The new Peace Bridge may not get built and the downtown casino is not a done deal.

If the Peace Bridge doesn’t get built, that does not mean that the process has failed; it just means things have changed.

If the casino gets built, that does mean that the process failed and our public officials have failed us, and as a consequence this city will change—for the worse.

The two dumbest arguments

I’ve heard a lot of dumb arguments about the Peace Bridge expansion project and the proposed Seneca casino in downtown Buffalo the past few years, but the two dumbest are: “Build it. Something is better than nothing” and “There’s no point fighting. It’s a done deal.”

Something is better than nothing only when it is better than nothing. That is a fact, not a tautology. Hemorrhoids and the clap are something, but they’re not better than nothing. War is something, but it is not better than nothing.

Likewise, the fact that a developer or a Buffalo News editorial writer says something is a “done deal” means nothing other than that those people said or wrote that something is a “done deal.” Words have the power to create realities in Genesis 1, but not in public works projects. In public works projects, a deal is done only when it is truly done, not when those wanting to do it are looking for ways to silence people who think they are doing the wrong thing the wrong way in the wrong place at the wrong time to the wrong people, or when lazy newspaper editorial writers do stenography instead of journalism.

Sometimes the best public works projects are those in which the deal is never done at all, or when a lousy done deal gets undone. Sometimes the worst thing that can happen with a public works project is for it to come about just as its planners and proponents desired and designed.

The four biggest blunders

Four prime Buffalo public works blunders, all well known to anyone in this region who is concerned with these matters, all of which should be brought to mind the next time you hear someone say “Just build it” or “But think about the [temporary] construction jobs,” are:

—moving University of Buffalo to Amherst, thereby removing from the city of Buffalo a huge portion of the middle-class wage earners who work there, as well as making it extremely difficult for the university’s students to avail themselves of the advantages cities have over suburbs;

—the light rail system, which began life as a monorail that would connect downtown to the new university, the suburbs and the airport, but took so long to get built it ran out of money, never got past the city line, never got up in the air and murdered much of Main Street in the process;

—the downtown segment of the Thruway, which almost perfectly severed the city from its greatest natural asset, the waterfront;

—the Kensington Expressway, which plowed through or severed several healthy urban neighborhoods and facilitated white flight from the city by providing downtown workers a quick and easy way to zip out to the suburban subdivisions when their workday was done.

These four public works blunders aren’t the only or even the primary reasons Buffalo never came close to regaining its long-ago luster of being a rich, thriving city. None of the other Great Lakes Rust Belt cities, even the ones that didn’t embrace suicidal public works projects like these, is a rich, thriving city. But they’re all doing better than we are. And had we thought and fought more before those projects were done or irreversible, had we not listened then to the people telling us “It’s a done deal,” Buffalo would have been a lot better off than it is. Buffalo would have been far better off if every one of those projects had been strangled at birth.

Dead projects

When that happens, everyone but the greedy is better off for it.

Some fools wanted to build an expressway right down the middle of Florida’s Biscayne Bay; they did the planning but were stopped before they could mutilate the waterscape. Others wanted to build the new Miami International Airport in the Everglades. It was a huge project and the developers would have made a fortune. One runway was built, then the community realized what was being destroyed and what was about to be lost, whereupon the project was aborted.

Robert Moses, who rarely gave a second thought to neighborhoods when he was planning and building his expressways, particularly if the residents were poor and nonwhite, wanted to build three expressways across Manhattan, all of them monstrosities. The Upper Manhattan Expressway would have replaced 125th Street. The elevated Mid-Manhattan Expressway would have plunged 30th Street into perpetual shadow. The most malign of the three was the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which was to have been eight lanes wide as it crossed the borough from the Holland Tunnel on the west to the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges on the east. Moses’s plan was to level “fourteen entire blocks along Hudson Street in Greenwich Village [and] would have destroyed thousands of historic structures and displaced nearly 10,000 residents and workers” [Wikipedia]. Jane Jacobs organized the successful opposition to that civic savagery.

The East Coast doesn’t have a monopoly on this kind of foolishness. Not long ago, California officials planned the 710 Freeway, which would have torn up a historic Pasadena neighborhood with many Craftsman homes. It was blocked.

Perhaps the biggest recent dead project was the Jets Stadium proposed for Manhattan’s West Side. It would have required huge infrastructure expenditures, imposed an inappropriate expansion on the Javits Center and turned development of the area into, in the words of architectural analyst Peter Slatin, “an imposed, willy-nilly free-for-all.”

Not only are inappropriate public works projects being blocked as never before, but some old mistakes are being reversed. The elevated highway over San Francisco’s Embarcadero was torn down, after which the moribund district blossomed. The same thing happened in Manhattan after a section of the West Side Highway collapsed. Instead of rebuilding it, as the city planners wanted, the remaining sections of the midtown and downtown parts of the highway were torn down. A once-gloomy area burst into the light and is now bustling with new buildings and, something never seen in that neighborhood before, pedestrians.

This Peace Bridge may be the only one you’ll ever have

The two biggest public works projects in the Buffalo area in the past decade were the Peace Bridge expansion project and the Senecas’ proposed downtown casino. The bridge may be dead. The casino isn’t dead, but should be.

In the late 1990s, the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority decided, after a series of closed-door meetings, to build a steel twin to the current bridge. There was a great deal of community opposition for environmental, aesthetic and political reasons, and after a year or so New York Supreme Court Judge Eugene Fahey told the Authority they would have to stop what they were doing and undertake the environmental impact study they had thus far assiduously avoided. After a bit of fumbling, the Authority completely reversed itself and abandoned its closed-door planning policy and invited community representatives from Buffalo and Fort Erie to engage in a new planning process. That process morphed over the years. While that was going on the Authority took a new look at the traffic problems on the bridge and realized it could alleviate many of them by reconfiguring the property it already controlled.

They moved the toll facilities to the Canadian side and are in the process of moving all their office facilities over there as well. Everything has been moved back from the bridge, and truck processing procedures and efficiency have been improved, so the truck lines so familiar three years ago are now extremely rare. If they are successful in moving the federal inspection to Fort Erie as well, that will free up a great deal of the park space the bridge has long occupied.

But passenger traffic has been declining for several years, a pattern exacerbated by increased security inspections after 9/11. Even though that process has been sped up, many people are still reluctant to cross the bridge for casual reasons—to have dinner in Fort Erie, say, or to spend time on the Canadian shore. If the Bush administration is successful in imposing its new PASS identification card plan (each card costs $50), there will be another significant drop in auto traffic and concomitant drop in tolls.

Traffic volume and toll income are the keys to building a new bridge. If the border continues to be, or be perceived as, unfriendly, toll money will keep dropping, and the new bridge won’t get built.

It may well be that for Buffalo, the most important part of the project was never the bridge, that it was rather the plaza: how the traffic moved once it reached land, how much of Front Park and Fort Porter could be restored, how easily local passenger traffic could get onto local streets, how good a gateway could be created in what has long been an urban scar.

Many of the major plaza improvements that were developed as part of the overall design process will be implemented anyway, whether or not a new bridge is built.

There are still major issues: Will the new plaza be to the north or south of whatever bridge or bridges are there, what access roads will be used, what city streets will be used, will the bridge operation penetrate more deeply into the West Side, taking a lot of houses with it? Some of the arguments in this are rational; some are not. It will be some time before it is all sorted out. All we know for sure is, as far as the Peace Bridge is concerned, Buffalo is going to be better off than it was.

Why this gambling joint is a public works project

Which cannot be said for the casino. A few developers, like Carl Paladino, will scarf up some money out of it, and for a brief time construction workers will have jobs, but after that it will be all a loss for the city in every regard: economic, social, traffic, you name it.

You’re maybe thinking that a gambling joint isn’t a public works project, but this one is. The public doesn’t get any benefit from the project, but the public is going to pay a great deal to make it happen and, because Buffalo is a city on the fiscal edge, that money is of necessity going to be diverted from public works projects that would really serve the public interest.

The Senecas are planning on 2,500 cars a day; if they do well, there will be more cars than that. No ramps or roads in that area can handle 2,500 cars a day, so ramps will have to be built and roads will have to be reconfigured. They’ll need power and water connections, they’ll need to cut through some city streets and block off others. We already know that the casino will take business away from local businesses and concomitantly drain the city’s and country’s sales tax revenues. In addition, we’ll have all these public works costs, which would cost far more than the city’s meager cut of the slot drop will cover.

Buffalo’s city economy is zero-sum. There is no fat. Any allocation of resources to one place means those resources are not going elsewhere, so all the public works dollars going into the gambling joint are dollars that will not go into repairing and maintaining city property elsewhere, or to schools or to police and fire department salaries or to any other city service you can name.

The lawsuits in state and federal court are challenging the casino on various legal grounds. They go to the process by which the land in downtown Buffalo was given to a sovereign nation, thereby removing everyone on it from the protection of New York State laws. They go to the failure of all the officials and agencies involved to require the developers to undertake environmental impact studies, which the law says are necessary to ensure that communities won’t be harmed more than they are helped by major development projects. Since whoever loses in either of these cases will certainly appeal, it will be some time before we know if the courts are going to insist that everyone involved in this process obey the law—as New York State Supreme Court Judge Eugene Fahey forced the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority to do six years ago.

City Hall could save us, if it felt like it

Lawsuits are slow. You may get justice in the courts, but you’ve got to wait for it. But Buffalo’s city officials have the power to save us right now, long before the lawsuits work their way through the state and federal judiciary.

None of the necessary public works activity can happen if the mayor and Common Council refuse to be complicit in it. They can refuse to issue the developers the easements they need to do any of this. They can say, “No, we won’t let you build new roads, we won’t let you chop up or block off city streets, we won’t let you lay new power lines or tap into our water lines” and so many other things the builders need and our elected officials control. If they stand up and do that, nothing is going to happen on the Seneca sovereign property adjacent to the Cobblestone District and near the waterfront. Instead, the city could develop normally and rationally, the way lower Manhattan did after Robert Moses’ lunatic Lower Manhattan Expressway was blocked and sanity reintroduced itself to New York City’s planning process.

You know who your Common Council representative is. Give him or her a call and make a suggestion about saving the city. Byron Brown’s office number is 851-4841. Give him a call. Tell him what you think. Maybe he’ll listen. They can all do the right thing for us, if they want to.

Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture at UB. He edits the web journal BuffaloReport.com and is a member of the Citizens for a Better Buffalo steering committee. For more of his articles on the Buffalo casino, as well as links to other reports and documents, visit the Citizens for a Better Buffalo Web site: http://betterbuffalo.com.