July 23, 2002
How
whitebig should Buffalo's Common Council be?
How
whitebig should Buffalo's Common Council be?
by Bruce Jackson
The menace named James Pitts
There's been an argument raging in Buffalo the past few months about the proper size for the city's Common Council. Some folks think it's bloated, that it has membership appropriate to a city the size Buffalo was 25 years ago, and that it should shrink to reflect the way the city has shrunk. Others think that present attempts to reduce the number of seats in the Council chamber is really an attempt to reduce whatever power the city's nonwhite population has managed to accumulate.
Common Council President James Pitts has become a lightning rod for all of this. People in town who hate bloated city government and people in town who hate the idea of black folk accumulating power have focused on Pitts as the enemy of progress, economy, and efficiency. The editor of one of Buffalo's weekly newspapers told me that Pitts was really evil, that he had to go, that he was dragging the city down. I asked him what, specifically, had Pitts done to drag the city down? "He's always trying to steer money to black neighborhoods and black organizations," the editor said.
I keep wondering, If James Pitts were a white guy, if he were thin and dapper like Carl Paladino, say, or if he had Ivy League clothes and a bushy moustache like Andy Rudnick, would all these white folks be going so crazy?
I ask that of white people and they say "Of course. It's not about race." I ask it of black people and they say, "What else is it about other than race?"
The worst thing I've heard about James Pitts is this: he's uppity. I keep asking people for specifics and it always comes down to that: he's uppity. They don't use that word, but that's the word they'd say if they knew it and if they didn't know the history associated with it.
I've lived in Buffalo for 35 years and I've seen this city run well and run badly by all kinds of rogues and scoundrels. I lived here when Jimmy Griffin was mayor. I've seen the worst the Niagara Frontier had to offer. But only James Pitts has called forth this kind of sanctimonious politicking.
I don't know much about Buffalo's city politics, but I find it weird that a politician in this town should be condemned for attempting to steer money to some of the city's ethnic neighborhoods (if that is indeed what he's done, and if he's done it inappropriately). What else do politicians in a town like this do except try to put the money where it might matter to them and, if they're good people, where it might matter to the city? Jimmy Griffin acted as if people who weren't white and heterosexual were transparent. He poured city money into South Buffalo and the city elected him three or four times. And now he's running around loose once again.
A little lie at City Hall's side door
There was a meeting at City Hall at 6:00 p.m. on July 22, the purpose of which was to let the public tell the Common Council what it thought of the proposal for reducing the Council's size from 13 to 9 members. That change would be accomplished by abolishing the four at-large seats, including that of the Council president, and by a reconfiguration of some of the existing districts.
I couldn't get in. There was a mob of people on City Hall steps at 5:30, so I went around to the side, where I met my district councilman, Marc Coppola. Marc, who was given the job when his cousin Al went to the state senate, was carrying a box of chicken wings and he was about to go in the side door. He said hello and that he'd love to take me in with him, but that it might get the wall painter, who was opening the door for him, in trouble so he just couldn't do it. He introduced me to his wife, who was with him.
All three of us knew there was no way in the world that wall painter would have gotten into trouble if I'd gone into that City Hall basement door with Marc Coppola. There's no way anyone in the world other than that painter, Marc Coppola, Marc Coppola's wife and I would have known how I'd gotten into the building, and none of us would have ever told anybody, had anybody asked, which nobody would have because no one would have given a hoot. So Marc Coppola was just jiving me. Don't you just hate it when a politician looks you right in the eye, smiles, and lies. I sure do.
SRO in the Common Council chamber
Then I went around the front, which was mobbed. I saw Charley Fisher, another member of the Common Council, and said, "Charley, get me in." Charley said he would, and told me to stick close to him. I did, and in the next two or three minutes he accumulated four other people with sheriff's office press cards. "You all stand right there," Charley said, "and I'll be right back." He went off and talked to some people and, about ten minutes later, he came back. "Follow me on up here," he said, and led us up to the far left door at the front of City Hall.
That door was locked solid and the cop guarding it said it wasn't going to open for anybody, so we followed Charley across all the doors until we got to the far right door, which was the only one functioning. It was secured by two cops, both of whom seemed very uncomfortable.
"I'm going in to get you seats," Charley said. "You stay here and I'll be right back." He went inside the building and never came back.
Over the next twenty minutes all kinds of people tried to get in that door and they used all kinds of pressure andhype to do it, but none of it worked. The two cops held firm, and so did a third cop in civilian clothes who joined them, a big guy with grey hair. He wore no ID, but he was obviously a cop—who else would wear four different things on his belt, one of them a small automatic pistol? I saw him on the 11 o'clock news and learned that he is a deputy chief. That door had high priority.
I saw Mike Groll, one of the best photographers on the Buffalo News staff. Mike was burned because the reporter he'd been accompanying had gotten in but he'd been kept out by someone who said that they were admitting only one representative from any publication. Mike said he'd try to explain that reporters and photographers didn't do the same thing, but the guy wouldn't listen. I saw a lot of tv people who were burned because nobody from their teams had gotten in at all. I saw one dapper fellow who told the cops at the door he was a lawyer and he had to get inside. He waved a thick packet of legal-sized files at them. They shrugged, and didn't move.
After a while, I decided it was pointless, so I headed back toward my car. On the way, I met someone who said, "People asked Jim Pitts to move this to a larger location but he refused."
"Who asked him to do that?" I asked.
"People did."
"What locations were available?"
"There's the Aud. The theater in the Buffalo News building. The Convention Center. All kinds of places."
I tried to catch the 11:00 p.m. news all three channels, but two of them ran the story at the same time, as they usually do. I saw one guy reporting from outside on the street. He was one of the people who hadn't been able to get in to City Hall, though he didn't mention that in his on-air report.
Someone called later to say he'd been there through the whole thing and that it had been terribly hot, humid and loud. "What did people say?" I asked.
"What you'd expect," he said. He told me that he'd heard it was all going to be broadcast on one of the public access channels on Wednesday.
Options and opinions
The Council is to vote on the proposal to reduce its size from 13 to 9 later today, Tuesday, July 23. As I understand it, if the Council passes the proposal, it will go to the voters of Buffalo in the fall.
Everyone assumes that the seven white Council members in favor of the reorganization will triumph over the six black Council members opposed to it, so that public vote probably will come about.
The Buffalo News is saying we should not only reduce the size of the Council but go to a part-time Council that would save even more money. Much of Council members' time, the News says, is spent dealing with district residents' problems, like missed garbage pickups and streets the snowplows missed and other failed city services. If Council members didn't have to waste time helping people with those kinds of problems, the News says, there wouldn't be so much need for so many Council members spending so much time on the job. Well, yeah. And if my car didn't have all those wheels I wouldn't have to buy so many tires when they wore out.
On the steps of City Hall and in too many conversations about this, I've heard a lot of black people saying this was all about race and a lot of white people saying it was all about economic efficiency. How can two sets of presumably well-meaning people be so far apart on the same issue? Maybe the issue is a lot more complicated than the most vocal proponents on either side have said in the public pronouncements.
Questions that remain
I still have a lot of questions that I haven't seen addressed anywhere and which I hope someone will at least try to answer between the Common Council vote and the moment I have to flick the lever in the ballot booth in the fall. Some of those questions are:
—What, exactly, does the Common Council and its staff members really do?I have other questions, but it's late, and the meeting at City Hall only ended a little while ago and the vote at City Hall takes place not very long from now. Things are moving along quickly, the issue is surrounded by passion, and I see more puzzles than solutions. However the Council votes today, the final vote will be ours. I don't believe any of this is at all as simple as the ideologues on both sides insist it is.
—What, exactly, do the at-large members of the Common Council do, and whom do they serve?
—If some of the Common Council's work is excess and wasteful, how much does that excess and waste really cost us?
—If we cut some Common Council members and their staffs , how much will have to be added to the staffs of other Common Council members to do the work that those people we just fired were doing?
—Some people say that the four citywide Council members are the city's only check on the power of the small group of rich white guys with 24/7 access to the mayor's office and the mayor's budget. Is that true?
—Some people say that the Council should be reduced to match the reduction in the city's population over the past three or four decades. If they're right, should that reduction be across the board or should it be refined to match the specific character of the population shift? That is, who left town and who's still here?
—If the cuts are really being proposed for economic reasons, how do they compare to the largesse the mayor's office bestows on rich white developers, and which kind of spending really does the city more good or less harm?
—Would we be hearing all this noise about the need for reduction if all the supposedly dispensable offices were currently occupied by white men?
—If James Pitts is the demon some people say, and if getting rid of him is what this is really about, isn't
the way to deal with him by running a candidate for Common Council president in the next election who is not a demon, rather than restructuring city government to eliminate his job description?
—What would reducing the size and changing the accountability of the Common Council do to the balance of power in city government?
—The city's charter specifics that in the absence of a mayor (through recall or whatever) the president of the Common Council becomes acting mayor until the next election. If we eliminate the job of the Council President will we have to do another charter revision? Can we eliminate the Council President before altering the charter? What happens if the mayor vanishes in that limbo time between when we vote to abolish the job of Council President and write a new city charter that doesn't specify the various jobs of the Council President?