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.

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On Wednesday, March 4, Governor David Paterson visited Niagara Falls for a “town hall meeting” at the Doris Jones Family Resource Center on Ninth Street, just around the corner from the Highland Avenue industrial corridor and down Hyde Park Boulevard from the federally designated atomic weapons employer  Titanium Alloys Manufacturing.

As a gift, Mayor Paul Dyster gave Governor Paterson a bag of tomatoes from the H2 Grow hydroponic tomato facility on Pletcher Road in Lewiston Porter, operated by Modern Disposal, Inc., whose waste stream generates a portion of the hot-house heat through the recycling of gasses generated at their adjacent landfill.

The seven-acre, glass-enclosed complex is located directly across the road (100 yards or so—see images below) from the US Department of Energy’s “temporarily-permanent, good-enough-for-now and for 200+ years with plumes” radioactive waste storage facility, called the Niagara Falls Storage Site. The NFSS is located within a 12-square-mile piece of land once secretly known as the LOOW—the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, a location with an eerie and checkered past of military-industrial projects that fill filing cabinets and boxes at the US Army Corps of Engineers offices in Buffalo and whose nasty byproducts fill holes on the Lewiston lake plain.

Discoveries of past “black” or not fully documented projects, activities and wastes at the site seem to happen with some regularity in what are known as “data gaps.”

H2 Grow in foreground.

*Note: Original Manhattan Project era split roadways designed to keep trucks carrying explosives and or radioactive substances separated by one-way lanes to lessen the chance of an accident, critical or otherwise. The underground utility and supply lines for this hydroponics facility were dug across legacy Manhattan Project and Atomic Energy Commission lands (among other historic past .mil users).

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The NFSS (shown on the map above and below) is one of the world’s largest single-source repositories containing the cancer-causing radioactive isotope radium-226—a prodigious generator of other radioactive substances along its decay chain half-life of 1,600 years, including the Nobel gas radon-222, a strong alpha-particle emitter and known cause of lung cancer. In just a few short days, radon-222 changes back to a solid substance and falls back to the ground in what’s called a radioactive daughter or progeny. And that’s only a part of the decay process involved in just that one isotope of radium.

These radioactive decay cycles, producing numerous progeny, have been going on continuously since the 1940s at the Lewiston Porter military dumps. That’s simply a physics fact.

There are many other isotopes at the site that decay and have produced hundreds of radioactive daughters and progeny ,including the “products of fission” and “hot particles” mentioned by Army Corps of Engineers personnel in this September 2008 Army interview, each isotope having its own chemical, physical, and environmental properties, half-lives, characteristics, affinities, and “habits.”

Even though being raised in a artificial root-laden hydroponic medium, tomatoes are well known to take a part of their nutrients/moisture from the surrounding atmosphere and to be receptive to absorption through their outer skin, leaf and vine structures.

Landmarks, legends, and landfills

Out in the desert of Nevada north of Las Vegas, on a desolate stretch of road, sits the infamous “black mailbox” (actually painted white), the only landmark leading into an area of the highly secure base known as the Nevada Test Site–(NTS)–the location of past U.S. above and below ground atomic tests (not-so secret because of sound and flash), Tenopah Test Range (flight and munitions), and the supposedly nonexistent and controversial “Area-51.”

Here in Niagara County, a lone white mailbox (pictured below) marks the main entrance to the once top secret, 12-square-mile, Lake Ontario Ordnance Works complex, on its own desolate stretch of Pletcher Road in Lewiston Porter;  now it marks the 191 acres designated by the U.S. Department of Energy as the Niagara Falls Storage Site (just out of view to the left).

WNY's own "secret mailbox."

Building 401 of the Niagara Falls Storage Site, across road.

Gate closed, restricted access leading into the 191-acre NFSS.

The NFSS is the fat-bottomed, T-topped rectangular shape on the government radiation survey map below. The dots/spots represent historic and remaining radioactive and chemical contamination.

See 2008 chemical/radiological analysis diagrams below.

*Note - Incomplete listing

Please also see:

Niagara Gazette front page tomato story day of Governor Paterson visit.

Audiocast and slideshow of town hall meeting from Niagara Gazette.

See the end below about the gift of H2 Grow (LOOW) tomatoes from Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster to Governor David Paterson [POLITICAL NOTEBOOK: We hear the words, we need more action.]

What others have said.

Enjoy  that  salad,  Governor!

A friend who travels close to Governor David Paterson reports on Paterson’s belt-tightening itinerary:

After a day of meeting what is left of the Blue Collar in Western New York, Governor Paterson built up quite an appetite.  So the question was: “Where does one dine after meeting with the rank-and-file in Niagara Falls?”

To that there could be only one answer: The Buffalo Chop House, located at 282 Franklin Street in downtown Buffalo, just 23 miles away.

In this time of fiscal constraint and belt tightening, all work and no play would make David a dull boy, and no one wants to be that.  So if power and money should happen to fall in your lap, follow the governor’s example from yesterday; take a ride to contemplate, visit the Falls, hear what the common man has to say, and then head back to the Buffalo Chop House with a large group of friends around 8pm.  You’ll be glad you did: They make a dynamite martini.

Let the others eat cake…

Brown and Clinton at City Honors last June.

On Monday, political gossip-slinger Joe Illuzzi reported that Caroline Kennedy had called Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown that afternoon, apropos her interest in filling Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. Illuzzi opines:

We believe it is presumptuous of Caroline Kennedy to have called the Mayor of Buffalo.

One could extrapolate it was an intimidation tactic. Caroline Kennedy using her name & $$$ in an attempt to get the Mayor to take his name out of consideration for Clinton’s Senate seat.

Number one: The good news is our Mayor doesn’t get intimidated.

Number two: Mayor Byron Brown is far more qualified as a local Councilman, NYS Senator & Mayor of a large City to represent the State of New York in the Senate of the United States.

In fact, a source tells AV, Kennedy called every Democratic mayor and county executive in the state to discuss her interest in the Senate seat, not just Brown—who is not, in any case, on any current short or even long list of candidates to fill Clinton’s seat. On the contrary, our source says that Governor David Paterson, who will choose Clinton’s successor, is annoyed at Brown and his political team for continuing to insert his name in the mix.

In addition to Kennedy, US Representatives Steve Israel of Long Island and Kirsten Gillibrand of Albany remain strong candidates.