Month: December 2011

The Constitution. Let’s Follow It.

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Title X, Subtitle D of the National Defense Authorization Act is neither well-considered, nor do I think it’s Constitutional – even foreigners on American soil are entitled to basic Constitutional protections.

If the government uncovers an al Qaeda cell that plotting some attack on US citizens, it already has myriad tools at its disposal to detain and try the accused.

And that’s the key here – the NDAA doesn’t really call for trial. Indefinite detention and interrogation of people on American soil is a complete abrogation of the Constitution that ought not stand (given an apolitical Supreme Court).  I’m not one to jump on the “police state” bandwagon, because I’ve had the experience of actually spending extended periods of time living in one. But giving the military and police agencies the power to indefinitely detain people based on mere accusations and suspicions brings us ever-closer to an America where people are detained arbitrarily and capriciously based on denunciations and evidence which may not be adequate to convict someone in military or civilian court.

A decade of paranoia and a lousy economy aren’t making anyone any freer, and codifying the indefinite pretrial incarceration of enemy combatants on de jure American soil is contrary to our national interests.  The full text of the provisions in question is after the jump. Read more

A Century of Bad Planning Illustrated

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Mark Byrnes, a former contributor to WNYMedia.net and current fellow at the Atlantic Cities and graduate student in publications design at the University of Baltimore posts this depressingly eye-opening article comparing the Buffalo of 1902 to the Buffalo of 2011.

It’s a stark depiction of failure and loss; failure to plan, failure to adapt, failure to lead, and loss of population, industry, and wealth.

The Buffalo conundrum illustrated – downtown is unattractive because of all the people and businesses that have left; but people and businesses don’t come downtown because of how unattractive it is.

The problem is how downtown development has taken the path of least resistance when it comes to parking. Businesses have demanded one spot for each commuter, and instead of expanding and modernizing its bank of public parking structures in a planned, targeted, and aesthetically pleasing way, the city has permitted developers to just throw up a surface lot willy-nilly. Surface parking lots are the bane of downtown’s existence and should be disincentivized through a land value tax.


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The Cost of 9 IDAs in Buffalo-Niagara

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Assemblyman Sean Ryan (A-144) held a press conference yesterday to protest the way in which Industrial Development Agencies in Erie County do business. Specifically done in response to the Amherst IDA’s granting of an incentive package to facilitate Premier Liquor & Gourmet’s move from Kenmore to Amherst, Ryan issues three documents outlining the cost/benefit to running nine separate IDAs in Erie and Niagara Counties. By comparison, New York City has only one IDA.

This chart outlines the cost of these tax breaks, and what other things they might have bought, and then compares the annual IDA tax subsidies that are granted each year in New York State against the much-touted Regional Economic Council regional plans submitted and reported on in Albany last week:

IDA chart : Assemblyman Sean Ryanhttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/75676491/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-1cin0wzjammva2g84ts3//

Ryan avers that the IDAs have an incentive to remain open as separate entities, and to grant property and sales tax breaks even in cases where one WNY community is poaching from another – the fact that each announced IDA transaction results in a fee to the IDA itself.

IDA Report – Assemblyman Sean Ryanhttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/75676457/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-p407dtjcd99ij974twf//

Even more egregiously, if the IDA recipient business fails to meet its obligation to create jobs, there is no recourse or “clawback” provision. The common misconception is that IDA incentives exist to lure businesses to the area. Yet Ryan’s study reveals that, of all 71 incentive packages given by the IDAs in Erie and Niagara Counties in 2010, exactly one was to attract a business from out-of-state. The rest were for the expansion or intraregional relocation of existing businesses.

It’s high time the region started streamlining its business development and retention strategies in a coordinated, regional way. IDA incentives given to well-off local companies as a “freebie” with little to no return on investment, which oftentimes results in one WNY community poaching from another needs to stop. Assemblyman Ryan is on the right track here, and it echoes what Erie County Executive-elect Poloncarz was advocating during the last election cycle.


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Deep Interim Thought

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Why don’t any qualified people want the job of interim Erie County Comptroller? Is it the pay, the politics, or something altogether different? This isn’t the kind of job where you just insert some ex-politician or hack as a patronage “thank you”; it requires a genuine and deep understanding of government finance.

Suffice it to say that none of the names you may have been hearing are going anywhere near that job.


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Vote for the Central Terminal

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Seldom a recipient of millions of federal or state dollars for renovation, and being carefully preserved – literally – by a dedicated group of loving volunteers, the Central Terminal is competing against other local historical architectural marvels for a $10,000 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Please click here and vote – and vote often – for the Central Terminal to receive this much-needed grant. All of the properties competing against the Central Terminal have been recent recipients of large grants from government sources and private foundations. The gorgeous old railroad station, however, has not been so lucky.

They really need this money.

Brad Riter on WBEN Today

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Brad Riter is a radio talk show host who most recently hosted the afternoon drive slot on WECK 1230-AM before it switched to a music format in July.  He wrote one of our “Daily Five” about a week or so ago.

He’ll be filling in for Tom Bauerle today on WBEN 930-AM and 107.7-FM from 9 until 12. Brad’s a good guy who does good radio. Please check him out.


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Cars To a Tax-Free Main Street

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Inch by inch, block by block, the city of Buffalo is getting ready to correct what’s turned out to be a mistake that hastened downtown’s demise. The federal government has given the city a $15 million grant to return vehicular traffic to Main Street’s 500 block, approximately Mohawk to Huron – Lloyd‘s downtown corner to the Hyatt.  The 700 block has been done, and the 600 block is in the works.

Pedestrian zone in Delft, Holland

In my experience, most successful pedestrian-only shopping zones aren’t located along main thoroughfares; they’re instead made up of a jumble of side streets, creating what amounts to an outdoor pedestrian retail zone.  Simply removing cars from a main arterial street doesn’t seem to have worked, and the decline of downtown shopping that was hastened by Metro Rail construction disruption never had a chance to rebound.

Although hundreds of thousands of people come into downtown from all parts of WNY every day, it’s a retail wasteland at all times. It’s doubtful that there’s very much that can be done at this point to reverse that.

But as we plan for a reborn waterfront at Canal Side, which will soon expand onto the Aud block and other surrounding areas, if becoming a retail as well as cultural destination is desired, then creating a sales tax-free zone downtown would have a great stimulative effect. Part of the question is – how do you attract people to shop downtown merchants as opposed to the Niagara Falls outlets or the Walden Galleria – an 8.75% discount in the downtown core would probably be a great draw.

No, it’s not fair to merchants outside the zone. But life isn’t fair. Furthermore, most of the merchants in Buffalo and outside the zone serve the surrounding residents and will still be patronized out of sheer convenience. Furthermore, the influx of people and businesses attracted by what amounts to a Buffalo Special Economic Zone will ultimately help those businesses thrive, as well.

Main Street in the 50s

Development would still be subject to Buffalo’s zoning and planning bureaucracies, but the rules would be simplified and permits & approval would be harmonized and streamlined. Property taxes would be reduced or eliminated, depending on the parcel. However, properties would be assessed not based on what they are (e.g., empty lots), but on what their value ought rightly be if developed.

By turning the central business district into a tax-free special economic zone, you give people 8.75 reasons to do business and conduct commerce in downtown Buffalo over anywhere else. Creation of a waterfront district while ignoring the decline and blight of the rest of downtown seems to me to be counterintuitive.

By executing a plan such as this, zoning the waterfront districts, and having the ECHDC or state spend public money solely on the improvement and installation of necessary infrastructure, transfer of title for all parcels to one single entity to speed development, institution of a design and zoning plan that cannot be deviated from, and – most importantly – remediating the environmental nightmares under the soil throughout ECHDC’s mandated districts, we can then auction the parcels off to qualified buyers.

That is how downtowns revive organically – through private initiative and private money. Government can do its job and merely provide the private sector with the proper environment to do business and build. It doesn’t get faster, quicker, or cheaper than that.

Merely returning cars to Main Street isn’t going to return downtown to its former glory. A coordinated effort and plan to make downtown competitive and attractive to people and businesses is needed.


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Gingrich: Give Millionaires a Leg Up!

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The Palinist wing of the so-called “tea party” is just a front group for superwealthy conservatives. As further proof of that, their favored Presidential-candidate-of-the-month, Newt Gingrich, is proposing a reformation of the tax code to codify a lower marginal income tax rate on millionaires than on middle-class families earning $40 – 50,000.

It’s all part of the Republican Party’s war on the middle class, and the social safety net that Americans fought for throughout the course of the last century. A tax cut of this magnitude on the superwealthy would starve the federal government of revenue, resulting either in a fiscal crisis or massive cuts to programs like Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and other things on which people depend when they are elderly or in the midst of a personal financial crisis.

It’s part of an ideology that treats any public expenditure as redistributionary socialism and represents a real danger that the country slips back to conditions extant during the times of the robber barons.

Right down to Gingrich blaming America’s underclass for being poor.

Right down to Gingrich’s support for an abolition of child labor laws.

No Quarter

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parkingFAIL

Image by Flickr user Buffalogeek at the AV Photo Daily group

I have no idea how these guys thought they could steal this much money from city meters and get away with it, especially given the huge discrepancy between what the pay & display meters were raking in versus these jerry-rigged old-fashioned meters.

Yet something tells me this is just the tip of a very corrupt iceberg, indeed.

Bagarozzo Complaint & Affidavithttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/75594404/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-2eo09mj7s6r0acydhc7y//

Charles Complaint & Affidavithttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/75594432/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-236d7pavno09l9i21pct//

All-American Muslim Nontroversy

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This past weekend, home improvement megachain Lowe’s caved in to pressure from some reactionary Christianist organization in Florida to pull its advertising from a new TLC series called “All-American Muslim.” The show is especially designed to show people that the overwhelmingly vast majority of American people of Muslim faith are perfectly normal, just like any other American person of different faiths. It’s a point that’s not only true, but truly important to get out there in the face of a growing right-wing Islamophobia / xenophobia.

The Florida Christianist group is the same one that boycotts Walt Disney World over Gay Day.

Anyone who has listened to WBEN’s troubled mulleted talkmeister Tom Bauerle at any point in the last few years knows what I mean. If you are aware of last year’s Park 51 nontroversy, or know the name “Pamela Geller,” you know what I’m talking about. In bad economic times, it’s easiest to blame it all on some enemy, like Hitler blamed Germany’s post-Versailles decline on “international Jewry”. Former right-wing Islamophobe Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has reformed himself and now devotes much time exposing these neofascists for what they are.

Yes, there are very bad Muslims in the world who want to kill you and your way of life. But that isn’t the basis for an indictment of an entire religion and all its adherents. There are many bad people out there, and if you live your life in fear of them, you’re not really living much of a life at all.

In the same weekend that Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich went out of his way to assail the Palestinian people of the former Ottoman Empire as “invented”, American ignorance of Islam is on full display with this Lowe’s nonsense.

Buzzfeed posted what it considers to be the 25 dumbest comments. Wading through them, you begin to lose all hope for America. When you realize that at least one or two people you know who consider themselves to be tea partiers think the same way, you realize how pervasive this ignorant xenophobia has become.  The Muslim families depicted on the TLC program are better Americans than, e.g., this guy:


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