Next Exit: OTB and Nate Benson becomes Legend

The Western Regional OTB voted yesterday to offer its top job to Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown. Brown, who has been mayor since 2006, recently won an unprecedented fifth term to an office he clearly doesn’t want. India Walton, by contrast, who won the Democratic primary and nomination, obviously did want the job and one can only presume how she would have navigated the city’s current Brown-induced fiscal crisis and engaged with city leadership and the community-at-large to work out ways to solve it.

Instead, for the last year or so, we have had Byron Brown giving himself whiplash while looking frantically around for a lucrative way out of City Hall. Buffalo State fell through, there was no path for him to replace Brian Higgins, a return to Albany would be a demotion, so here we are, with Mayor Brown looking to be the head of the gambling commission.

For all his faults, former City deputy mayor and agent prokakateur Steve Casey was the last guy to take the job of Mayor seriously. He may have been a pretty scummy political operative, but he ran the city’s bureaucracy with an iron fist, and his oversight of (what is now a punchline) CityStat at least introduced to Buffalo the idea of accountability and metrics in city government.

The hope is that Brown’s departure from a job to which he is no longer attracted will eventually land the city with a mayor who actually cares about lurching City Hall into the 21st century both literally and figuratively. Someone who can build on what makes Buffalo great and leave behind our myriad failures, our obsession with static nostalgia, and our attraction to mediocrity.

The patronage free-for-all with the overarching motto being “don’t kill the job” has sort of got to go.

But this isn’t really a post about Byron Brown’s departure or the failures of city government and politics.

This is a post about political reporting and the importance of listening.

Buffalo is a small TV market. We have a handful of local news teams that are all pretty decent, but every once in a while a person or team rise to the top. Two very important interviewing skills are preparedness and listening carefully to an interviewee’s answers. You may have a checklist of possible questions or topics, but if you’re not listening to the person answering questions obeying your list instead, you’re going to miss opportunities to be excellent.

On Thursday, the OTB board went into executive session for hours, which meant that reporters were left waiting around. After the board returned to public session and voted to offer a job to Mayor Brown, most of them got out of there, except for the board member from Niagara County, Elliott Winter. WGRZ’s Dave McKinley and Nate Benson double-teamed this guy. McKinley asked Winter to explain how Brown is uniquely qualified to run the OTB. Winter responded that Brown had 18 years of experience overseeing 3,000 employees with a budget of over $600 million – the City of Buffalo.

Good question, good answer.

Nate Benson, wearing his trademark tweed newsboy hat, was standing behind Winter. McKinley’s iPhone caught him asking a question so perfect in substance and timing that one can only conclude that Benson woke up Thursday deciding to become a legend. Benson asked,

“[Brown] will be leaving his post with a $50 – $60 million budget deficit. Is that a concern?”

You can at this point see Winter’s soul leave his body, grab its bindle, thrust its thumb out by the side of the road, holding a sign reading, “California or Bust”.

He meekly shakes his head and says he has no further comment.

The video is breathtaking in its simplicity and beauty:

And that’s the key, really. You can talk about Brown’s vast experience running a massive city operation, and his “executive experience,” so to speak, but what is the net result of that 18 years of experience? A massive deficit, plugged with one-shot gimmickry not unlike the county crisis of the mid-aughts. Joel Giambra and Byron Brown were shrewd at playing the political game and getting ahead. Once in office, though, they blew it.

Kudos to Nate Benson, who has become one of Buffalo’s best and brightest reporters.