October 31, 2002
Why you should vote NO on Buffalo's Proposition #1
(Because it's just Carl Paladino and Andy Rudnick bushwhacking Jim Pitts one more time)
by Bruce Jackson
How stupid do those guys think you are? Very.
If you live in one of Buffalo's predominantly white neighborhoods, you've been barraged this past week by mailings from a group calling itself the "Committee for Council Reduction." The card tells you nothing about who the Committee for Council Reduction is. The return address is a post office box number and there is no telephone number on the card. Verizon information has no phone listing for any such committee.
The mailings say you should vote yes on city Proposition One in next week's election because abolishing all four at-large seats on the Common Council will move Buffalo in a new direction, rehire laid off cops, firemen and teachers, end the flow of jobs from the city, stop the shrinking of the city's tax base, and provide the city a fresh start.
Which is to say, by reading nothing but their own campaign literature you can learn that the people backing Proposition One, the Committee for Council Reduction, are a duplicitous bunch that banks on the notion that, on the whole, you and Buffalo's other voters are very stupid.
59 very white faces
I've received four of their mailings now, eight cards in all. It's eight cards because we get two of each, one addressed to "THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY OR CURRENT RESIDENT" and the other addressed to "THE JACKSON FAMILY OR CURRENT RESIDENT."
The first had photos of a white male firefighter, a black male cop, and a white female schoolmarm. (Click here for a fuller description of it.). The second was blue and white with a lot of compass graphics—compasses as in north, east, south, west. The third had photographs of wrapped bundles of $50-dollar bills.
The fourth, two copies of which arrived at my house on Tuesday, October 29, is the one that reveals what they're really up to and what they're really marketing and whom they're really targeting.
The side with the address says in big letters
Seniors Throughout Buffalo are Saying
"YES" to City Proposition 1. . .
That side has three photographs. One is a couple sitting next to one another and laughing. Another is a couple sitting on a table with a cheese plate and checkered tablecloth on it; they're both facing to the right with the woman pressing up against the man from behind with her arms around his belly. The third photo is a man with white hair holding a pair of pruning shears. They all seem to be in their 60s or 70s.
The other side has four photographs of people in groups, plus two larger head shots, one of a man in the lower left, the other of a woman in the upper right, both of them in their 70s or 80s. Each photograph has a caption beginning "Seniors know..." According to the card, seniors know that every dollar is important, cutting the four council seats will save a million of them, having fewer politicians will save jobs of cops and firefighters, and Proposition One will give the city of Buffalo a fresh start.
In all, there are at least 59 individuals depicted on the card.
Every single one of those 59 individuals is white. Every single one of them.
Fifty-nine white senior citizens. That's who the Committee on Council Reduction is utilizing to advertise its campaign to get rid of three African American members of Buffalo's Common Council, and especially the city's African American Common Council president.
Fifty-nine white faces.
If anybody tells you that race has no part in this, you just show them that blue card with the 59 white faces on it and ask them to tell you where are the black folks? Where are the Hispanics? Where are the Arabs? Where is anybody other than those 59 white faces?
Sure, the fight to get rid of the at-large seats on the Common Council is about power. Sure, it's about making sure nobody will interfere with the free exercise of power by a very small group of powerful developers. Sure, it's about making sure no one will get between deals cut by developers and the mayor's office. It's about all of that. It is also about race.
The other side
I ran into someone who I found out was working for or with the Committee for Council Reduction. I told him what I've just told you.
"The other side does the same thing," he said. "They just focus on black people. They just send their mailings to black people and Hispanic people. They don't send any mailings to people in white neighborhoods. That's why you never see any of their mailings. And they don't put their address on their mailings either. They're no different from us and they've got a ton of money."
I didn't make that up. A person who works for or with the Committee for Council Reduction really did say those things to me. He may even have believed what he was saying.
But not a word of what he said is true.
I live on Buffalo's West Side in an upscale neighborhood that is not entirely white but is so close it might as well be. I got a mailing from the opponents of Proposition One. So did my wife. Hers was addressed to Diane Christian, mine to Bruce Jackson. Neither mailing had "or current resident" on it. The mailing had pictures of white people and black people. Instead of slogans, it had a lot of detailed texts focusing on the issues. It had a street address printed in two places. And it had two telephone numbers you could call.
The side that wants to give the citizens of Buffalo a chance to vote on the 11-member Common Council plan that would keep an elected Council president, the plan developed by the Commission appointed by the mayor and the Council that was buried by the seven white members of the Common Council, tells you where they can be found and how to get in touch with them.
The side wanting to get rid of any citywide representatives who might stand between developers and the mayor's office hides behind a box number and slogans.
So who is the Committee for Council Reduction and who is paying its bills?
Same answer to both questions: real estate developer Carl Paladino and Buffalo Niagara Partnership CEO Andrew Rudnick and some of their associates. They've been involved in the organization and funding of the Committee for Council Reduction from the beginning. Both of them have been squabbling with and spending money trying to get rid of James Pitts for years.
Other people are involved in the Committee for Council Reduction—all seven white members of the Common Council, for example and especially Rose LoTempio—but it's Paladino and Rudnick who have been providing the big money. And Paladino who has been doing the organizing.
The Committee for Council Reduction could have remained nothing but a meaningless post office box return address on several mass mailings were it not for New York's election law, which requires that all political action committees report their contributions and expenditures.
Those reports don't tell you who runs the organization, but at least they tell you who filed the reports, which is usually the treasurers. The treasurer of the Committee for Council Reduction is Deborah Lynn Williams. So far as I can find out, she is the organization's only formal officer. Everyone else is staying hidden behind that post office box in the upper left-hand corner of the front side of their frequent mailings.
Since Deborah Lynn Williams's name is public, I was able to ask her some questions.
"Who made you treasurer?" I asked her.
"I got the call," she said.
"From God?"
"From Carl."
"How much money does your group have?"
"So far I've only written checks for $40,000."
"How much is in the bank account?"
"That's it. We're spending it as fast as it's coming in."
"Did the Partnership put money into it?"
"Not into our account."
The Committee for Council Reduction and the Buffalo Niagara Partnership PAC disclosure reports
Please bear with me for the next nine paragraphs. I have to tell you about some numbers. Numbers are dry, but they sometimes take you places nothing else can.
New York State requires political action committees to file reports disclosing contributions and expenditures 32 and 11 days before and 10 days after primary elections, and 32 and 11 days before and 27 days after general elections.
The report of the Committee for Council Reduction filed last Friday covers the Committee's activities from September 30 through October 21.
The smallest noted contribution was David Franczyk's $100 on October 21. The largest single contributor is Carl Paladino. His total contributions came to $20,000.* The other corporate contributors were Moog $3000, Delaware North Companies $5000, National Fuel Gas Supply Corp $3000 and National Fuel Gas Company $3000 (both have the same address), Protective Industries $5000 and Summer Street Capital Partners $1000**.
The Committee lists $43,628 in expenses, mostly for printing and radio spots, and $6,305.66 in outstanding liabilities, mostly for printing services.
The parallel pre-election disclosure statement filed by the Buffalo Niagara Partnership PAC on October 21, revealed, for the period October 1-21, contributions totaling $43,174.50 and expenditures totaling $46,500. Individuals and partnerships contributed $21,125***; corporate contributions totaled $22,049.50****
The Partnership's PAC listed only two payees: $10,000 to the Committee for Council Reduction and $36,500 to the U.S. Postmaster. According to the Buffalo News, all of the payments to the U.S. Postmaster were for mailings for the Committee for Council Reduction—those cards I told you about earlier and which you've probably seen in your own junk mail.
That means the single political cause the Buffalo Niagara Partnership is backing in this election is getting rid of the four at-large positions on the Buffalo Common Council.
There were two other items in that report, one of them unimportant—a refund of $175 from the Friends of Francine Delmonte in Lewiston. The other item was a note appended to the report addressed to "To Whom it May Concern." The notes said that the PAC had received $15,000 on October 22 from the 43 x 79 Political Action Committee.
43 x 79 (the numbers are Buffalo's map coordinates) was one of the major underwriters—along with the Buffalo Niagara Partnership and Carl Paladino—of the attempt to get rid of James Pitts in the 1999 primary, so it seems safe to assume that their funds were dedicated to the same end this time.
If you've stuck with all these numbers thus far...
...then you may have noticed a curious discrepancy.
Not a penny of the $10,000 the Buffalo Niagara Partnership gave to the Committee for Council Reduction nor a penny of the $36,500 it spent on postage to mail the Committee for Council Reduction's cards appears anywhere in the disclosure statement of the Committee for Council Reduction filed last Friday.
That means that the Committee for Council Reduction got $47,373 in direct contributions it did report plus the $46,500 from the Buffalo Niagara Partnership it did not report, for a total of $93,873.
It means that if you just saw the disclosure report of the Committee for Council Reduction you couldn't possibly know how much Carl Paladino, the Buffalo Niagara Partnership and their associates were spending to convince you to vote the way they want you to vote. You could only know the real amount if you happened to come across every disclosure report in which there are indications of money flowing in that direction.
I came across only two disclosure reports—the Committee's and the Partnership's—and they jointly tell of nearly $100,000 dedicated to influencing your vote. If the Committee's disclosure form doesn't disclose $46,500 from the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, what other services is it having paid for by other individuals or organizations?
What are we to make of the fact that the Partnership says in its report that it wrote a check to the Committee for $10,000 and the Committee's report indicates no such check ever reached its treasurer? Is it just a fluke of the bookkeeping? A mere technicality? Is someone lying? Is the reporting system set up in a way that gives people like you and me the impression that we're being told what's going on when in fact the really important money movements are as hidden as they always were?
Buffalo history keeps coming back
So now we have reports suggesting that the primary organizers and big backers of this campaign to get rid of Common Council James Pitts and the other at-large members of the Common Council are the same folks who ran David Franczyk against James Pitts in the Democratic primary for Common Council president in 1999.
In that election, Carl Paladino gave David Franczyk $25,000, the Buffalo Niagara Partnership gave him $15,000 and 43 x 79 gave him $47,500.
Paladino and Rudnick and their associates have been trying to get rid of Jim Pitts for a long time. They couldn't do it directly in 1999, so now they're apparently trying to do it by restructuring the city's entire government.
Carl Paladino, described two years ago as the largest private landowner in downtown Buffalo, has had great success with Buffalo mayors: neither Jimmy Griffin nor Tony Masiello seems to have ever denied him space for a parking lot that would make one of his office buildings more profitable, even when there were legitimate businesses vying for the same space that would have been far more productive for the city. He has been trying to defang the Common Council for more than a decade. I don't know when his vendetta against James Pitts began; I know only that Paladino has spent a lot of money trying to get rid of Pitts.
And I also know that this isn't the first time he's backed a charter revision that would get rid of people in government who got in his way. He did the same thing a decade ago, in 1992, only that time it went nowhere. This time, the seven white members of the Common Council threw out the 11-member reduction plan produced by their own commission, and came up with a plan that would create a Council that would be far more malleable and docile than the present Council, and probably far more easily and cheaply bought.
It's not just that Pitts has several times put a name on his financial deals that rankles Paladino. It's how up front Pitts has been in articulating his opinions. "You sit on top of the City of Buffalo like a vulture on dry bones," Pitts once shouted at him in a row over Paladino's push to tear down more buildings for more surface-level parking lots. I don't think Carl Paladino has ever forgotten that description of his daily work.
That, perhaps more than anything else, is what Proposition One is really about, why we're getting all those postcards with the photographs of the 59 white faces.
* Paladino gave through several of his corporations: Swan Group $5000, Mohawk Group Limited Partnership $5000, Niagara Group $2000, Seneca Street Properties $1000, Ellicott Group $5000, Staats Street Group $1000, J-P Group $1000.
**Summer Street's check was signed by Frank McGuire. McGuire is partners with Gerald Lippes and Larry Quinn in the 655 Main Street office building. Their principal tenant is the Buffalo Niagara Partnership.
***Randall Clark $1000, Richard Garman $5000, Gerald Lippes $2500, Reginald Newman II $10,000, Howard Zemsky $2500, and "unitemized" $125.
****Conax Buffalo Technologies $1000, GIT $2500, Hamister Group of Companies $2,500, International Motion Control $5000, Jaeckle Fleischmann & Mugal $2000, Lippes, Silverstein, Mathias & Wexler $2500, Maid of the Mist Corporation $5000, "unitemized" $1549.