The Overdue Promise of Cashless Thruway Tolls

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For the balance of this column, let us assume that the New York State Thruway is a roadway for which exorbitant tolls remain necessary. Let us agree, for the sake of argument, that it is somehow acceptable to pay just under $20 to travel on an expressway from Transit Road to Yonkers Raceway. Entre nous, let’s concede that there is an especial joy in, say, driving 15 miles perhour under the posted speed limit as one truck takes five miles’ worth of roadway to overtake another, or how the rest areas inexplicably and unremorsefully shelter the only remaining Roy Rogers franchises in the known universe—detritus from a bygone era; the Fish that Saved Pittsburgh of fast food franchises. Face it—that “Fixin’s Bar” is so 1978. 

Let’s forget, for a moment, that the Thruway should have been expanded to three lanes in each direction many moons ago, and how its speed limit should really be 70, if we’re being honest. 

Instead, let’s discuss cashless tolling. 

According to a source in the know, it would take about 24 months to completely transform the entire Thruway to cashless tolling. That means ripping down toll booths at every exit from Harriman to Ripley and replacing them with overhead transponder readers and cameras set up to snap license plates at high speeds. It is 2017, and the Thruway still employs human beings—paid in actual American money—to stand in a booth literally to operate an automated ticket dispenser for you, and hand you the toll ticket. 

Ever watch the Sopranos? That show came out in 1999. During its opening titles, Tony enters the NJ Turnpike and is seen retrieving his own toll ticket from an automated dispenser. Again: New York believes that you need an actual, living person to stand in a booth and execute that complicated endeavor for you. There is no way to make that up. Even Massachusetts now has cashless tolls along its Turnpike

I don’t like to see people lose a job, but “ticket dispenser operator” is about as necessary for today’s Thruway Authority as “blacksmith” or “milliner”. 

It was announced recently that the Grand Island tolls would switch to a cashless system. Downstate, New York has already implemented this at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and the RFK / Triboro Bridge. Cashless tolls snap a picture of your license plate and/or read your EZ-Pass transponder as you continue to travel at regular highway speeds. The toll plaza bottlenecks and backups are eliminated, and the entire process is seamless. If you don’t have a transponder, you are billed by mail. It has been thus on Toronto’s 407 since the day it was built. 

The Buffalo market is special for the Thruway. Not Rochester, Utica, nor Syracuse get a special toll-free local area of the Thruway, but we do. That means, however, that through traffic has to pay up at Williamsville and/or Lackawanna. Neither of these toll barriers allow for any through passage at highway speeds—all traffic must stop or slow. Traveling west through the Williamsville toll, you have maybe two EZ-Pass only lanes—one at the extreme right, and another at the extreme left. 18-wheelers are allowed to use them both. 

There has been talk in the past of extending the “free” zone of the Thruway west to include the Transit Road exit 49, but people between Clarence and Pembroke balked at the concomitent movement of noise and pollution; this despite the fact that one option was to put the plaza adjacent to a quarry which regularly uses dynamite. 

At long last, someone is talking about bringing the Thruway kicking and screaming into the 21st century, with cashless tolling to eliminate the backups in Williamsville and Lackawanna. An initiative led by Congressman Brian Higgins would use money earmarked for toll plaza “improvements” and instead replace them with overhead transponder readers and high-speed cameras. New York’s “tolls by mail” infrastructure is already in place. Even if the change was just applied to the barriers that bookend Buffalo’s free Thruway section, it wouldn’t take much to add cameras at every other toll plaza to bill motorists by mail.

But switching just Williamsville and Lackawanna is stupid. Do it all, and do it right. Imagine the time and fuel savings—not to mention drop in pollution—by eliminating idling vehicles and plaza backups from the Thruway equation.  

Don’t like the transponder system or bill by mail? No worries—here’s an alternative. In 2012, I wrote, “The 1950s Called: They Want Their Toll Road Back”, where I suggested that cashless tolling could be accomplished quite easily using the model used elsewhere in the world, 

If tolls are to be maintained, the Thruway could take a hint from Toronto’s 407 and make toll collection something that’s done at highway speeds. However, that’s costly, and cars without a transponder pay an extra fee for the license-plate-photograph privilege. Instead, many European countries share the cost burden of highway maintenance through sales of stickers.

For tourists, we could follow the Austrian model where [€9] buys you 10 days of unlimited travel on that country’s highways. Another possibility would be to follow the Swiss model, where SFr 40 buys you a year’s worth of travel on that country’s impeccably maintained Autobahnen, Autostrade, and Autoroutes.

Police spot checks look for scofflaws. If caught without a vignette, the Swiss charge you a SFr 200 fine, plus the cost of a vignette. The Austrians will fine you €120 on the spot.  Given that it now costs almost $20 to get from the Major Deegan to the PA line, a $10 sticker for 10 days’ worth of highway travel is a bargain. So is $40 for the entire year. Vignettes could be sold at welcome centers entering New York or leaving bordering states. They could be sold online, in advance, or, as they are in Hungary, even via cell phone text message. No more toll barriers, no more toll collectors.

In 2013, I found it downright unconscionable that there was no progress being made to introduce cashless tolling of some form on the Thruway, adding,

The reason why the Thruway Authority will never, ever change the toll plazas in Williamsville and Lackawanna has to do with the fact that western New York is a nonentity. No one from Albany needs to pass through here on their way to Erie, and so it doesn’t really matter all that much whether you’re sitting in unnecessary traffic at Ripley, Lackawanna, or Williamsville on the I-90.

It’s 2013 and completely unacceptable that we haven’t made use of the not-very-advanced technology that is available to permit EZ-Pass holders fly by the toll plaza at highway speeds. No EZ-Pass, you can pay cash at a booth located off the main road, like they do in Florida…There is no accountability, so there is no motivation or impetus to improve service to Thruway consumers. It is more evidence of the dictatorship of the bureaucracy under which we live in New York.

A bit fatalistic, to be sure, but accurate. But some local politicians were pretty stupid when it came to the Williamsville barrier, such as the time Clarence’s then-supervisor voted against a resolution in favor of moving the barrier east because it would somehow ruin business along Transit Road. I brought up cashless tolling again in 2014, effectively yelling at clouds like Grandpa Simpson. If people still insist that moving to an all-cashless system on the Thruway is somehow too complicated, then do what Florida has done for at least a decade.

Cashless tolling is an idea that is long overdue. The New York State Thruway is ruled by a bureaucracy that is extraordinarily resistant to change, clinging to an outmoded way of doing business like barnacles to a hull.

Toll barriers are to driving what Roy Rogers is to fast food: a mediocre anachronism. 

Chris Collins Meets Constituent Renee Sutton

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Back in March, Representative Chris Collins (NY-27) appeared on a CNN town hall style show hosted by Van Jones when average citizen Renee Sutton confronted him about his lack of town hall meetings here in WNY, and his reluctance to meet with constituents generally. 

Although Collins claimed that he didn’t see the value in town hall meetings with constituents, (a topic I broached in this piece in The Public back in March), he promised to meet with Sutton at some point. That meeting happened last week. In a Facebook post last Friday, Sutton relayed what happened

So, yesterday I finally got my meeting with Rep. Chris Collins. He agreed to meet with me in March, after I asked him on CNN’s The Messy Truth with Van Jones why he was willing to appear on the show but refused to meet with his actual constituents in a town hall setting. That brief interaction on CNN ended with him approaching me in the audience, shaking my hand, giving me his business card (his real business card, with his personal email, cell phone number and everything) and inviting me to contact him anytime to get our future meeting set up. After four months of intermittent attempts to schedule the meeting, I was contacted with very short notice and told that he would be free and in Canandaigua. I contacted Michelle [Schoeneman, candidate for Erie County Legislature), in hope that she could join me, but life conspired to prevent it, and I went solo. 

The meeting was held in a conference room at the Ontario County Office Building in Canandaigua, and Collins was accompanied by two male aides, one of whom stayed the entire meeting while the other kept running in and out of the room. Collins came in, shook my hand, and took the seat across from me. I tried a little “break the ice” small talk, but he wasn’t interested. His affect from the start was cold and resentful, and the tone of the meeting was immediately adversarial. 

The cameras are off, the audience is gone, and the real Chris Collins showed up. 

During the first 15 minutes of the meeting we discussed the AHCA and the premature termination of grant funding for teenage pregnancy programs. The AHCA conversation went nowhere. When he commented that the individual mandate and taxes related to Obamacare were job killers, I smilingly responded something to the effect of “yet somehow the president managed to add one million jobs since January.” He visibly did not appreciate that comment, and shot me down with a comment about the medical device tax never having been implemented anyway and a snide, “you didn’t know that, did you?”

Weird, because Collins has been so vocal about that medical device tax, you’d have thought it had not only been implemented but had been at a rate of 200 percent. 

I moved on to teenage pregnancy prevention issue. This conversation started with me prefacing that, although we are probably on opposite sides of the reproductive rights issue, this might be an issue where we have some common ground. He responded that if I believed in partial birth abortion which equals murdering babies, then we most certainly were on opposite sides.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who said anything about “partial birth abortion”? 

I told him that I understand why pro-choice activists don’t agree to any erosion of abortion rights fearing it led to the elimination of ALL abortion rights, but that my personal convictions around reproductive rights led my advocacy for legal, accessible first trimester abortion that was subject to no further regulation than any medical procedure would be. Collins actually agreed. I was so surprised that I repeated, “So you agree that abortion in the first trimester should be legal and accessible?”, and he replied, “yes.”

LOL RINO. 

This was such a shocker to me that a Republican congressman was expressing support for abortion rights, any abortion rights, that I just said something along the lines of not expecting that to be an area of common ground, but still glad that we had identified at least the one! I then pivoted to the teenage pregnancy prevention funding, and his first response was that it was an HHS issue, so it wasn’t in his purview to fix, although he agreed it was a worthwhile endeavor to support. I responded that it was my expectation that as a congressman it was in his purview to advocate for his constituents and lobby the executive branch for restoration of the funding. He agreed, and asked me to send him a list of providers in the 27th who were recipients of the funding. I thanked him sincerely, and commented again that it was great that there were things we agreed on. 

So, that exchange was actually—on its face—somewhat productive. Collins agreed that first trimester abortion should remain safe and legal, and agreed to look into reinstating teenage pregnancy prevention program funding through HHS. 

Heartened by this initial success but knowing that time was running out on the meeting, I said that I next wanted to talk about Charlottesville and the tenor of political discourse since the election. BOOM: the affect that was cold and resentful turned to outright hostile and demeaning. The next ten minutes felt like some kind of crazy fever dream, and Collins did almost all of the talking, getting increasingly heated as he did so. It was just so clear that I became a target for all of his frustration and anger over the billboards and the protests and the letters to the editor. There were A LOT of things said, so for brevity’s sake I need to dispense with the narrative and just share some bullet points:

Regardless of your political persuasion, there is no doubt that political discourse has been dismal. There are certainly culprits on both sides (Louise Mensch and Claude Taylor stand out as rhetorical bullshitters, and the so-called “antifa” paramilitary-without-portfolio does no Trump opponent any favors), but the president of the United States has revealed himself to be the troll-in-chief, seemingly existing to do whatever is best guaranteed to piss off liberals. That seems to be the sum total of Trumpism. But Charlottesville—that was the work-product of only one side

What happened in Charlottesville was quite simple: The “Unite the Right” rally was an effort to bring together Trumpist trolls, the Klan, various and sundry Nazi wannabes, and other white nationalist/identitarian groups. There was a very thinly veiled pretext at play: to oppose any effort to remove a statue to Robert E. Lee or to rename the plaza where it sits. But really what it amounted to was an orgy of hatred and violence fueled by ignorant, phony white resentment. 

Confederate monuments and statues exist to commemorate acts of high treason and white supremacist chattel slavery. If you doubt this, go and read the constitution of the Confederacy, especially Article IV and Article I § 9. Then go and read the “Cornerstone Speech” that the CSA’s first and only vice president, Alexander Stephens, gave in 1861: “Our new government is founded upon exactly [this] idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Back to Sutton’s meeting with Collins, who seemed triggered by mention of Charlottesville. 

  • He stated that he is against white supremacists and the KKK, but supported First Amendment rights.  

This is all fine, but note the invocation of the First Amendment. We’ll come back to it. 

  • Collins repeatedly referenced the protests against himself and the president. He said that “you guys haven’t stopped marching around with your signs since the election.” I replied that we were exercising our First Amendment rights and that I was among those protesting his agenda and carrying signs. He replied, “yeah, you and your sign filled with lies.”

What about First Amendment rights? “Marching around” with political “signs” is among the most strongly protected types of speech in existence. It doesn’t matter whether he thinks the signs contain “lies”. All the more reason, frankly, for this representative of the people to meet with people and listen to them—especially the ones with whom he has disagreements. 

  • He said that “you guys and your protests” are the reason why he now has cameras outside all of his offices. He also accused us of drawing chalk outlines on the sidewalk outside his house in efforts to threaten and intimidate him, so I was a hypocrite for wanting civility in our political discourse.

Chris Collins is opposed to Obamacare, voted for Trumpcare, and is opposed to universal health coverage. People die from lack of care—or the inability to pay for it. Maybe he could listen to people who, unlike him, are not millionaires and have issues with the affordability of not just healthcare but health insurance. Chris Collins has offered exactly zero reasonable alternatives to Obamacare in order to expand affordable health insurance to more Americans. All he’s done is vote to repeal Obamacare dozens of times, only to fail miserably to actually repeal it when actually given the chance. To call that failure is an insult to failure. 

  • He said that the ethics accusations were lies and fake news perpetuated by “you guys.”

Weird, that. The Buffalo News reports that the ethics investigation has taken a “more serious” turn just this week. The Office of Congressional Ethics referred the matter of Collins’s stock trades in an Australian penny stock to the House Committee on Ethics. I guess it’s more than just “fake news”. 

  • He said that the press attacked him for calling Sheldon Silver the antichrist and evil, and that he didn’t even know Silver was Jewish. I said that I didn’t think characterizing political opponents that way was helpful and that I expected my elected officials to model better behavior than that. 

My goodness, Collins’s run-in with Sheldon Silver was years ago. Interesting he’d bring that up, unprovoked, within this context. Sutton is exactly right that maybe politicians referring to other politicians as evil devils isn’t productive. Or…

  • He said that I was a hypocrite who voted for “that lying, cheating scumbag Hillary Clinton.” I responded to him that invective like that was unnecessary and harmful, and belied his interest in unifying Americans. 

I would have asked Collins how he reconciles his opposition to “lying, cheating scumbags” with his full and deep-throated support for Donald Trump

The last thing I said to him was, after trying to make the case for being more accessible to all his constituents, “How can you really represent me if you won’t listen to me?”

Here’s the kicker: 

His response was delivered with utter contempt (and this is verbatim), “I represent the 72% of people who voted for me. You didn’t vote for me.”

First of all, Chris Collins earned only 67 percent of the vote in 2016; not 72 percent. I mean, when you win by two thirds, what’s with the compulsion to inflate? 

Secondly, there are 477,200 registered voters in NY-27.  Collins received 220,885 votes. That amounts to 46 percent of eligible, registered voters. According to Collins’s own logic and math, he truly only represents the 46 percent of eligible voters who bothered to turn out and vote for him. This means that fully 54 percent of the eligible voters in NY-27 are unrepresented. Not only that, but the total population is 713,175. So, if Collins only represents the people who voted for him, it stands to reason that only 30 percent of the residents in NY-27 enjoy Congressional representation. Does this mean he only gets paid 30 percent of his Congressional salary? Or that he is entitled only to 30 percent of the federal health, pension, and other fringe benefits he might otherwise receive? 

For Collins to tell a constituent that he doesn’t represent anyone who didn’t vote for him is indicative of two things: 1. He is unfit to serve anyone; and 2. He is an arrogant personage whose continued involvement in WNY politics soils all of us. 

Immediately after that utterance, his one aide popped into the room and said that he needed to leave the meeting. Collins got up from the table, and walked out of the room without a backward glance. No hand shake, no thank you. His other aide asked if I would be following up with the list of providers receiving the teenage pregnancy prevention funding. I was still so stunned that I couldn’t do any more than look up and nod at him. He left the room, and I stayed to jot down some quick notes and quotes I didn’t want to forget, and then I biked home … As soon as I got home, I called Michelle. The first words out of my mouth were, “We are really getting to him.” 

“We” being the “Citizens Against Collins” group that has protested Collins at his various offices and raised money to buy billboard space to shame him for his refusal to hold public meetings. 

Before the meeting, I was really excited to have this opportunity to just exchange some ideas and possibly find some common ground with Collins. I truly believed that we were just two Americans who love our country but who have different ideas about how to solve problems, and that his bluster and invective against folks more liberal than he were more for the benefit of the cameras and his base. At best, I hoped that my friendly demeanor and respectful, reasonable arguments would telegraph to him that I saw his humanity and that, in turn, he would see mine. I really thought, on the basis of our shared American values, I could convince him that our resistance represents political engagement that benefits our Republic and was worthy of his applause, not his condemnation. At worst, I thought it would be a meaningless half hour in which my concerns would be answered with measured political doublespeak and condescending civility. Instead, my congressman told me that he will not represent me because I didn’t vote for him. My congressman called me a liar and hypocrite who voted for a scumbag. Never in a million years did I think I would be treated with the insulting hostility and contempt that I experienced. I wasn’t treated like a human being, much less a constituent. I was treated like an enemy, and it saddens me that that is the state of the nation today. 

Welcome to Collins country. “Collins for our Future”—a future of rude, arrogant, entitled multi-millionaires. 

As crappy as it felt to be on the receiving end of that much hostility, I am proud of the way I behaved and unapologetic for my idealism. Yes, it is clear to me now that my civility was wasted on Chris Collins, but it wasn’t a waste to me. Chris Collins supports a president and policies that run counter to fundamental American values and that will hurt his constituents and lead to the destruction of our environment. Collins’s behavior and hateful rhetoric yesterday were unprofessional, unbecoming, and incompatible with representative democracy. For those reasons I will work hard to ensure his defeat in 2018 and 45’s in 2020. But I will do so modeling the behavior and rhetoric I want to see from others, eschewing hateful and divisive speech and personal attacks. I hope you all will join me. To the fair-minded people we hope to convince, our integrity and decency will be as powerful a source of persuasion as our reasoned arguments. And when we win, we will have the satisfaction of knowing we did it in the sunshine, and not the gutter.

The Public reached out to Collins’s office Monday morning. Sutton’s version of events was copied and pasted, and these three questions asked: 

1. Is Sutton’s account of the meeting substantially accurate?

2. If there are inaccuracies, can you please identify them and offer the Congressman’s account?

3. Can the Congressman please explain or elaborate on this statement, which Sutton says she is quoting verbatim: “I represent the 72% of people who voted for me. You didn’t vote for me.”

Neither Collins nor anyone from his office responded. 

Paladino’s True Colors

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Over the weekend, a large group consisting of neo-nazis, Klansmen, and other “alt-right” white nationalists converged on Charlottesville, Virginia ostensibly to protest the possible removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Lee was the general of an army fighting for a country that had betrayed and seceded from the United States to preserve the right to buy and sell black people as chattel. Query whether we should replace confederate statues with ones honoring the victims of its inhuman feudal ethos. (Note: I will not capitalize the word “nazi”. It’s not a mistake.)

As one might expect, people came to the college town to launch counter protests against the nazis. These weren’t antifa black bloc rioters smashing Starbucks’ windows because capitalism is at the root of racist fascism, and to smash one is to smash it all; but regular people who were disgusted that their town had become a magnet for nazis.

When it becomes wrong to protest nazis, then we’ll know that political correctness has, indeed, run amok. 

It all culminated when a 20 year-old nazi from Ohio adopted the means and method popularized by ISIS-inspired jihadist terrorists in France and the UK – he rammed his Dodge Charger into a crowd of peaceful counterprotesters, then backed it up and rammed over some more. The nazi motorist murdered a woman – a 32 year-old paralegal named Heather Hayer, and injured over a dozen more. The nazi who murdered her stands charged with second-degree murder. This representative of the master race hasn’t the means to afford his own lawyer, so he must rely on the state to fund one for him. The public defender’s office was conflicted out because of personal ties to other victims of the nazi’s ISIS-inspired attack. 

Charlottesville is home to the University of Virginia, a school that hipster nazi Richard Spencer attended. Spencer befriended Trump adviser Stephen Miller when they both attended Duke University about a decade ago. 

In the aftermath of what had transpired in Charlottesville, the Public and I reminded Buffalonians of our own white nationalists here in our region. 

My March 14th article discussed an email that local elected school board official Carl Paladino had sent, which contained this image: 

I wrote at the time, “Carl Paladino, an elected school official, thinks murder is funny.

In the wake of the murder of Heather Hayer, who was killed by a nazi plowing his vehicle through a group of protesters, I’d be wholly unsurprised to see Paladino express his white nationalist glee at the news. 

On Monday, Carl Paladino posted something to his public Facebook page. He likely thinks it’s a funny joke and all us extreme leftists should lighten up and tolerate racist jokes like we tolerate things like immigration and multiculturalism, but in the wake of the fashy haircut hipster citronella fascists’ march ‘n murder in Charlottesville, it is unbelievably tone-deaf. 

In Michigan, Carl quips, a guy with 100 guns and 100,000 rounds of ammunition would be called, “the last white guy still living in Detroit“. Because Detroit, like the Buffalo school district Paladino oversees, is predominately African-American. That is the punch line to that part of the joke: a white guy in Detroit would need that much firepower because of all the blacks. We know this because of the use of the adjective, “white”. 

It makes sense to pause here as a reminder that white nationalist “pride” is comically weak stuff. If you’re white, it’s nothing more than an accident of birth – it’s not an achievement, or the result of any effort. If all you have to be proud of is your whiteness, maybe it’s time to accomplish something meaningful with your life. If all you have to be proud of is your whiteness, you’re not proud of anything at all. 

Carl Paladino swears up and down to all and sundry that he’s not racist – you’re racist. He controlled a majority on the Buffalo school board for two years, and his only achievement was to worsen the dysfunctional circus atmosphere there. Hey, at least he has “being white” to be proud of. He is part of a board that oversees a school district as diverse as, e.g., Detroit, and he jokes that this sort of ethnic or racial diversity is something against which white people need to arm themselves.

Carl Paladino has established time and again the myriad ways in which he disqualifies himself from – and is unfit to – oversee any school district, much less one whose kids overwhelmingly don’t look like his own. His racism, veiled thinly if at all, is something that rational, fair-minded people need to reject and shun. If anyone needs to see Paladino’s attitudes towards black Americans, it’s Mary Ellen Elia, who is now deliberating what to do with Paladino vis-a-vis the Buffalo school board. 

None of this is new. 

March 2010: Paladino’s racist and pornographic emails
October 2012: Paladino denies he’s a birther, but is birther. 
August 2014: Paladino’s homophobic reaction to a 419 scam letter
February 2015: Paladino rejects civil rights assessment of Buffalo schools. 
March 2015: Paladino threatens school board “sisterhood” with libel suit (which never came)
July 2015: Paladino demeans “damn Asians” at UB. 
July 2015: Paladino offers fake apology to “damn Asians”
July 2015: Paladino’s supporters: hey, he could have said, “damn Ukrainians”. 
July 2015: Paladino defends Joe Mascia’s n-word outburst
July 2015: Sandy Beach calls Paladino out on Joe Mascia
August 2015: Paladino digs a deeper hole on Shredd & Ragan. 
August 2016: Paladino claims Obama is Muslim. 
December 2016: Paladino wishes President Obama dead, likens the First Lady to a Zimbabwean gorilla. 

Paladino says he wants to run for governor again. His 2010 effort was torpedoed, in part, by the revelation of private racist and pornographic emails that he had sent to friends of his. Any potential future effort must be thwarted by his own public pronouncements. 

The Ballad of Niagara’s Black Sewage Plume

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Last weekend, the Niagara Falls water department released some sort of fetid, black effluent into the Niagara River near the Falls. The Buffalo News referred to it as a “Black Sewage Plume”, which sounds like it should be a character in a song.

In the olden days, someone would have written “The Ballad of the Black Sewage Plume” by now. When you sing or recite this – whether out loud or in your head – consider it in the manner of Roger Miller singing about Robin Hood and Little John in the 1973 Disney version of Robin Hood. 

Down below the cataracts,
up in Niagara Falls,
People started worrying
and placing lots of calls

They called the cops and rangers,
their hearts were filled with doom
from witnessing Niagara Falls’
Black Sewage Plume

The sewage oozed and stank
and the tourists got upset.
They watched it as it blanketed
Niagara’s riverbank

From all around the world
People came to see the flumes,
and really didn’t want to see the
Black Sewage Plume.

Nobody in government  
knew about the botheration, 
so the water board explained 
that it was sediment filtration

The state issued a permit
for discharge that was brackish, 
but no one had permitted them
to turn the water blackish. 

The water board had done this
for a variety of reasons, 
but never had they done it
at the peak of tourist season

The black blob grew for hours
and continued through the night
and the most disturbing images
arose from helicopter flights. 

The matter turned political, 
the mayor commenced investigations, 
the Niagara County Legislature
demanding instant terminations.

It took about a week
for all the sludge to go away. 
The tourists were now free
to all enjoy Niagara’s spray.

There ain’t no need to holler
and there ain’t no need to fume. 
Just raise a glass and celebrate the
Black Sewage Plume.