April 26, 2002
editorial:
The arts crisis in Buffalo is real, so it's time for Tony, Joel, Al and Jim to stop campaigning, squabbling, preening, posturing and competing, and instead give us some rational and responsible government
The Buffalo News last week (Monday, April 24) reported one more of those pointless City/County posturings over who should pay for what. This time the key players were Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello and County Legislature Chairman Al DeBenedetti, and the highway wreck around which they were dancing and making "it's your responsibility" speeches was funding for the arts.
Masiello seemed to be saying that we need a dedicated source of arts funding, but since the arts benefit the region as much as the city, the county should find a way to provide it. The mayor opined that a piece of the County's 1% sales tax add-on could be a source for that. That tax was created at a time when the county was in a fiscal sewer; it was supposed to go away as soon as the County saw daylight. Daylight has come—but the tax hasn't gone. It's an essential part of the County's budget now.
Which is what County Legislature Chairman Al DeBenedetti said. The County certainly couldn't use that tax money for the arts because then the County would have to raise money elsewhere to replace it, and doesn't the City know how difficult raising money is these days?
The Mayor called the arts institutions "regional assets," no doubt referring to the fact that though many are located within the City of Buffalo, they're utilized by people who live in Amherst, the Tonawandas, Cheektowaga, Orchard Park, and places like that.
The News reported that "county officials said cultural groups already receive more money from the county than they do the city." That's one of those meaningless utterances people in public life use—in the familiar words said every week by the announcer who introduced the old-time radio program "The Shadow"— "to cloud men's minds."
The county also has more miles of road than the city, and more trees. So what? Lines like "We pay more" in conversations like this say nothing unless the rest of us know what's being paid for and in proportion to and relation to what.
It's like two parents who hate each other and wish the other would disappear arguing over who's going to feed the kids. Sure, the Mayor would like the County to part with some of that tax money, a large portion of which is taken out of the city in the first place. Sure, the County would like to see the City disappear so the New Regionalism (whatever that is) could simply occur without having to make political and economic sense first.
In the meantime, neither of them is feeding the kids.
The Common Council is no help, either. They still haven't figured out a way to differentiate between a wedding party in the Rose Garden, a political fund-raiser in the Casino, and Shakespeare in Delaware Park putting on a series of free performances on summer nights. That foolishness should have been straightened out more than a month ago, yet they're still working out the complexities. What complexities? There aren't any. Those guys aren't lawyers getting paid by the hour. They don't have to make up complexities.
City Hall has plenty of time to cuddle up to, stroke, fondle or otherwise make happy any developer or hustler promising to turn the other side of Niagara Square into a gambling joint. It can find ways to put an $800,000 roof on a former department store then sell the rehabilitated building for a dollar bill to a private developer. It can find reasons to keep the city from making money now on the sale of the Main Place Mall parking ramp that it is going to have to give away for nothing a few years from now.
But it can't find money for the arts.
This is worse than the same old-same old Buffalo cronyism, where only people with personal connections get the big bucks and everybody else gets a handshake and a smile. It is all that, of course, but it's also worse.
It's worse because not only are the arts one of the cleanest industries known to humankind (no industrial waste, no noxious byproducts, no productive enterprises displaced while they do their work), but dollars spent in the arts have one of the highest multipliers of dollars spent in any industry.
All dollars, as economists and city planners know very well, are not the same. A dollar spent in a casino, for example, leaves the community almost immediately. A small portion of it goes to the mostly-low wage hourly employees and the people who pick up the trash in the alley, but the bulk of it goes elsewhere.
A dollar spent in the arts, like a dollar spent in education, tends to stay around town, and when it is spent locally, somebody local does something with it, so it gets spent again and again and again. It's the modern equivalent of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Spending on the arts makes sense in terms of quality of community life, in terms of the community's economic health, in terms of common sense.
Using the arts as one more place for performance and preening is a disservice to us all. It's time for Tony Masiello and Al DeBenedetti and Jim Pitts and Joel Giambra to stop the games. It's about time they learned that art is the real thing.
—Bruce Jackson
©2002 Buffalo Report, Inc.