August 15, 2002
Buffalo in Black and White:
What happened at Waterfront School
Buffalo in Black and White:
What happened at Waterfront School
by Bruce Jackson
Note: Full texts of most of the statements referred to or quoted in this article, and several others, are online in Buffalo in Black and White: What people said to Mayor Masiello.
Night school
Nearly 70 people spoke to Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello over the course of three hours at the Waterfront School on the evening of August 15. A few were showing off for the audience of Adelphia's television cameras, but the great majority of speakers were giving the mayor their opinion of the Common Council plan to cut the Council's size from fourteen to nine by eliminating all the at-large seats, including the Common Council president. Three of those four seats are presently held by African Americans.
All seven white members of the Council voted for the plan, which had been introduced by Councilman David Franczyk. All six African American members voted against it. The vote of the seven for the Franczyk plan blocked any consideration by the Common Council of the plan developed by the Citizens' Advisory Commission on Reapportionment, the members of which had been appointed by Mayor Masiello and Common Council President James Pitts, and who had been unanimously approved by the Common Council. The plan on which the Council did not get to vote would have reduced its membership by two—one at-large seat and the seat held by David Franczyk, whose district exists only because of a 10-year-old gerrymander and which has shriveled significantly since then.
The session at Waterfront School lasted three hours, with a brief break two hours in. It was broadcast on Adelphia 22 and WNED radio.
A few times, the Adelphia audience couldn't hear what speakers were saying because the studio host, Pete Anderson was chatting with his three studio guests—Rev. Robert E. Baines, Network of Religious Communities; Political Science Prof. Kevin Hardwick, Canisius, and Jeremy Toth, President, New Millennium Group. But those interruptions became less frequent as the evening wore on. After the three-hour public session was over, Anderson and his guests talked and fielded telephone calls for another hour.
Events like this are representative of nothing other than people who are willing to come out for a public session. There was a wide range in the character and quality of the statements. Some speakers were thoughtful and considered, some were loopy, some were seriously concerned about their community, some were passionately concerned about themselves, some stayed right on point, some didn't come close to it.
All of the nonwhite speakers and maybe a third of the whites opposed the plan. Many of the nonwhites said to Masiello, "Do the right thing."
The empty seats
At first, the most surprising thing about the meeting was how few people were there.
I don't know how many people that room held—maybe 250—but it was never more than half full and for much of the evening it wasn't even that. I'd expected the room to be full, with people waiting to get in, as at City Hall for the July 22 public discussion the day before the now infamous Common Council vote.
In the post-game discussion on Adelphia, Jeremy Toth opined that maybe people just didn't care that much about the redistricting of the city and the restructuring of the city's government, that perhaps all the talk about people being upset was in the imagination of the people doing the talking.
That's wishful thinking.
The most important reason for the low turnout was the simple fact that Mayor Masiello was on record as saying he'd already made up his mind and that he had no intention of changing it. People had filled the Council chamber in City Hall on July 22 to talk to legislators because they believed the matter had not been finalized and that the legislators would at least listen to what they had to say. This time, they pretty much knew their words would be wasted, so they stayed home. Why go out on a hot and muggy night to a place that's hard to find (several of the streets that go to Waterfront School have been closed off) to sit for hours on the chance you'll get two minutes to talk to a man who said in front he wasn't going to pay any attention to anything you might say? Those folks are angry; they're not stupid.
Masiello never even paid lip-service in the course of the three-hour session to the possibility that he might be maintaining an open mind on the matter. The hearing with his presence was mandated by law. The law didn't say he had to think about anything that was said. Tony is obdurate, testa dura as my Sicilian friends say, but he's not a hypocrite. So except for a few exhibitionists realizing they could get on television after all, hardly anyone seeing the empty seats on Adelphia bothered to come down.
Not that he didn't pretend to take it all seriously. Through the entire meeting, he made notes on one of his yellow legal pads. He always takes notes on yellow legal pads at public meetings. He has never been known to look at any of those pads afterwards.
For most people it was, why go out on a hot muggy night to talk to a man who already said he had no intention of taking you seriously.
His closing statement is perfectly empty of content. He managed to say not a single word about anything that anyone had said during the previous three hours, let alone the issues and process that had brought everyone there. The statement could have been uttered with equal relevance at the wake of an old friend or enemy, at the ground-breaking for a new library or ribbon-cutting for a building some crony just got rich on, at a confirmation or bar mitzvah.
Where Masiello is
Tony Masiello is in a switch. A switch is when you have to choose between two options and neither of them is the right one.
If he signs off on the Franczyk resolution he's got the East side and half the lower west side mad at him. If he vetoes it the money guys who tell him what to do will be angry and so will all those people who took him at his word when he said he'd sign it no matter what people said or did at the public hearing.
There's a rumor bouncing around town saying that Pataki has promised him a job some time after this fall's election, one of those Albany sinecures that pays a fat salary and has a term of five years or so, which means that even if the governor who appoints you is tossed out, you get to stay. Masiello is 55 now. A five-year-term job that carries him into or close to retirement age. He may be figuring "If I just play the game right, if I just do what they want, I've got it made."
The question is, whom is he really serving? Is it people like developer Carl Paladino and Buffalo Niagara Partnership CEO and Robert Wilmers' watercarrier Andrew Rudnick? If so, then they're far more interested in getting rid of Jim Pitts than the size or shape of the Common Council. The Franczyk plan would get rid of Pitts. Is it his own rage at Pitts? Associates say he's convinced Pitts is in secret partnership with former mayor Jimmy Griffin in Griffin's recall petition campaign. That's unlikely, but Masiello didn't need that bit of paranoia to get on Pitts's case: he was there already.
I doubt Masiello would be signing on the Franczyk plan if he had any intention of running again for any public office in Buffalo, so he's almost certainly got something in mind at the end of this. I don't believe for a minute that he'd do this much damage merely to save the city $300,000.
Pataki, presumably, is rewarding Masiello for jumping party loyalty to endorse him in the last gubernatorial election. I assume Masiello will do the same this time, even though when Masiello last went to Albany to beg for help from Buffalo the governor wouldn't even grant him an audience. If Tony signs off on the Franczyk plan it appears on the November ballot, and that will ensure a large black and Hispanic turnout in Buffalo. That's traditionally a very Democratic vote. However the Franczyk plan fares, having all those additional Democrat votes in Buffalo's booths in November won't make Pataki the least bit happy.
The very white ninth seat
Proponents of Franczyk's nine-district Council plan say it provides four seats almost certainly to go to whites, four almost certainly to go to blacks, and one that's a tossup because the population in that district is 30% African-American, 20% Hispanic, 50% white.
That ostensible balance was achieved by chopping the Hispanic neighborhoods into three sections, virtually ensuring that they would have no city-wide voice. "What are we," asked community activist Andres Garcia at the August 15 public forum at the Waterfront School, "collateral damage?"
The answer to Garcia's rhetorical question is yes. The Hispanic community figures in no one's public thinking on this. They're used simply to populate the fiction of a balance of whites and nonwhites in that ninth district.
I write "fiction" because, if voting follows its ordinary ethnic lines, the redistricting plan guarantees that the ninth district will go to a white candidate, and that the Common Council will be controlled by whites for at least the next decade.
That reason that ninth seat is not a tossup, my friend Peyton Randolph points out, is the fact that the 50/30/20 population distribution in that district has nothing to do with eligible voters in that district.
"It's not just that whites vote more heavily than blacks and Hispanics," he said. "Even when they come out in equal percentages, they're crippled by the demographics. There are far more whites of voting age in Buffalo than nonwhites. You can see it in any grade school. So a district in Buffalo that is 50% white and 50% nonwhite is going to have far more white than nonwhite voters. That ninth district is a lock for the whites, at least until that generation of kids is old enough to vote."
Lunacy, narcissism, creepiness
Public hearings like this inevitably draw two kinds of citizens: people who care passionately enough about an issue that they'll give up their personal time and submit to the inconveniences on the chance that they might influence a decision-maker, and people who care passionately about performing in front of an audience. This event had both. Some people who speak say things that are truly important and considered; some are running their mouths the same way and perhaps for the same reasons a flasher unzips his fly. And some are truly crazy or so deep into their own looney narcissism they defy analysis.
My nominee for most narcissistic speaker of the evening was Richard Kern, who describes himself as a civil rights and housing activist. I've never met Kern, but for a while I got his raging and paranoid emails. I wrote him and asked him to stop sending them to me, but that didn't work. Then I realized my email program had a filter which would send them immediately to pixel perdition without stopping at my Inbox.
Kern said the nine-member district-only plan was a good one, though his reasoning was pretty addled. His statement seemed to have two main themes. One was his unhappiness that Common Council James Pitts hadn't developed politically the way he would have preferred. Mayor Masiello stopped him from what was turning into an ad hominem rant. Kern insisted it was necessary. Masiello told him to stick to the subject. Kern insisted this was the subject. Then he got distracted and went on to another subject. His other main theme was his disappointment that some black and Hispanic people thought there was a racist aspect to seven white Council members abolishing the seats of three nonwhite Council members over the very focal objection of all six nonwhite Council members. Kern said the fact that some people thought there might be a black versus white issue here was a "devastating indictment of Martin Luther King."
Kern also told a terrific lie. "I've been prosecuted twelve times for exposing corruption," he said. All the Kern arrests and prosecutions I know about have been for trespassing and harassment. Maybe he was also arrested for "exposing corruption," but I've not been able to find any record of that. The record says he was arrested because he was a pest.
The creepiest speaker of the evening
That would be real estate salesman Robert Biniszkiewicz.
He several times said that he was "cutting my own throat with this," and then he'd say why the council should get rid of the at-large seats, why we'd all be better off without Jim Pitts, why two of the current blacks were on there only because the whites running last time were so good they divided the white vote and the blacks slipped in, why Franczyk— who came up with the plan that got rid of the four at-large seats but preserved his own—was sacrificing himself because next time the blacks would be out to get him.
His logic is garbled and loopy and much of what he says makes, on close examination, little sense. I'm not sure that's accidental. I learned during the Peace Bridge War, when he surprised all the signature bridge people he'd been sidling up to the previous six months by joining forces with the steel twin-span advocates at the televised public hearing of the Public Consensus Review Panel, that he's always working some angle, sucking up to somebody, seeking some future advantage the rest of us couldn't even suspect.
He's planning on running for the Council in two years, he says, and he knows how much money Andy Rudnick and Carl Paladino and those guys throw around when they want to help somebody who plays ball, or hurt someone who doesn't. I cannot believe Biniszkiewicz would ever cut his own throat. He's just not the kind of guy who would do that. His knife would far more likely penetrate a back, and not his own. This guy bears very careful watching.
True believers
There was a lot of home-made Christianity and fully undigested Eastern mysticism at the meeting, some of it deeply felt, some of it a mere vehicle for public performance; some of it a reasonable and coherent component of a complex world view in which the sacred is a part of everyday life, some of it drivel.
Early on, a thin black guy preached a fiery, rambling, and barely coherent sort-of sermon, the point of which I never got. He was shortly followed by a white guy who began by saying,"I am a white, powerless citizen of this democracy," closing his eyes, covering his heart with his hand, and then lecturing the room on universal tolerance and what we need to do to have peace. I loathe people who brag about how humble they are. Occasionally he would chant "om," à la Allen Ginsberg at the Chicago 7 trial. He finished with this whacko goulash:How Tony kept a straight face during that farrago, I don't know. Maybe he was sleeping with his eyes open.Mr. Politician, rather than honoring your sacred duty to serve the people, you have chosen to wash your hands with the blood of the corporate money changers. And because of the arrogance and vanity of your deeds, you must bear the sins of this community. And yet, because we are a loving and forgiving people, out of the depths of our compassion, we offer to you one opportunity for redemption. Cease to do the will of the corporate money changers. Begin to do the will of the people. Keep the counsel.
I kept remembering that great moment in Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles when the bearded prospector gets up in front of the congregation and proclaims, "I wash born here, an I wash raished here, and dad gum it, I am gonna die here, an no sidewindin bushwackin, hornswaglin, cracker croaker is gonna rouin me bishen cutter," after which the town preacher thanks him for "That genuine bit of frontier gibberish."
Arthur's Eve's religious fervor is more difficult. I don't know what it's like listening to Arthur Eve if you're the kind of believer Arthur Eve is. I just can't get there when he talks about the Lord talking to him in Albany about Buffalo political structure. But I can deal with it metaphorically the same way I deal with saying Achilles's sword arm was stayed on the Trojan beach the day Agamemnon stupidly insulted him before the Argive host. From Achilles's and maybe even Homer's point of view Athena was an active force in what happened there; but Achilles also had good reasons for what he did and didn't do, which is why the Iliad continues to work for us. So what are they saying?
The thing is, whether or not you buy Eve's fundamentalist visions, the secular part of what he says made a good deal of secular sense. After Eve spoke, I wondered if Tony plopped his words in the same box as the other two guys who claimed to have a direct line to Truth itself, or if he was listening to the parts that made sense whatever source of wisdom you were plugged into.
Jeremy Toth's secret knowledge and passive retreat
Several African-American members of the Buffalo Common Council have referred to the 7 white members who backed Franczyk's plan meeting by themselves, getting their act together. Two of those Council members mentioned it during when they spoke at the Waterfront School session.
Jeremy Toth, president of the New Millennium Group, says it never happened. He said that several times during the show. The first time, he said,I wondered, How could he know that? How could he know with such certainty that something didn't happen?There's this myth, this misinformation that the seven council members got together in a room one night and met. And that just didn't happen. This happened over months of conversations between all the council members, every single one of them, in each other's offices.
Later, during the panel discussion after the mayor ended the meeting, Toth said,Again I wondered, How does Toth know that the conversations in the hall were all that occurred? How does he know that a meeting among the seven whites never occurred? Why is he, as president of the New Millennium Group, saying that two African-American members of the Common Council were not telling the truth? Who is Toth representing?I don't believe this is a manifestation of the racism that exists in this community. There is racism in this community, there's no doubt. But I don't believe that this is a product of that. And one of the things that bothers me and I said it earlier is that there's this belief that the seven white members sat in a room one day. But that is not the way—this came about the way all legislation does. You have an idea, you walk down the hall, you see what that person thinks, they go upstairs to the other office. And that happened for several months. Marc Coppola, David Franczyk, Joe Golombek were all in the paper in May saying they wanted seven districts, nine districts. _________ the at-large. This was not a closed door between members as some people say.
I dialed the number on the screen, hoping to ask Toth some of those questions, but I was on hold for 30 minutes and never got in. But someone named Larry did get in, and apparently he was puzzled by the same thing:This is where Toth got really weird. He plunged into the passive voice. The passive is the way people talk when they can't avoid talking about something but don't want to take the rap for anything that happened or even for what they're saying. Nobody's home in the passive voice; there's no active player. I'll italicize the passive passages, the places where someone speaking directly would have put nouns, names of people:Mr. Toth, I heard your analogy about the way that negotiations take place in all forms of government, one councilperson would go to the next councilperson's office and say, "What do you think about this plan and what's your idea?" and whathaveyou. My question to you, Mr. Toth, is, are you saying that minority members of the Common Council who have alleged that they were not given an opportunity to participate in the process are not telling the truth?
There is, by the way, no "Jim Pitts proposal." I assume Toth refers to the recommendation of the Citizen's Advisory Commission on Reapportionment. Calling it the "Jim Pitts proposal" trivializes that entire enterprise. Why would Toth do that?Well, my understanding is that there were conversations in a completely unofficial capacity, because they were just conversations, between all the members of the Council over the course of several months. That maps were bandied about throughout the hall for eight, for nine. Conversations happened between all of the district members, anyway. There was generally feeling up until the paper proclaimed that Rose LoTempio was going to vote for this plan, there was general feeling that the seven votes were there for the Jim Pitts proposal. And there was a sense, again, this is my understanding, there was a sense that there wasn't any need to discuss, the seven votes were there, so there was no need to discuss. But that there were conversations, no official meetings, just conversations throughout the hall on all issues, about maps, and about plans and about districts.
More important, why would he get all slippery and completely evade answering Larry's question? He doesn't tell the names of anyone he talked to about this, so what authority does he have to say the African-Americans were lying?
Not only were his remarks evasive, there was also something desperate or hysterical about them. For example, this:That's like saying when your car is skidding on ice and the brakes aren't working you should do anything. But that's wrong: you shouldn't do anything. You should do the right thing, otherwise you just get into more trouble than you already are.Though this is not the plan that I supported or wanted to see, the time has escaped us to go back to the drawing table and find seven votes or a different on, which is why my fear, that if this doesn't go forward, we're stuck with the status quo, and that to me is just not acceptable to anybody.
The other two members of the Adelphia panel told the audience about their previous political experience: Reverend Baines said he'd run for office but hadn't been successful; Prof. Hardwick referred twice to his experience as a councilman in Tonawanda. That information helped us understand some of the things they said. Toth never mentioned that he had run for one of the at-large seats in the 1999 election and had lost. Nor did he mention that he had worked for one of the winners in that election, Councilman at-large Charley Fisher, hated the job and left in a storm. Nor did he mention that he had worked as a senior staffer for Sam Hoyt.
This is all very muddled, clumsy and shoddy. I presume Toth is smarter than that. I'm still wondering why he was so insistent that no meeting among the whites ever took place but refused to give the basis for that repeated assertion. I'm wondering why he's willing to accept any kind of action at all, even if it might do more harm than good. I'm wondering what agenda he was really pursuing in all of this, whose interests he was really representing and why he wouldn't talk straight.
Jeff Belt, president of the New Millennium Group during the Peace Bridge War, is one of the straightest-talking guys I've ever met. He spoke with specificity, answered questions directly and honestly, never waffled, avoided, shuffled, or did the old slip and slide. When I heard Toth repeatedly insinuate, misdirect and evade, I really missed Jeff Belt.
Racism and memory
I keep hearing blacks and Hispanics talk about the racist aspects of this and whites saying that there's nothing racist about it at all, that it's just about economics or efficiency or putting more cops on the street to deal with hoodlums. They have the idea that if their motives aren't racist then their actions have no racist consequences. It's as if there is a perfect disconnect. If the intentions are noble, the results must be good.
But it doesn't work like that. Consequences do matter. The fact that you thought you were shooting at a burglar when in fact you were shooting at your child may get you off in a court of criminal law, where intention matters far more than consequences, but it doesn't get you out of the fact that you killed someone you didn't want to kill and whom you shouldn't have killed. Maybe they can't send you to jail for it, but if you've got any heart at all you know you did something really bad.
The damage already done
A few days ago I ran into someone I hadn't seen for years, a person I'd always considered politically very conservative.
"I was happy," he said, "to read your interview with Pitts. That's a point of view that needs to be told and the Buffalo News won't do it. What's happened here is the same small group of people control the Buffalo News, the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, and most of the important things that go on. And they've got the rest of us fighting amongst ourselves."
I thought of that conversation after the mayor's Waterfront School event. I wondered: What are we fighting about? What do any of us get out of this? What do you get out of it? What do the constituents of those seven white councilpersons get out of it? What do the blacks and Hispanics of Buffalo get out of it?
We run around and we fight over this nine-seat plan (which, James Pitts has said, originated with the Buffalo News), and argue over whether or not the $300,000 it saves (as opposed to the studied plan developed by the committee appointed by the mayor and Council) will put more cops and firemen on the streets. But we don't talk about who really profits not only from the toothless city council it will create, but more importantly from having us fighting one another and being angry at one another for years.
Which, make no mistake about it, we will be. Even now, even if Tony Masiello had a sudden vision that told him it was more important to think of the city than satisfy his masters, huge damage has been done. If Tony goes ahead and signs this thing and it goes to a vote, huge damage will be done. If the thing passes even greater damage will be done. Buffalo will be the laughing-stock of the country and it will have sown local seeds of frustration and anger that will bear bitter fruit for decades. We'll all be busy dealing with it for decades, or at least some of you will.
And while we are thoroughly disorganized and fighting amongst ourselves and getting even and digging our way out, who will speak for us to that "same small group of people who control the Buffalo News, the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, and most of the important things that go on?"
Reverend Baines on the Adelphia panel maybe put it best:Power is what it's really about. It is about who will control and who will be controlled. Anyone who tells you this is about saving the city $300,000 is a liar or a fool.I think that this has caused people to wake up. I don't think they're going to forget about it in two years. I think that they're going to remember that we did have a big fight here. I'm thinking of downsizing the Council and we made such a big thing of that. I'm convinced that this is about power. It's about who is going to control what. I don't think it has to do with Democrats versus Republicans. I don't even know if you can call it racism. I think it's more a power struggle.
And who really wins? And what do they win? And what about the rest of us, all the rest of us?
Previous Buffalo Report articles on this subject:
The Buffalo Report Interview: James Pitts, President, Common Council (1 August 2002)
Truth to order on page 1 (1 August 2002)
Racist Buffalo (1 August 2002)
How white big should Buffalo's Common Council be? (23 July 2002)
A response from Joe Golombek (1 August 2002)