September 19, 2002
Room change for the Buffalo Common Council war
Room change for the Buffalo Common Council war
What happened in court
The battle for control of Buffalo is moving from federal to state court.
On Monday U.S. District Judge John Curtin said there wasn't sufficient evidence of harm to Buffalo's black community in the Common Council redistricting and downsizing plan for him to prevent the city from putting the plan on the November 5 ballot. He didn't throw the case out entirely. He said that if anyone came up with convincing data of specific harm he'd reconsider. But for now, it's out of Federal court.
Opponents of the plan adopted unanimously by the seven whites on the Council over the unanimous objection of the six blacks on the Council stand a better chance of success in state court. Curtin was limited to looking at potential harm caused by the proposed change, which is hard to prove in advance. In state court, the attorneys for Rev. Robert Baines, Council President James Pitts and the other plaintiffs will be able to argue irregularities in procedure and violation of the city's charter, things that have already happened, as well as a host of other issues not relevant to the futurity question.
Pitts has hired former Erie County DA Edward Cosgrove to represent the six black members of the Council in the case, and that too should make for a substantial difference in what happens in state court. Cosgrove was there last Monday, but the argument for the case was made by one of the representatives for the plaintiffs in the original suit against the city, Ken Nixon. (I write "representatives" because someone told me that Nixon has a law degree but hasn't yet passed the New York Bar). Nixon seemed at once fumbling and oversure of himself. Judge Curtin three times interrupted him to ask if he didn't want to take a break to confer with his colleagues and perhaps get his argument and facts in order and each time Nixon said no, he was doing just fine. He wasn't, but by the time anybody got a chance to tell him it was too late.
Everyone in Curtin's court for last Monday's hearing got an early indication that things weren't going well when he made a surprising apology for his statement in the previous hearing that Franczyk's redistricting numbers seemed drawn out of a hat.
That was doubly odd: first because Curtin's remark was, given the situation, hardly inappropriate, and second because Franczyk's numbers pretty much were drawn out of a hat.
Franczyk's map
The redistricting map on which the Council voted was drawn by hand in wobbly and thick pencil lines on a copy of an older district map. In the September 2 Common Council meeting, Common Council President James Pitts, city attorney Darryl McPherson, and David Franczyk argued for over an hour about whether the map that was voted on, the map the mayor signed off on, and the map that was sent over to the Board of Elections were the same, and also about the source for the numbers underlying the lines in the map, both maps, or all three maps, whatever it was.
McPherson was polite and evasive and Franczyk was huffy and evasive. McPherson finally admitted that there was no documented source of the redistricting numbers; he'd just taken what Franczyk had given him. Pitts then asked Franczyk where he'd gotten the numbers. Franczyk kept implying that the numbers had been vetted before the vote by the City's Office of Strategic Planning, which wasn't the least bit true. The numbers hadn't been seen by anyone in the Office of Strategic Planning before the vote; that didn't happen until later.
For a while, the whole thing was like government by the Marx Brothers. Then it got more like the scene in Treasure of the Sierra Madre where the bandit says to Bogart, "Badges? I don't have to show you no stinking badges!" That what Franczyk was like at the end of the September 2 discussion in the Common Council chamber about the source of the numbers in his pencil-drawn map—the ugly bandit chief in that old movie. "I don't have to show you no stinking badges!"
What now?
That foolishness, which never came into play in federal court, may very well be a key part of what happens in state court.
I'm wondering if the Buffalo News will pounce on whatever state judge gets the case with the same vigor it pounced after Curtin. They started hectoring him early, first with an editorial the presumption and arrogance of which was astonishing even for them (they pretty much told him what was in federal jurisdiction and what was not) and with a heavily-slanted news story in which the people quoted most got to beat up on him for his unforgivable old offenses of having undone some of the race and gender bias in Buffalo's schools, police department and fire department.
If Pitts and the others are unsuccessful in state court, then the Franczyk resolution goes on the November 5 ballot. There has already been a good deal of work to that end. Opponents of the Franczyk plan have set up a storefront at Main and Allen and they've been mounting a grassroots voter registration and information operation. Proponents of the Franczyk have been working with a very expensive political advertising firm in Rochester for several months now. (I'm still trying to find out who put up the money for that, and how early they started writing the checks.)
Pitts is organizing a public forum on the downsizing and redistricting issues in which people will talk about both sides of the issue. That will probably take place during the first week in October. The specific date, time and place haven't been set yet. There's been a lot of screaming, yelling, posing and posturing around all this, so a rational discussion of the issues and implications before the election could do nothing but help. UB's John Sheffer will moderate.
If this does go before the voters and the Franczyk plan passes? Expect more lawsuits. If the Franczyk plan fails? Then the whole issue goes back to the Common Council and they have to come up with something else. From the way they've dealt with one another at the two most recent Council meetings, that will probably get very, very ugly.