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A Small Bridgehead

Peace Bridge plaza expansion opponents applaud GBNRTC decision

When the unanimous vote on the amended resolution addressing funding for the Peace Bridge Expansion Project was taken on Thursday, July 17 by the seven-member Greater Buffalo Niagara Regional Transportation Council, Alfred Coppola gave a restrained but victorious fist pump.

And the former New York State senator, Buffalo Common Council member, and long-time community activist wasn’t the only spectator who was pleased with this parliamentary outcome. A number of people from the neighborhood near the proposed bridge and truck-inspection plaza expansion, as well as representatives of perhaps a dozen community organizations, voiced their approval to each other.

Earlier, Coppola and several others had spoken vehemently, and sometimes passionately against the Public Bridge Authority’s plan for doubling the bridge’s capacity and expanding into largely residential areas nearby, citing anticipated harms to city residents’ health and the environment.

The resolution before the GBNRTC was itself an amendment to its long-range transportation plan, which looks ahead 30 years. The GBNRTC is charged by federal regulations with the responsibility to approve and coordinate the use of any federal transportation funding coming into Erie and Niagara Counties. Until recently, according to Timothy Trabold, a GBNRTC analyst in Buffalo, the plan treated the bridge project as a non-federally funded one, but the increasing prospect of federal monies, particularly earmarks from members of Western New York’s congressional delegation—up to $110 million in some estimates—called that assumption into question. In a briefing paper, the GBNRTC noted that “only projects that are consistent with the [council’s] transportation plan can be included in the plan” and that inclusion is necessary for federal funding to be used in this region.

When the proposed amendment to remedy this omission was read out before the vote last week, the text, which repeatedly referred to “the Peace Bridge Capacity Expansion Project,” met with voiced objections from audience members. At that point, Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster suggested substituting “border crossing” for this reference, and after a short discussion among the seven panel members, “border-crossing expansion capacity” was inserted as a substitute. Council chair Alan Taylor, of the New York State Department of Transportation, called it “a generic substitution.”

In a brief conversation after the vote, Dyster said he had intended to “clarify” language that was “antagonistic to other issues,” without specifying what those issues were. But in a later interview, Coppola was much more concrete about what he thought had been accomplished. “You have to follow the dollars,” he said. “If the first wording had been passed, politicians in Washington could have thought that there was a lot of support for the [Public Bridge] Authority’s plans.” Coppola argues that with the revised amendment, “the money won’t be tied to just the Peace Bridge. It’s now for any or all the border crossings from Lewiston to Buffalo.”

And it’s not hard to see why he and others were encouraged by what he calls both “a small symbolic” and a practical victory. It may be true that this vote isn’t much of a speed bump in the path of the Public Bridge Authority’s plans, but these plans have been paused recently because of environmental issues, giving opponents a little more hope for their efforts. And the vote last week may evince a slow-growing willingness among political and community leaders to consider alternatives.

Stay tuned.

george sax

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