Easy Money

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niagara falls

Photo by William Smyers via Flickr AV Photo Daily Group

Dearest Friend,

My name is Mr.Samuel Frank; I am the son of the former minister of finance for the Lord Mayor of the City of Niagara Falls (USA). I am contacting you for a business transfer of a huge sum of money from a deceased account. 

Though know that a transaction of this magnitude will make any one apprehensive and worried, but I am assuring you that every document that will bring about the success of this transaction will be provided by an attorney here in Niagara Falls, and all will be well at the end of the day.  I decided to contact you due to the urgency of this transaction.

My father, the deceased person who died; died in a lorry accident while he held a cheque for US$89 millions in his personal pocket. I retrieved the cheque. 

Since his death, I have fled to Lome, Togo, but cannot cash the cheque in my possession because of the different modalities of bankings here. Your American NSA is tracking my every move and mobile phone activities.  We cannot release the fund from this cheque unless someone applies for claim as the next-of-kin to the deceased as indicated in our banking guidelines.

Upon this discovery, I now seek your assistance to stand as a next of kin to the deceased, as all documentations will be carefully worked to make you the beneficiary to the funds $89,000,000 USD which will be released in your favor as the next of kin, Because after twenty days the money will be called back to the bank bond treasury as unclaimed bills and the money shared amongst the directors of the bank.

So it is on this note I decided to seek for whom his name shall be used as the next of kin/beneficiary to this funds rather than allow the bank directors to share this money amongst them at the end of the year. It may interest you to know that we have secured from the probate an order of mandamus to locate any of the deceased beneficiaries.

Please acknowledge receipt of this message in acceptance of our mutual business endeavor by furnishing me with the following information if you are interested.

Your Full Name:_____________________
Your Complete Address:________________________
Name of City of Residence:________________________
Date of Birth (Day/Month/Year):__________________
Your occupation:____________________________
Direct Telephone Number: ____________________
Mobile Number: ____________________________
Fax Number:___________________________________

For our personal contact and mutual trust in each other I shall be compensating you with 50% of the above amount on final conclusion of this project for your assistance with bank modalities, and the balance 50% shall be for me, because I intend to retire after the conclusion of this transaction.

If this proposal is acceptable by you, please endeavor to contact me immediately. Do not take undue advantage of the trust I have bestowed in you, I await your urgent mail now to my private email richardson_frank@msn.co.uk

Best Regards,

Mr.Samuel.Frank

Donny’s Style Manual #1: Non-Sequitur Tielman Invocation

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I have absolutely nothing negative whatsoever to say about Bernice Radle and Jason Wilson.  I have absolutely nothing negative to say about the Buffalo Young Preservationists, who are fighting for what they believe in, (even if I occasionally disagree with them). 

But because Donn Esmonde is an Ass™, I have negative things to say about his profile of them; to wit, does Tim Tielman pay Donny a stipend for mentions? WTF does Tielman have to do with anything to do with these two 20-somethings? Is that how he earns his living? Because as far as I can tell, he has no visible means of support, yet is able to not only afford a home and food, but even a bus. 

There are a lot of so-called activists in town who are opaque about what they actually do for money, but at least Radle and Wilson have proper jobs, on the books, and try to save buildings and neighborhoods in their spare time. Not only that, but they hold degrees and jobs that have something to do with planning and preservation. 

To my mind, Radle and Wilson have infinitely more educational and professional bona fides to talk about planning and preservation matters than the guy who runs a protectioneering racket. After all, neither Bernice nor Jason have taken developers to court, but excepted the ones who hire them as “consultants”. 

Protectioneering

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From the Buffalo News, with respect to a State DOT plan to get traffic moving better around the Peace Bridge and out of Front Park:

Maria Lehman, the state’s project manager for the Peace Bridge, said after the formal presentation that construction would take about a year, would cost $20 million to $22 million and would be paid for by state and federal funds.

She added that all the land involved in the project is owned by the DOT or the Thruway.

“The ingress and egress as it stands right now is very complicated,” Lehman said. “It looks like spaghetti. When you have a backup at the intersection and trucks are backed up, it’s very difficult to get in and out.”

After the presentation, Tim Tielman, executive director of the Campaign for Greater Buffalo, History, Architecture and Culture, questioned the need for the project.

“This situation has been there since the Thruway was constructed,” he said. “There’s been a 2 percent annual decline in traffic on the bridge since the ’60s. In the light of that, wouldn’t it be a better use of public funds to not do this at all?”

From January – May of 2013, 2.2 million vehicles crossed the Peace Bridge.  In 2003, 7.2 million vehicles crossed. Traffic eroded slowly  until the economic meltdown of 2009, when it dipped below 6 million. In 2010, it began to rebound, rising above 6 million. It increased again in 2011, and stayed essentially even in 2012. Chances are that traffic would increase if there was more capacity, quicker screening, more lanes. Backups at the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge during any peak time are utterly outrageous, and trucks can’t cross anywhere else.  Incidentally, the Q-L Bridge was built in 1962, which would have alleviated some of the traffic volume at the Peace Bridge. I don’t see why rejuvenating the park and making the traffic pattern less complicated shouldn’t happen. 

Looks like the State DOT didn’t pay its protection money. (Reference here and here)

Shared Border Management: They Choose Not To

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The United States Government claims that it just can’t implement any sort of shared border management with the Canadians along the length of the Niagara River. The American personnel from the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) allegedly cannot be permitted to work on the Canadian side of the border because of two factors – their firearms, and the requirement that American inspection personnel be able to stop, question, and fingerprint people who make a U-Turn before entering a US customs plaza that is on Canadian soil. Because liberty. 

The fact that Southern Ontario and the Greater Toronto Area has millions of people, and represents a tremendous market opportunity for western New York, we are stymied by Washington’s and Albany’s unwillingness / inability to help integrate the region.  We can’t get shared border management approved when the real discussion should be about a customs union with Canada. 

Two solutions have been proposed for this very simple solution to the problem of Buffalo’s West Side and Front Park – the first is the “embassy” solution, whereby an American entry inspection plaza in Fort Erie is legally considered to be United States soil, and the second is the “airport” solution, whereby travelers are simply pre-screened by American personnel authorized through treaty to operate on foreign soil. Pre-screening takes place in myriad Caribbean and Canadian airports, so that flights from those countries can arrive at US airports and be treated as domestic ones, easing the burden on CPB here at home, and widening the number of airports that can be served. 

You know what else? Look at this picture: 

That’s a sign in the Dublin airport.  Dublin, Ireland, European Union. There are CPB personnel in Ireland – across the Atlantic Ocean – who are there to pre-screen travelers to the United States. They do it in Toronto, too. 

 

The shared border management idea was first proposed and rejected under President George W. Bush and his Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff in 2007. The Obama Administration killed the idea in 2009 after briefly toying with it earlier that year. 

If we can accomplish this across the ocean, certainly we can get it done across the Niagara River? 

Donny Kissinger

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Only the severely deluded would agree that it’s a good idea for Buffalo and New York to enlist Donn Esmonde to mediate a high-stakes dispute between the State of New York and the governments of Canada and Ontario. What would we do without his measured tone and earnest concern? For starters, we’d probably have a bridge by now. After advocating for a signature crossing 13 years ago, Esmonde has spent his time since then criticizing everything about Peace Bridge expansion.

Peace Bridge Night - Old Lights

Actually, today’s column is one, long concern troll.

Esmonde assigns every stitch of blame for the current fight over the bureaucracy and management of the bridge to Governor Cuomo and the American members. As if it doesn’t take two sides to maintain an unreasonable squabble, and as if the Canadians hadn’t had their share of bad behavior – including One saying sexist things against a female American bridge official.

Back in 2000, Esmonde was on the side of the New Millenium Group and the people in Buffalo who demanded not a twin span, but a signature bridge – a bridge that would stand out and be not only functional, but beautiful. The Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority (PBA) had decided in 1994 that it would build a companion span. Twenty years later, there is still the one steel bridge, and the American plaza still looks like an unwelcoming toll plaza. I wonder how Esmonde feels, writing about the same topic he did in 1997? Yet after pimping the signature span in 2000, he went to denigrating waterfront champion Congressman Brian Higgins in 2008.

When a bridge fell into Lake Champlain, Albany undertook an audit and review of other bridges. It deemed the steel Peace Bridge structure unsafe.

Why did Donn Esmonde support the lawsuit to bring about a “signature bridge”, and now supports people threatening lawsuits to block construction of the signature bridge?

Which is it, Donn? “Better bridge” or no bridge?

Well, it’s “no bridge“. Esmonde has spent the last decade lauding anyone with a white beard and a lawyer. We don’t need any peace bridge expansion, he now says.

After 20 years of plans, a new Peace Bridge will remain unbuilt — pragmatically, I think, in light of declining traffic and questionable economic boost.

Esmonde calls for the PBA to fix itself, and fast – to de-escalate the fight. But why do we need a separate authority for the Peace Bridge, on the one hand; and the Niagara County crossings on the other? Couldn’t the entire thing be made “lighter, quicker, cheaper” if we only had one authority for all the crossings? Is there something special about the Peace Bridge? Is there something inadequate about the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission that it couldn’t expand and change its name to “Niagara Frontier Bridge Commission” or something?

Donn Esmonde usually becomes verbally turgid over the phrase emphasized in the preceding paragraph. But after almost 20 years of waiting for increased Peace Bridge capacity, Esmonde says we shouldn’t rush these things. What?

And our own little Kissinger – how diplomatic has been towards the Canadians? How about this column he wrote just 2 years ago, expressing how “disillusioned” he was by Canadians down here for a hockey tournament, (what else?), and some drunken brawls (of course).

Whatever happened to the polite, humble, rule-respecting folks we thought we knew? Where were the civic-minded citizens who dutifully wait at the street corner when the traffic light is red, even when no cars are coming? Wherever you are, we want you back…

…I talked to workers at a downtown bar/restaurant that will remain nameless, to protect the place’s cross-border business. By tournament’s end, they had disdain for all things emblazoned with a Maple Leaf. The main complaint, and this is not new, is a lot of Canadian hockey fans are awful tippers.

“They would have a few beers and leave like a quarter or 50 cents,” said one bartender, who for job security reasons asked that his name not be used. “Servers said they were getting two-dollar tips on a $25 check.”

OK, chronically bad tipping is not cause for a diplomatic crisis. But multiply it by a few thousand visitors, and you leave behind a lot of irritation.

Donn Esmonde as diplomat. I’ve honestly never heard anything so ridiculous.

This is part of an ongoing AV Daily series, “Donn Esmonde is an Ass“

 

Standards

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In an exercise in facile nonsense, local Republicans Nick Langworthy and Chris Grant criticized Democratic Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz today because Poloncarz took to Twitter and Facebook to criticize the fact that JPMorganChase is closing a call center in Albion (Orleans County), eliminating 400 jobs. The Republicans played a bit of “gotcha” with Poloncarz, who accepted campaign cash from JPMorganChase in past races, and demanded that he return it for some unstated, obtuse reason. 

It only makes sense if these Republicans agree with Poloncarz, that JPMorganChase is a bad corporate citizen for announcing these layoffs – otherwise they wouldn’t be demanding he return anything. 

Yet Collins, who has said nothing in public about the loss of jobs in his district, owns between $100,000 – $250,000 in JPMorganChase stock, according to OpenSecrets. Certainly, he will show solidarity with 400 of his constituents who are about to lose their jobs by divesting himself of these holdings. Right? Yet, oddly, there seems to be an eerie silence on this question. 

I think owning $100 – 250,000 worth of stock in a corporate bad actor is worse than taking $3,160 from them to win some elections. 

Republicans remain silent on the fact that Poloncarz not only accepted over $3,000 in campaign cash from JPMorganChase, yet still felt comfortable criticizing them harshly.  I guess it shows that Poloncarz’s opinions and positions are not necessarily stifled or silenced by campaign contributions.

Isn’t that a good thing? 

Donny And The Great Concrete Elevator

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Donn Esmonde just loves the grain elevators, and he loves people who love what he loves. Those crumbling concrete gravestones to a long-gone industrial time might be big and ugly, but by gosh they tell a story. 

waterfront wasteland

Something about it. Photo by Chris Smith via Flickr

These things matter. 

Esmonde skips through his paean to placemaking, extolling the wondrous things that nostalgia can bring – a buyer for a peeling behemoth on Lake Erie an outfit called FFZ Holdings bought at auction June 7th for just $475,000.

True, they are more beast than beauty, comparatively closer to mastodons than to mermaids. Yet to this Buffalo transplant, they always seemed like concrete dinosaurs, rising from the scrub brush along the Buffalo River plain like frozen-in-time fossils. Their inert mass stamped Buffalo’s broad-shouldered identity and shouted “sense of place” in an increasingly homogenized world. What was not to like?

For decades, [grain elevator aficionado Lorraine] Pierro has been their fiercest champion. “This is our history,” she said. “It seems like there is a new appreciation and recognition of them.”

FFZ Holdings is located at the same 26 Mississippi Avenue address as Savarino Companies, and it was named as a co-developer of some apartments on Ohio Street in the remnants of the “Erie Freight House”. Remember how receptive Esmonde’s friends in the preservation community were to the Savarino-proposed demolition of the freight house? I wonder how much taxpayers will be on the hook with various and sundry incentives and corporate welfare schemes to renovate Mr. Esmonde’s beloved concrete monstrosities. 

Is there a similar preservation movement in Europe to preserve Soviet-era concrete apartment blocks because “sense of place” and historical significance? 

Maybe more people could learn about the historic freight houses of the Erie Canal and the reasons why grain elevators are important if schools weren’t being starved into oblivion by alleged school reformer tea party hacks such as the ones Donn Esmonde now promotes. 

This is part of a new, ongoing AV Daily series, Donn Esmonde is an Ass.  Email us ways Donn Esmonde is an ass here. 

Peace Bridge: Back to the 90s

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STATEMENT FROM THE

WNY LEADERS FOR PEACE BRIDGE PROGRESS

Like most people in Western New York, we have spent the past two decades watching and waiting for a new, more efficient gateway between our community and Southern Ontario. Instead of progress, we have seen debate, delay and dysfunction. This project is too important to allow ego and personal differences to stall this project any longer.

Instead, we will let ego move the process forward!

The “Golden Horseshoe” around the western end of Lake Ontario has a population of 8.76 million people; that is 68% of Ontario residents and 26% of all Canadians. They come to Western New York to take in Sabres and Bills games, enjoy our ski resorts and other recreational opportunities, shop, and most importantly, to conduct business and enrich the economies of both sides.

The American government, addicted to security porn and anti-immigrant animus, has proposed and/or implemented every barrier possible to keep these people on their side of the border. Furthermore, the state of New York and the various and sundry governmental, quasi-governmental, and charitable entities have not yet decided to, e.g., set up a string of information center/rest areas on this side of the Q-L Bridge, Rainbow Bridge, or Peace Bridge to inform and direct Canadian crossers to WNY businesses, attractions, and communities.

For this population, the main crossing into the United States and the City of Buffalo is the Peace Bridge. More than 4.7 million cars and 1.2 million trucks crossed the span last year alone. The sheer volume makes the Peace Bridge one of Western New York’s most important economic engines, and to prevent the progress of improving the American side of the border crossing is to prevent the growth of business, recreation and friendly relations between the United States and our valued neighbor to the North.

Not only that, but if you expand the bridge and plaza capacity, you can minimize idling trucks and cars, the emissions from which are adversely affecting the nearby residents, according to some.

We need to take hold of our own destiny and move proactively toward embracing plans that will allow our great region, on both sides, to grow and prosper. The plan put forth by Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State of New York is the best option to accomplish that. The Governor wants progress for Buffalo and Western New York, and as business people, residents and active members of this great community, so do we.

The Governor? Hasn’t Cuomo ham-handedly allowed his local proxies mercilessly to antagonize the Canadians on the Public Bridge Authority in recent weeks?

Governor Cuomo has promised a beautiful, more efficient plaza in which the PBA and our community could take pride, and one that would improve the border crossing process for both sides. Western New York needs to form a unified front behind the efforts of the people we elected to represent us. That is exactly what we are announcing today.

To be honest, I’m not so sure anyone has described a customs and inspection plaza as “beautiful”, or that anyone has been “proud” of such a structure. I mean, the new plazas on the Canadian side of the Peace Bridge and Q-L Bridge are quite nice and efficient, but I think “beautiful” is a stretch. It would, however, be nice if people’s first impression of the United States when crossing from Canada was “hey, these people want me to be here and spend my money”. Instead, they resemble the angry, barely utilitarian, chaotic toll plaza on the Queens end of the Midtown Tunnel.

Western New Yorkers and our guests from Canada should not have to wait for years. They should not have to endure the traffic congestion of maintenance projects only to be followed by years of other projects that don’t actually help move traffic, especially passenger traffic off the plaza more expeditiously. New Yorkers and Canadians alike deserve a better, more functional U.S. Plaza faster.

We’ve gephyrophobically waited for years. I’m not so sure ego will overcome what ego has stalled.

The WNY Leaders for Peace Bridge Progress is a group of community leaders who have joined together to show their support for Governor Cuomo’s efforts to expedite the development of the Peace Bridge US Plaza in a way that maximizes the economic benefit to the WNY economy by reducing congestion and making the plaza more efficient and at the same time improving the quality of life in the immediate neighborhood. The committee is co-chaired by Leonard DePrima, formerly of LiRo Engineers and former Chief Engineer and Deputy Executive Director of the NYS Thruway Authority, Laura Zaepfel, Vice President at Uniland Development and Paul Brown, President of the WNY Building Trades Association.

Sounds like this was pulled together in response to this and this.

The WNY Leaders for Peace Bridge Progress

Co-Chairs: Leonard DePrima, Laura Zaepfel, Paul Brown

Cliff Benson Robert Gioia John Koelmel Jonathan Dandes Anthony Conte Rocco Termini

Mark Croce Doug May Alan Pero Paul Ciminelli Victor Martucci Sam Savarino

Robbie Ann McPherson Matt Connors Colleen DiPirro David Rivera Geno Russi

Joel Giambra Kelly Thompson Robert Kresse James Newman Rev. Michael Chapman

Isn’t that an interesting collection of political, development, charitable, and union leaders? It’s as if someone went around and wanted to ensure that this humble group of leaders had enough juice to offer credibility and a second look at the chronic Peace Bridge stasis.

As far as I can tell, however, the most palpable public health problem affecting the community-at-large is a dire case of Peace Bridge Fatigue. Any excitement or public desire for a signature bridge or a crossing that looks world-class rather than second-rate has been beaten into apathy by lawsuits, arguments, the Common Tern, and general political dysfunction. As I suggested last year, it may instead be time to simply demolish the Peace Bridge altogether.

This all seems so 1999. Thanks for trying, though.

NSA Collects Metadata because it Can

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The astonishing thing about the report yesterday that a secret court had ordered Verizon to turn over – en masse – the metadata concerning every phone call placed on that network isn’t that it happened. It’s that it’s probably perfectly legal. If you’re a Verizon customer, file suit. The 4th Amendment is interpreted to protect you from government surveillance, search, and seizure with respect to matters in which you have a “reasonable expectation of privacy”.  

Because the content of your messages and phone calls are not generally collected by phone carriers, you have an expectation of privacy with respect to what you say. But the metadata is automatically transmitted to the company, so it will likely be argued that you have no similar expectation that this would remain private, since Verizon also has it. 

The USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting & Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept & Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001), which Congress passed just six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, greatly enhanced the government’s ability to surveil US citizens with respect to their involvement in terrorism, and it was extended in 2011 under President Obama. 

Here, the government sought and obtained a federal court order from a secret court that our government set up through a rushed process immediately after a catastrophic terrorist attack. Furthermore, the order in question was sought immediately after the Boston Marathon attack in April. There’s a possibility it was sought in response to that in order to track any unusual call patterns to determine if there were more attacks in the pipeline. 

I don’t mean to excuse what is obviously a very troubling case of government surveillance.  What I mean to do is point out that this is the world we’ve collectively chosen. In response to 9/11, we turned America into a very weak, cosmetic police state in the name of public protection. We don’t have a Stasi that will arrest you for your political dissent activities based on the warrantless taps on your phone, but we do have a government that indiscriminately collects call data to see if there are odd and suspicious call patterns related to terrorism. 

If you want this sort of thing to stop, you have to change Washington and the whole notion of a department of pre-crime. The NSA, Bush, or Obama didn’t do this to us; we did this to us. 

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