:

“Saturday night, I made a poor joke regarding the Speaker of the Assembly Sheldon Silver.  I want to extend my sincerest apologies to him for my comments.  I have placed a call to the Speaker’s office to offer my apologies directly.

While we may disagree strongly on policy matters, my statement had no place in our political discourse and I am truly sorry to both the Speaker and to anyone else who I may have offended.”

I’m not going to take issue with the apology—it’s too easy to undermine the sincerity of a public apology, and it’s not fair: I can’t see into the heart of Chris Collins.

But it’s clear to me that his remark comparing an orthodox Jew to Hitler and the anti-Christ was not “off the cuff” or “unscripted”; it was not a momentary lapse in judgment. The joke is part of Collins’s repertoire. He has used it more than once, who knows how many times. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware that it was offensive until the uncomfortable silence he met at the Adam’s Mark on Saturday night. Maybe he didn’t know it was offensive until Elizabeth Benjamin exposed the remarks in the New York Daily News on Sunday. Maybe he still doesn’t believe what he said was offensive.  He certainly did not recognize it to be offensive between the time he made the remark to that group of college students and the time he made the remark on Saturday. Or he did and didn’t care. The former makes him an idiot, the latter makes him arrogant and heedless.

And, as Bruce Fisher writes in this week’s cover story, giving him a pass on this makes us all look bad.

UPDATE: Grant Loomis sent out a second statement this morning, after our email exchange. Here it is:

“The County Executive, at times, uses very harsh language in taking on what he believes are opponents of the taxpayers.  As the descendant of a Jewish grandfather, the County Executive recognizes that this characterization of the Speaker is wrong.  He has apologized for that characterization publicly, and personally apologized to the Speaker.  The County Executive will not let this mistake, however, distract him from his focus on protecting taxpayers and challenging the status quo locally and in Albany.”

Still no denial. So he’s called Silver hateful things before, and now that he’s been caught out, he recognizes what he said was wrong. Call it adult education, on Erie County’s dime.

Archeologists believe they may have found a long-lost quatrain penned by the famous renaissance seer Nostradamus, in the remains of a room once used as a salon by Catherine de Medici. The four-line verse is thought to be one of the fifty-eight quatrains missing from the his collection of predictions known as the seventh “Century.” He composed ten in all. Believers around the world point to the uncanny accuracy of his forecasts—including envisioning the rise of Napoleon and Adolf Hitler.

Alas, the discovery comes a few days late for Erie County Executive Chris Collins, who might’ve benefited from the soothsayers words:

The great suit will stumble at the mark

Among a crowd of his followers

From his lake, clad in silver, on horseback, he will cross the state

Seeking the letter sigma, whose number shall be six

Tearing a page from the Bread and Puppet Theater, the Coalition for Economic Justice staged the following skit at the condos down by the waterfront yesterday. Pictured is a great big Tom Golisano puppet.

Location: Behind Waterfront Place Condos
Date: 10/1/09
Time: 4:00 PM

A Press Conference in 1 Act:

Setting: Rally at Waterfront Condos

Designated “Cast”:
Politician played by Eric Gallion
Developer  (Carl Paladino) played by Roger Cook
Condo Buyer  (Stephen Barnes) played by Harrison Watkins

Foreclosed Home Owner played by Jane Piazza
Unemployed Worker played by Rachel Wilson

Activist: Eric Walker

Act 1: The Press Conference (Politician, Developer, and Condo Buyer stand next to each other, behind podium)

Politician: “We are gathered here today to celebrate the opening of the Waterfront Place Condos.  It has been my honor to pave the way for these condos to be built in a tax-free zone, spurring economic development that only the wealthy can afford.  This development is a perfect example of creatively using the Empire Zone program, which was originally intended to promote investment and job creation in poorer areas, to subsidize luxury condos for the entitled elite.  Without further ado, I would like to introduce the developer who had the courage to take advantage of these subsidies in the third poorest city in the country when he could have built these condos with his own money.” (more…)

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.

If you couldn’t get into your usual parking space at the Buffalo Club this morning, blame it on UB President John Simpson, who held his annual community address across the street at Babeville. I think I was the only sucker who put a quarter in a meter on the street. And I’m lucky I had a quarter, because the automated kiosk on Delaware Avenue was broken and wouldn’t accept credit or debit cards.

This year’s speech, “Buffalo-Niagara at a Crossroads,” riffs on themes borrowed from bluesman Robert Johnson and poet Robert Frost.

Teddy Roosevelt also received major props in the address, as Simpson reminded us, “If we are really to be a great nation, we must not merely talk big; we must act big.” As in UB2020, get it?

Simpson also borrowed Roosevelt’s warning to skeptics: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

Dust and sweat and blood, people. You can’t make this stuff up. He even threw in a reference to the Russians and Sputnik. But don’t take my word for it, read it for yourself by clicking here.

And for the heck of it, I’ll offer another Teddy Roosevelt quote, for your edification: “A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”

AV correspondent Geoffrey Anstey reports on last night’s fundraiser for State Senator Dale Volker:

On Tuesday, two separate groups gathered at the usually quiet Erie Basin Marina: one dressed in suits and ties armed with checkbooks, and the other dressed in t-shirts and slacks armed with angry signs. Both made it to the harbor on account of New York State Senator Dale Volker, and his desire to keep his 34-year hold on the 59th senate district in the fast approaching 2010 New York State elections. To help him to do so, Volker invited some of his finest friends (the generous types) to a nautical fundraiser, which local grass roots movements, such as Tea New York, Liberty Pursuit and Free New York, weren’t pleased about.

The common thread between these movements is the abhorrence of current state government and the feverish desire for radical change, so it’s not surprising they could agree on protesting the continued success that Volker has had during the long decline of the region. But as is often the case with these folks, focus was lacking, and while looking upon the crowd of two dozen people you couldn’t help but notice that only half the signs had anything to do with Volker himself, while the other half adhered to the separate groups’ different, general mantras—a natural chink in a coalition of libertarians.

When asked about the protesters Volker calmly, and politely replied, “They have the right to protest, this is the United States of America,” going on to say “these people are angry at state government and I understand.” Immediately he went on to show how he didn’t understand by saying, “They’re angry at state government because the Democrats took over and frankly created a lot of havoc…and then they’re protesting because of the stories in the paper about the dysfunction [the recent stalemate in the senate].”

Though the protesters’ political compasses were clearly aligned to the right, each movement represented claimed no partisanship—to them each party is a different flavor of poison. So had Volker actuallt asked  the angry crowd about their problems with state government, they surely would have shown more outrage over the SEIU suits in Volker’s boat than the Democratic Party’s majority in the State Senate. And they definitely would have shown more concern over last year’s accusations from Kathy Konst supporters—who claimed that after signing a petition supporting Konst against Volker, he hired private detectives to intimidate and harass them—than over the senate stalemate. If these accusations were true, you would have to relate to the anger behind these grassroots “revolutionaries,”  if not to most of the messages on their signs.

And here’s video from WNYMedia:

The Albany Times-Union reports that New York State Senator Pedro’s Espada’s son, Pedro Jr., has resigned the $120,000/year job he was given in the State Senate after just two days.

Some figures on the Espadas:

$120,000: Annual salary for the brand new position of deputy director of intergovernment relations for the New York State Senate—a job filled this week by the son of State Senator Pedro Espada Jr., the majority leader who led the couple that paralyzed Albany earlier this summer. “Let me make it unequivocally clear that this is not the result of a quid pro quo or a contingency to my ending the Senate stalemate,” Espada said.

$432: Restitution Espada’s other son, Alejandro, was told by the court to pay for breaking blogger Martinez Alequin’s camera at a September 2008 political rally. “I was attacked because I was asking questions,” Martinez Alequin said. “I asked [Sen. Espada] to stop [his son]. I said they were hurting me. I was traumatized and I fear for my life.” Alejandro is director of one of his father’s not-for-profit health clinics.

$2 million: Amount in earmarks Senator Espada sought for two new not-for-profit clinics he opened this year. Both clinics were created just days before Espada requested the funds.