July 1, 2002
(Peace Bridge Chronicles #58)
What 9/11 did to the Peace Bridge expansion process
(Peace Bridge Chronicles #58)
What 9/11 did to the Peace Bridge expansion process
by Bruce Jackson
Doing things to ourselves
9/11 changed the political landscape. The realities central to—and the craziness at the periphery of—our lives have been redefined. Some people worry about what a second round of suicidal terrorists might do. Others worry about the damage we're doing to our own way of life because of that fear, or because of people capitalizing on it. Both groups are right to worry.
George Bush now refers to himself as a "wartime president." He says he is in a fight against Evil. How shall we ever know if he's won that battle? If can't tell when he's won, how can we ever abandon him without being unpatriotic? That's Vice President Cheney's mantra: any question about current policy is evidence for Cheney of a defect in the questioner's Americanism.
Attorney General John Ashcroft is the scariest of the lot. He's gone after the Bill of Rights like a Missouri hound dog after squirrels. As soon as he got to Washington, Ashcroft begin working to undo decades of federal progress on gun control. 9/11 and the egregiously misnamed PATRIOT Act licensed him to rachet that assault up by an order of magnitude.
By virtue of that act, Ashcroft's FBI agents now visit libraries in search of suspicious book-borrowing patterns, and other FBI agents are on the lookout for librarians who tell anyone about the FBI reading checks. Librarians who squeal about FBI scans are guilty of new major felonies. U.S. citizens merely suspected of being connected with unnamed terrorists can now be locked in jail without the right to see a lawyer or communicate with their families or the press. Trials can be held in secret and no one outside of Ashcroft's Justice Department knows how many of them are going on or are planned. People sucked up in that vacuum are, basically, convicted on the basis of suspicion. This guilt by accusation is like the Spanish Inquisition and Stalin's NKVD where the question wasn't "Are you guilty of this charge?" but rather "If you're not guilty then why have we locked you up?" For the first time, the United States has legislation permitting us have our own Disappeareds.
Scary times. And the scariness seems to license profligacy in a startling number of realms many of us had thought safe from domestic ecoterrorists. Bush's energy people use 9/11as an excuse to clearcut more first-growth national forest timber and engage in more oil exploration in the few unpoisoned natural habitats left. We can't trust that those Arabs will deliver the ever-increasing amounts of oil we need, they say, so let's drill, drill, drill. How does polluting a stream or river or sea or disturbing a herd of caribou compare to our (ostensible) increased need for domestic oil?
The same political economy lets them cut back on depoisoning major toxic waste sites. We need the money, they say, for armaments; there is no money to reduce domestic poisons dumped into the environment by major corporations. (see, for example, http://nytimes.com/2002/07/01/national/01SUPE.html for an discussion of how the Bush administration killed funding for investigation of 33 major pollution sites in 18 states).
We see the effects of 9/11 every time we fly out of town. Buffalo's airport used to be one of the most laid-back in the country. You could get there ten minutes before takeoff and, if they hadn't overbooked your flight, you could be in your seat when the plane pulled away from the gate. Buffalo is no longer a laid-back airport. There aren't any more laid-back airports. If you want a seat, you better get there early because you never know when they're going to get weird.
And then, there's the Peace Bridge. After years of increasing congestion, traffic last year started speeding up at the Peace Bridge because of operational improvements. But the increased inspections on both sides after 9/11 have cut into those improvements. Lately, Attorney General Ashcroft is pushing for vastly increased inspections and ID procedures coming and going. He wants more vehicles and more people inspected for more things by more agents. Crossing is going to get worse long before it gets better.
So how does this fear of further terrorism affect the Peace Bridge expansion project? Those folks were coming up with some nice ideas for opening the border, reducing the bureaucracy, cutting the red tape. Now it seems that Ashcroft & Co. are busily reversing all that progress.
The point man on all of this is Vincent "Jake" Lamb, who has been managing the environmental impact study and planning process for the Public Bridge Authority since Judge Eugene Fahey ordered the PBA to obey New York environmental law by incorporating community needs and opinions in its planning process. Lamb has amassed an impressive array of design, engineering, public health, environmental quality and legal consultants to work on the project, and he has set up a binational citizens' committee to consider every recommendation anyone has for expanding bridge capacity.
I asked Lamb to comment on the impact of 9/11on Peace Bridge design, thought, and operation. This is what he said:
What Jake Lamb saidCertainly there's more focus now on what happens at the border by everybody that's involved, including people who cross the border. Everybody wants to know what's happening and what the changes are going to be to make the borders more secure toward the overall objective of fighting terrorism. It's affecting everybody that's planning, everybody that's using, everybody that may be building, everybody that's involved in the process.
The most important thing at this point is the uncertainty that surrounds just how the border operation is going to change, because it really hasn't been fully defined yet by the federal authorities on both sides of the border. I know they're working hard on it. I know they're actively discussing it within the context of a broader security issue for both countries. So there's a lot of work that has to go into what they do at the border. And of course it's not just one location, it's not just Peace Bridge. It's the entire northern border, the entire southern border and our coastlines. It's going to take time for the federal authorities to get their ideas gelled and make the right decisions on what to do with the border.
Obviously security is the main focal point at this time. We're definitely expecting changes in the way the border's operated. This definitely will impact the spatial requirements, layout, even the functioning at the border–how goods are transported, and people.
It seems that there's going to be more checking and not less checking. There was a time when there was a lot of discussion about seamless borders, about going to a more open arrangement to facilitate movement of goods and people. I think that some of those ideas are still there, but there's probably a little more caution being taken with respect to innovative ideas or innovative technologies, to apply them in this environment, the terrorist-threat type of environment that seems to have enveloped us. I think there's more caution about these systems and reliance on the new systems than might have been the case otherwise.
What we're hearing in the community is a lot of people hope to focus attention on this area as an attractive place to visit, to live, to work. That pushes the tourist part of it and the natural resources that we have here. If the border becomes the type of place that nobody wants to go to, it's certainly contrary to and would be interfering with these plans that are waiting for projects like the Peace Bridge to go forward. I think that's a major concern for the region.
We need to help the government as best as we can accomplish to their objectives, while at the same time not sacrificing the potential for these kinds of developments and the quality of life that everybody enjoys here and that we want to preserve for the future.
Some people want Fort Porter resurrected for historic significance, to make it an attractive place to visit. The resurrection of Fort Porter as a fortress is another matter, one that certain people would be concerned about.
I think that the major impact is what it's going to do to the area. How it's going to change our style of life and quality of life. How it's going to change the image. Everybody was for a positive change of the image to make it an attraction. People that want the signature bridge, people that want something better. It's consistent with "Give us back our waterfront, give us back our parks." All these things. Let's concentrate on hooking up our park systems with Canada, and our bike trails and pedestrian ways. Let's accent the historic sites, archeological sites, the history that's here. Let's generate that kind of enthusiasm.
What seems to be happening here is the development of a potential situation that's beyond our control.
The trick here is going to be preserve those goals, preserve those ideals and things that people want this place to become, and at the same time accommodate in a balanced, reasonable way the national interest for security and the rest.
Commerce has to be preserved. We have to preserve the relationship that we have with our neighbor, Canada. If that's going to be sacrificed in the name of public security and the greater interest of the country—it's going to be a heavy price that's going to have to be paid locally if we don't get this done right.
If that happens, then the bad guys win.
That's exactly right. If we strangle ourselves and we do things to diminish the potential that we have here to improve and better ourselves, it's just what they wanted to accomplish. We have to be smarter than that. I think we can be. We must be. We just need to work through these issues and accommodate in a realistic balanced way everybody's concerns without sacrificing that potential. That's extremely important. We have to be vigilant to make sure that happens. We have to really work at it.
You said a while ago that this was going to change the way we look at the space needs here. Could you say a little more about that?
There is the possibility of more checking and not less checking. We had hoped there’d be less checking, that there would be consolidated, integrated checking, meaning, maybe the Canadian and US authorities could do things together, maybe even on one side of the border, with cooperative information sharing, intelligence sharing. We'd all get on the same page with respect to the conventions that are used and make it more efficient. Hopefully we're still headed in that direction.
But there seems to be a tendency to have more control, more inspection, more checking. And there's going to be a reliance on the tried and true ways of doing that. That's what I meant before when I said I think there's going to be some reluctance to try innovate approaches.
So the infrastructure needs, the plazas, would tend to increase in size substantially to achieve all these objectives. To achieve the objective of maintaining commerce and to provide for the growth of commerce and the provide for convenient and attractive passage passage of people back and forth across the border. If you take that desire, together with the increased inspection or checking that may occur at the border by the authorities for security reasons, enforcement of the law, customs and immigration things, obviously you need more space.
If you didn't worry about making it an efficient operation, and if you didn't worry about choking commerce, or making it more difficult for people to cross the border, then you're less concerned about space. So we have to provide enough space to preserve that goal of maintaining and improving the attractiveness of the location, the attractiveness of the Niagara region, together with the security demands. You're looking at a hell of a lot more space to make it work.
So this implies that we may have to rethink the notion of all of the traffic crossing here, that it may be necessary to revise how we look at the whole crossing idea.
Yes, I think it complicates the crossing idea. We know from going through the scoping process and listening to the public that there are already ideas put on the table by the public. It's a good idea to think about approaching the movement of goods and people in a different way than we have been doing it traditionally.
What I'm referring to is the concern expressed by many of the citizens when we went and had our public meetings and we had scoping meetings and emails that we received, a lot of people want to see the truck traffic separated from the car traffic. A lot of people want to see the truck traffic separated from the car traffic from the standpoint of air quality, public health issues. This is what we were hearing from the standpoint of making the parkland attractive, making the passage attractive. It was in keeping with some of the initiatives that communities on both sides of the border have in mind with respect to attracting tourism and developing the tourist trade, the tourist industry.
We have the added element now that the complications of maintaining and providing facilities to adequately take care of security while taking care of our other issues, of moving people and goods efficiently. It adds another complication that I think leads us to examine the options in an even more thorough way than we would have otherwise.
The likely consequences of all that
Jake Lamb is cautious when he makes public statements about the Peace Bridge expansion project, and properly so. He has defined his job as facilitating a complex information gathering and evaluating process that involves scores of technical experts, government representatives and ordinary citizens.
Before Judge Fahey's decision, the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority met in secret, ignored community needs, and came up with a bridge design that was both ugly and expensive. In a few years it turned itself from an agency hardly anyone knew existed to an agency that thousands of citizens on this side of the border hated and wanted abolished.
Lamb changed all that. People trust him and he has become the PBA's point man on just about all major public issues. He has had the full backing of two widely-trusted and liked PBA chairs who were also willing to meet and talk with anyone—Victor Martucci and now Paul Koessler.
Until 9/11, the process Lamb developed seemed to be slowly moving toward an interesting design of a companion or replacement bridge, along with a reconfigured binational customs, immigration and tolling operation that would significantly reduce the PBA's land needs on the American side.
Which is to say, we stood an excellent chance of getting Front Park and Fort Porter back, thereby restoring a significant part of Frederick Law Olmsted's grand design.
But vastly increasing the number and complexity of border inspections of vehicles entering and leaving the country threatens to change all that. The forces of security would chew up more of Buffalo's land rather than giving us some of our land back, and would have those huge vehicles idling and pouring noxious fumes into the local air for more rather less time.
Lamb insists that everything is on the table, that all design and location options will be given equal consideration. The security consequences of 9/11 changed the economy of the border. Projects that seemed to make little economic sense previously—like Robin Schimminger's idea of moving the truck traffic up to the southern end of Grand Island—are a lot closer to feasibility than they were a year ago. Schimminger's plan would require a much longer, hence much more expensive, bridge but it would pull all the through trucks away from Buffalo's waterfront, which would mean the city would get nearly all of Front Park back, people could have direct access to the water, and we'd be rid of the health problems caused by trucks idling in a residential area.
Everything connected with crossing the border has gotten more complex, more cumbersome, thicker with agents and agencies, rules and regulations, procedures and processes. On the other hand, the range of feasible design options has significantly expanded.
Something good may come out of this yet.