Lonesome Joel

At its February 9 meeting, the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority, commonly referred to as “the control board,” voted to approve the deal for the sale of two blocks of Fulton Street that attorney Michael Powers brokered between Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown and the Seneca gambling operation.

Erie County Executive Joel Giambra moved to table the vote. He said they didn’t have nearly enough information about the impact of the sale on the city’s present financial situation, let alone its long-term effects on the city’s economy. He said there was no pressing need to finish the deal, so why not get fuller information and perhaps wait for resolution of the two court cases attempting to block the project.

He couldn’t get a second, so his motion to table died in the brief silence that the board’s chair, Brian Lipke, accorded it before moving on.

Wilmers comes out

After they’d talked for a while someone moved a microphone to a speakerphone in the center of the table. Board member Robert Wilmers, who apparently had been listening in from some remote location, said he was strongly opposed to a casino in Buffalo, that he’d looked at downtown casinos elsewhere and found they did the cities in which they were embedded more harm than good.

This was, to my knowledge, the first time M&T boss Robert Wilmers has come out publicly against the casino. People close to him have long said he was opposed to it but that he wouldn’t go public because it might annoy some M&T Bank customers.

Nothing he did Thursday was likely to annoy any of his pro-casino customers. His opinion and knowledge of harm elsewhere notwithstanding, Wilmers said there was a deal between the mayor and the Senecas, and getting into the middle of something like that wasn’t in the control board’s job description. The others board members at the table, save Giambra, seemed quite happy to go along with that.

It was a curious position to take, given the control board’s very broad powers and the fact that it had been put into place specifically to play adult supervisor to a city hall in deep trouble because of unwise and incompetent financial dealings. The legislation creating the control board seems to say this is exactly the sort of issue the board should be engaging. Instead, the board elected to play the Three Monkeys.

The mayor’s lawyer

Mayor Brown spoke for the deal, as did corporation counsel Alisa Lukasiewicz, who had previously made a sales pitch for it at the public hearing preceding the Common Council’s vote ratifying the deal. Buffalo attorney Anthony Colucci, Jr. asked her about the policy of getting only one assessment of the property’s value, and that one provided by an assessor hired by the Seneca Gaming Corporation, the buyer. That, she replied, was city policy. He asked her the same question a second time, apparently never previously having encountered a situation where the seller sells at a price the buyer’s assessor suggests. She gave the same answer and he gave up, shaking his head.

Giambra several times tried to get her to tell who was on the committee that approved the appraisal for the mayor’s office. She never did name all the names, though she talked around it a great deal. Mayor Brown tried to shut that line of questioning down by calling the question. Chairman Brian Lipke ignored Brown, so Giambra got to finish his questions, though he never got his answers.

Do these folks read?

The only member of the board to question Lukasiewicz about any details of the deal was attorney John J. Giardino, who accepted every one of her answers at face value. He never responded, “But that isn’t what the agreement says,” or “Where in the agreement does it say that?”

Nothing said by Giardino or by any member of the panel, in fact, gave any evidence that he or any of them had actually read and thought about the agreement itself.

Power, accountability and responsibility

When the vote came, only Giambra voted against the sale.

It may be that the others voted as they did because, in their collective wisdom, they really believed that anything the governor and the mayor and the Seneca Gaming Corporation all wanted was, by definition, beyond the control board’s legitimate area of inquiry.

That’s what some of them said. I didn’t believe it when I heard them say it up there on the auditorium stage at the downtown public library, and I don’t believe them now, a week later.

Nearly every member of the board who was present for that vote (Rev. Richard Stenhouse wasn’t there) is dependent on the governor, the mayor and/or the Senecas for business or influence or both. There are no economists or law professors from, say, UB or Canisius or Buffalo State—people with not only the necessary expertise, but with the kind of independence that is the reason for tenure.

I don’t know how much arm-twisting went on before that meeting, how many phone calls were made to which members by the governor, the mayor, the Senecas, but the meeting felt more like a group of people looking for a way to avoid making a politically sticky decision than an independent deliberative board examining a crucial city of Buffalo financial transaction soundly within its chartering legislation.

The Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority was set up to be an independent agency to supervise and guide the city’s financial affairs (because the city couldn’t do it itself), free of political influence, self-interest or any kind of direct, personal involvement in the city’s affairs. Is it? If last Thursday’s discussion and vote on the Fulton Street deal is any indication, the answer is no, at least not when it really counts.