January 6, 2003
Peace Bridge Chronicles #61The Buffalo Report Interview:
Vincent "Jake" Lamb:
"I'm listening to people"
The Peace Bridge expansion project nowby Bruce Jackson
how we got here
Three years ago, the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority (which almost always refers to itself by the alias "Peace Bridge Authority" ) set about to expand its truck-handling capacity by building a steel bridge adjacent to the 75-year-old steel bridge currently connecting the city of Buffalo, New York, to the town of Fort Erie, Ontario.
They decided to duplicate the design and technology of the old bridge, a puzzling decision, given the huge advances in bridge construction technology in the eight decades separating the two projects. Their plan, developed with no public or outside professional input, was also costly, ugly and environmentally defective.
The Authority ran into a firestorm of public opposition that culminated in an order from Judge Eugene Fahey forcing them to obey New York environmental law, which they had vigorously and creatively attempted to avoid. Fahey told them they had to mount a full environmental impact study. (For all the details, visit The Peace Bridge Chronicles.)
Up to that point, the primary spokespersons for the Authority were the two general managers or whoever was chairman of the board at the time (the chair bounces back and forth across the river/border annually). Sometimes Andrew Rudnick, president and CEO of the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership (né the chamber of commerce) served as the spokespersons' spokesperson. In general, their attitude was, "We'll do what we damned well please; we don't have to pay attention to what you think; we're not going to listen to what you have to say."
Judge Fahey's order changed that de jure and de facto.
What Jake Lamb is up to
Vincent "Jake" Lamb, who has been directing the Peace Bridge Expansion Project for the past 18 months, is perhaps the most inexhaustible listener connected with any Niagara Frontier public works project in living memory. He's hired an army of outside technical and design consultants; he's been meeting with citizens, public officials and groups on both sides of the border; and he's been conducting a series of large public meetings in Buffalo and Fort Erie. He's put a good deal of technical material on line at the project's web site, http://www.peacebridgex.com.
The Peace Bridge expansion project is now in its scoping phase, which means they are deciding where they want the new bridge to go and figuring out what kinds of landings the various options might require on either side of the Niagara River. When they've finished scoping, they'll move into the environmental impact study (EIS) itself. The EIS examines everything connected with a project: what it does to air, water, human communities.
Before construction can begin, Canadian and American federal, state, provincial, city and town agencies must all agree that the EIS has shown the project isn't harmful. The Canadians are expected to sign off on anything, as they did last time, since almost all of the potential the social and other environmental damage from the bridge project will happen on the Buffalo side. Last time the U.S. Coast Guard was the lead agency for permitting the project on this side and it totally ignored any concerns except those of the Public Bridge Authority. This time the agencies will be paying very close attention to local concerns and needs, in large part because this time the process is open to the public.
Workshops
At a public workshop at the WNED studios the morning of December 7th, the Peace Bridge Expansion Project's technical consultants discussed their short list of recommendations of which alternative sites should be retained for further study—four different alignments at the present site and an entirely new site near Grand Island. (Their report, Alternative Screening Process Technical Analysis Report: Technical Recommendations 04 December 2002, is online at http://www.peacebridgex.com/studies_reports.asp), after which the public was invited to comment on and then vote on those recommendations and on other sites it thought ought to be included. Several Buffalo Report correspondents discuss on that public meeting in "Peace Bridge Expansion: It's NIMBY Time," Buffalo Report 16 December 2002.
politicians and their controllers
Several of the key politicians involved in Peace Bridge affairs have moved elsewhere since all this started:
—Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who argued passionately for a glorious piece of public architecture, has been replaced by Senator Charles Schumer, who argues with less passion and who seems willing to settle for something that works pretty well.
—Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who wasn't particularly interested in the Peace Bridge, was replaced by Senator Hilary Clinton, who isn't particularly interested in the Peace Bridge either. She occasionally comes out in favor of something generically good being done, rather on the order of being in favor of highway beautification and well-maintained parks, and recently she came out for tightened security along the entire Canadian border. Clinton isn't interested in city life. She's been no help in this process and isn't likely to be.
—Congressman John LaFalce, who energetically backed the twin span, has been gerrymandered out of office.
—Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello remains as passive on the whole issue as he's been all along. Masiello does what Mark Hamister, Andrew Rudnick and the rest of the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership tell him to do, unless something else comes along to startle him into transient local responsibility. His continuing failure to demand excellence in this major public works project continues to astonish.
The board members of the Buffalo and Niagara Public Bridge Authority have changed a little bit since this all began, but not much. The Canadian members are the same. The few changes are on the American side. All the Board members seem anxious to get the trucks moving. At the most recent meeting of the Binational Peace Bridge Task Force, PBA Chairman Paul Koessler argued eloquently for swift acceptance of the Memorandum of Understanding between the PBA and the City. Afterwards, I asked him why he was so pushy about that, since that seemed contrary to his usual laid-back style. The Canadians, he said, were in despair that anything would ever happen on this side and the MOU was of both practical and symbolic importance. The MOU was passed and signed, and the process has moved along.
The day before the December 7 workshop, Lamb and I talked about the present state of the project. Two weeks later, after he had met in Washington with Homeland Security and other agency officials, we spoke again.
—B.J.
Scoping
LAMB: We're taking the results from Workshop 2 and using them. We used those results to focus what we've done since Workshop 2. But we have more information now in certain areas. Especially on those locations that we've worked on. We've got new iterations of them. We had a traffic diversion analysis done. We have more information on the air inventory that we were doing. And when we focused on these alternatives, for instance, at the existing location, we also started developing information about the number of parcels that might be affected and the consist of those parcels, meaning how many are commercial, how many are residential.
We have the GIS mapping that shows land use and we're able to get more information about it. We've been carrying on more meetings with the city representatives. That has developed into a cooperative working relationship. We have meetings that take place whenever we have more information to share.
We have our consultants coming in and developing plaza alternatives and talking about how they're going to function with the street systems, with I-190. We even have estimated how much park land would be returned, or how much land would be vacated for park land use under each one of those scenarios, each of those iterations that we've developed at the existing locations. All of that information will be shared with the public on Saturday.
We had an initial screening at Workshop 2. We had always intended to have a second shot at that. I was surprised that using the criteria that I set up that none of them technically met that criteria. A lot of people said to me, "Then, Jake, knock them off the table." I said "No, we really can't do that. We really need to have a second and maybe more, better understood process for actually narrowing down and finishing the scoping process before we go into more detailed examination."
Scoping is to identify those alternatives that we want to consider in further detail and analyze in the preliminary design and draft EIS phase. So in the scoping phase we do only enough work to identify issues, environmental issues, public concerns, and enough information about formatting the alignments, configurations, the tentative location of these plazas, to say that we know enough by intuition, common sense and the information we have gathered to say "We don't have enough information to knock it out. We want more information to compare it with the other alternatives."
Tentative recommendations and changing minds
We're recommending what we should carry forward. These recommendations don't have anything to do yet with whether it's a replacement span, a companion bridge or what type of bridge it is—that is yet to be decided, and any one of those options is available to every one of these recommendations. That needs to be clear.
We're recommending, for instance, that we retain for further consideration and evaluation shifting the US plaza to the north to basically vacate as much as possible of the existing footprint. It's important to understand that. Now that includes what we've formally described as EBNP1, EBNP2 and the iterations of that that we've developed since Workshop 2. So it isn't like here is an alternative that's what we're going to look at and we're not going to wiggle it around or change the configuration. As a matter of fact, if we end up with an alternative to the north, if that's chosen ultimately, it will probably be not be exactly as anything that you see Saturday. It will be something that's evolved from that. Because as we are focusing on that location and that particular alternative, we try and manipulate it.
We're trying to make connections to 190 different than they are now. Not only are we working on vacating the existing plaza, we're also eliminating some of those high ramps there that would interfere with the vision or perspective from the park area. But as soon as we do this, it means that incoming traffic is on the residential side. So we said, "Let's try to develop something to put it further away from the residential side."
So you see how these things evolve: through development, development, development, development.
People say to me, "Jake, you changed your mind." And you know what this process is all about? It's all about changing your mind. We changed our mind to do this process, didn't we?
When you go through a process to come to a solution, whether your really recognize it or not, you are going through a series of tentative 'what ifs' in your brain, or sometimes you write them down. And you're weighing them. And sometimes you say, "This looks good." But then later on it doesn't look as good as it did. That's what this process is about.
Shared border management
One of our recommendations is for what we call shared border management. The idea is to move some or all of what I'll call our border barrier operations, to Canada: all the customs, immigration and security issues. There's some headway being made in that regard.
The Commercial Vehicle Processing Center in Fort Erie was always designed to handle some form of US primary inspection. There are already some activities going on over there that help move operations on the US side. But the Authority could accommodate a measured—I say measured because I can't broadly predict anything that the feds would want to do—moving of primary US inspections for commercial now, or within some reasonable time. Which means what you would have on the US is secondary inspection. That, hopefully, would meant that we would need less land. That would affect every one of these alternatives, right? So when we show these and we talk about them, an overriding factor is shared border management.
We haven't focused on trying to work this out in detail yet. If we knew what the probability of that or the certainty of it, we could come up with a number of alternatives. For instance, there's no duty free in these drawings, there's no welcome center. We just haven't thought through any of this yet.
Maybe the security forces will want some kind of Checkpoint Charlie on our side. We'd have to work that through and that would affect all of our thinking.
Buffer zones
We've talked about buffer zones for a long time. We can't size them yet. But we recognize there's an interface with residential or commercial properties and there certainly is justification to consider some kind of transitional land use. You've heard me say this at meetings. As we focus more on these plans we have to be thinking about that. We have to be thinking about the existing land use and how what we do affects it, and what the city may have in mind for changing land use.
For instance, they may want to change land use to commercial in some areas that are now not commercial and in areas that are considered to be adversely affected by our construction. We need to work together with the city and the public to develop that kind of thing.
Other sites
Let's take a look at this from a common sense standpoint. We've got thirty alternatives at six locations. We know a Niagara Falls location doesn't work. Forget it. We know that Lake Erie bridge doesn't work. Forget it. We know that Niagara International Railroad Bridge is not an alternative to look at.
If we put a bridge anywhere close to where 198 hits 190, we're forced into connecting to 198 to make an interchange with 190, and of course rebuilding that whole thing. It's not an interstate system. We are on an interstate system now. We're trying to fix the congestion problem on a US interstate that's the equivalent of a Canadian interstate, the QEW. Even if you said, "No trucks on 198," which a lot of people want to have happen, you're still going to generate more traffic on 198 because of the autos. More traffic means queues on 198 because the intersections between 190 and Delaware Avenue and Elmwood Avenue, and all the others, were not designed for interstate traffic.
I know a lot of work and a lot of effort went into these ideas but they all fall on this one point.
Let me say this: I'm not interested in this really getting into a full-blown public discussion because it really gets us off-track. Theoretically the time may come someday that somebody wants to get rid of 198. Will that ever happen? I don't know. You don't have an east-west road. It would seem logical to replace it with something somewhere. I don't know where that is. You could think, "I'll dead-end the 198 somewhere." Well, that's almost the same thing as saying you're getting rid of it. It would be an access road to the park. That would completely change the nature of the traffic patterns and you'd have a new demand for something to replace it. But that's way beyond where we're at.
So I say, they just don't make sense from a transportation standpoint.
Tonawanda is a potential connection between the QEW and the Interstate system's 290 and 190. We know that about 80% of the trucks on the border crossing—that's Lewiston-Queenston and the Peace Bridge—are through truck traffic. They're destined for areas beyond our immediate region.
The other 18-20% of the truck traffic is local. When I say local I don't mean just Buffalo and Fort Erie. It could be Tonawanda. Some of the Tonawanda local would come over the Lewiston-Queenston. I'm talking about the local communities that are within reasonable commercial service distance of the existing bridge.
That's an important factor. When we talk about economic impact and people say "It doesn't have any economic impact on us," certainly it's hard to argue that the 80% is good for you, except for the general welfare of the two countries. But the 18-20%, that's another matter. I think that's important from the standpoint of being essential for what happens here.
JACKSON: Nobody's ever talked about that, that I know of. For two years we tried to get the PBA and the Partnership say what the truck traffic did to us other than harm and they never came up with anything.
LAMB: Maybe there's a lot of other things that should be talked about.
We did a traffic diversion analysis. We created a model for the entire Niagara River. Our traffic engineers worked with the Ministry of Transport Ontario and New York State Department of Transportation. They have transportation models for planning their transportation networks. They're cranking in population information, demographics; they crank in economic activities, projections, land use, and they update it with as much reliable information as possible so that they can predict in some reasonable fashion impacts of changes in traffic patterns or even developments that are considered. It also helps them when they do their air quality containment analyses. It's damned good information. But it ends at the shoreline. What we did was work to connect them.
So we've connected them. And we've said, "Take the traffic projections in the future and do a what-if analysis on how much traffic is coming across one of the bridges." We have existing traffic at each one of the bridges—Rainbow, Whirlpool, Lewiston-Queenston for trucks and autos. We have scenario 1, where we expand at the existing Peace Bridge, and it shows expansions at the other bridges. And we have scenario 2 and 3, which are basically what happens if we did make a connection up at Tonawanda or even going across Grand Island. It's the same effect; they're so close to one another. We know Grand Island hates it, they don't want anything on Grand Island. We know that.
Crossing at Tonawanda
Scenario 3 says we don't let any trucks at the Peace Bridge. Say they all have to go up to Tonawanda. Well, we need at least six lanes up there then. And at the existing Peace Bridge we need three lanes. Possibly you'd need a fourth one for functional reasons, but in terms of traffic, and this is strictly by the numbers, the traffic projections would mean that if you built this other bridge and took all the trucks up there, and cars would be allow to go up there as well, you would have no more traffic 30 years out at the Peace Bridge than you have now.
Well it's a compelling reason to say "that's an alternative that has potential." It has a lot, a lot of drawbacks. Bigtime drawbacks. There are serious issues. But you have redundancy from the standpoint of national security. You've got more flexibility on the border. You've got more alternatives for the convenience of more people, like in the northtowns and the upper edges of Buffalo. It's a potential catalyst for economic development for the state and province because you're facilitating the movement of that 80% to other areas. It's an alternative for future traffic growth. We need to do more so we can compare it to these other alternatives.
One of the major, major issues has to do with jurisdiction. It's an issue that we have to examine in detail to determine. We know that we have to get legislation from the United State Congress, Canadian Parliament, as well as Provincial and State legislation to authorize the Peace Bridge to build up there.
You've heard about the franchise. The franchise doesn't give authority to build. It prevents somebody else from building. And it's only on the Canadian side. That's a protective shield, if you will, from competition, but it doesn't give the Peace Bridge Authority any entitlement.
There are other things. It's not on the long-range master plan. I think if the need and warrants were demonstrated it would be reasonable to expect it would overcome. And it's a high cost and there's a good chance that because of the environmental considerations a tunnel might be the only viable option. Because you have Niagara Park on the Canadian side, a very sensitive area. You have sensitive ecological issues in the river itself, and if you put any piers out there it's going to be a major problem. Even the type of tunnel you would build, you would have to bore from the shore, not dig a trench and sink something because that would be even worse than a bridge. So there are lots of problems associated with it.
Nonetheless, I think it's an essential aspect of our process that we take a look at it as an alternative to answer the questions that are asked about the existing location. It's the only one of all the offsite alternatives—when I say the only one, the idea of connecting QEW with the interstate system—that makes transportation sense. The rest of them really don't.
We're recommending we retain it for further consideration. Does that mean we're recommending that you build it? No. We're not recommending any of them at this point.
Eminent domain
A lot of questions have been asked, by the way, about how eminent domain works. People have to understand that if we do need to take your property, we would first come to you with independent appraisals of what the market value of your sale. You have a right of refusal, in which case we would go perhaps into eminent domain as a last resort. Eminent domain process guarantees you, within our structure and its capabilities, which I recognize has limitations and there are debates about, a fair market price through the court system. It also protects the public from the point of not paying too much for your property, which I think is an important element of eminent domain that I think some people haven't focused on here.
The idea of a project of this nature with the amount of property that may be required demands that justification in terms of public need to spend that money, and justification that the money spent is sufficiently and fairly spent. And that goes to avoiding any sweetheart deals on any land acquisitions or indeed even configuring a solution in anyway to sweetheart somebody. That just ain't gonna happen, at least as long as I'm involved in this thing. It's not gonna happen.
So it's important for the public to realize it isn't just a one-sided thing. I think that eminent domain is always thought of as, "My god, you don't want to give that power to the Peace Bridge Authority." But we've put all kinds of restrictions and limitations on it that we recognize are needed to build this project, and at the same time there's protection built in the for the public good. As you know, the Council approved the MOA. They had some changes that they wanted to make. The Peace Bridge Authority on the 3rd of December accepted and endorsed all those changes, so the MOA is getting ready to be signed.
One thing was, they wanted some calendar time limit when eminent domain would
JACKSON: expire?
LAMB: Not necessarily expire, but if we didn't initiate eminent domain within 5 years of the ROD it would expire. I think the logic in back of that is "Look, indeed it's for this project. Indeed, if we are going to move forward with the project after the record of decision we don't want this sitting around. Because if nothing happens within 5 years there's probably something wrong." This is acceptable, we understand that. We have no problem with that.
If we have to do eminent domain, we have to initiate that within 5 years. That doesn't mean that it's all finished then.
There was a neighborhood meeting at which a young boy up in the community center had one of the most intelligent questions. I'm not saying there weren't other intelligent questions asked, but he said, "Why are you going to take my house? And my friends. I have friends. And there are old people who live there in the neighborhood. And what are we going to do? Why are you taking my property?" I feel a responsibility to answer that question.
First of all, I told him, that we have to consider alternatives that don't take your property. That's why we're looking at all of these. We have to take a look at alternatives that don't through recycling continue to do this. We have some alternatives that don't take his house.
It's a legitimate question. We have a responsibility to look at alternatives and options so that in the end if that boy's home has to be taken, we need to be able to go in that room where I went and look at him and his family and others and say, "Listen. We've looked at all of these alternatives. This is what we have found. We've done this with public participation and all this technical help and here are the reasons why for the public need we have to take your property."
We're not anywhere near there now. We have to go through the process to be there.
The air we breathe
We've got a draft air inventory report. It's going through a review by state agencies, and that's why I haven't released it yet. But I am talking to some of the findings of that inventory because of the importance it has to the public discussion.
The other night I said I was going to show it on Saturday but I'm not. That's because I thought we were close to the end of this review, but I was informed yesterday we were not. But I'll just briefly go through what I did show the other night.
We're going to meet all the guidelines, the study requirements. Actually, we're going beyond the study requirements. That's a sensitive issue in some areas. We felt it was important for the community to make an inventory of existing conditions with respect to air quality. And we went out and we put monitors in upwind and downwind. What we found was there's variations. That's obvious because the wind blows in all directions. And we used the closed meteorological station available, which is right down near the rowing club instead of the airport, which we could have relied on. We were trying to get local study information. And we did.
It's reflected especially on this date that happens to be very close to 9/11. You see it ticked up a lot at the crossing. So it's good stuff. Sometimes a certain type of process puts out a chemical that's nowhere else that's a fingerprint, so you can tell where it's coming from. We didn't find any fingerprints but we did find elemental carbon slightly higher downwind from where the diesel exhausts are.
We happen to have taken measurements before 9/11. The estimated average plaza contribution to downwind particulate matter in relation to the total quantity downwind represented about 6% of what was in it, what was at Busti avenue or downwind of Busti avenue. Before 9/11 the density of particulate matter we were getting was 2.2.
Then it went to 12.7. It went to 12.7 in one day, even with far less traffic. Why? [I made a gesture of holding up my hand like a cop stopping traffic.] Yes.
That, in and of itself, confirms that when you have efficient transportation it's good for a lot of things. It's good for moving people and goods more efficiently. But it's also good for our environment from a standpoint of pollutants that are emitted in the air.
So a crucial part of what we're doing is asking , "What's that operation going to be and how fast are we going to be able to move traffic across the border?
We continued these measurements and since then, even with the drop in traffic, we've had an increase in the total concentrations of particulate matter blown into the neighborhood. That raises additional concerns about making sure that we end up doing more to make our operations more efficient at the border, so that we can get back down to a more reasonable number. And it also raises the issue of we better look at that other site alternative, just to make sure.
In Canada it went from 4.4 to 10.1.
Over the distance of a block there was a substantial reduction in the PM. Dissipation, and more importantly, buildings knock down PM. Especially diesel PM for some reason. Buildings, trees, birms, walls.
People don't like walls. I mentioned it the other night and somebody said, "Take walls out of there. We don't want any walls." Well, I don't want any walls either. But walls are often used as a buffer instead of taking property. I said, "We're going to keep it on the table so we can show you what the impacts would be of this if that were the case."
At least we recognize the sensitivity for Buffalo. This helps us understand that this material does dissipate. We haven't done any analysis yet. We will do it for every option we get down to considering seriously. And most importantly is the throughput time. This traffic's coming through here: is it going three miles an hour or is it going 40 miles an hour? They're the variables that go into the model. And in discussions with our science guys.
What next?
JACKSON: What happen after tomorrow [the December 7th public meeting]?
LAMB: We're hoping that the results of tomorrow's meeting, where we ask the public "Give us your five." We've given our five recommendations, in addition to the shared border management. We're hoping that they kind of confirm our recommendations. There may be exceptions, and there will be naturally. We will finalize our scoping report. We'll bring it back out to the public. Distribute it. And we'll have another meeting to say okay, we've got all this information, this is where we're going with it now. We have defined the alternatives to take further on.
There is always the possibility that we can resurrect something that was discarded before as we develop new information. People have to understand that. And they have to understand that when I say at the end of the meeting, "Here are the things we're going to do," and you look at it that day and you don't come back for three or four months and you can say "Hey, what happened?" It may look different. You have to understand that it's a dynamic process. We'll show how we've gotten from there to here. And we'd like you to be there as we're doing it. But if you're not, don't be surprised if it looks different.
We will go to the Partnering Group [City of Buffalo, Town of Fort Erie, Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority] for ratification. In the case of the Tonawandas, we will ask the town of Tonawanda to ratify considering that. We've got indications already that they support the idea. Grand Island absolutely is against it. They're going to bring an army down, they say, on Saturday. When I went up there, they kind of beat me up. I see it as part of the process. It's necessary for people to get up and say, "Hey, you're out of your mind. Don't do this."
Then we go into the preliminary design and draft environmental impact study phase.
JACKSON: When do you settle on one location, one alignment?
LAMB: We go through iterations of examining these and the things that we developed from them. We're going to meet with the public all the time. I want as many public meetings as people want. I'll go to them and explain as best as I can what we're doing.
Then let's say we have these five locations, these five that I'm talking about. Maybe about March or April we'll say, "Hey, look: we've got more information now to lead us in a direction that says this one and this one." Maybe have this discussion again, but now about three. Maybe we take three right to the end.
And at the end, we say, "We got one that we recommend. That's our preferred alternative." We've got input from the agencies, the permitting agency, approval agency. There's a reasonable potential of being able to build it from a jurisdictional standpoint, money standpoint. Community input is there and to the extent that there is consensus and at least acknowledgment, acceptance of that alternative—you'll never get 100% —being the alternative that we go forward with. That's it.
I want to get there.
JACKSON: And that's when you go to design?
LAMB: No. We would have a public hearing, a formal public hearing. All these meetings I'm having now are not formally required. But there's a requirement for a formal public hearing. We would have a formal public hearing and then start the paper process of getting a record of decision that normally takes something like six months, and that's hurried. What we would try to do is expedite that, make it sooner, and when the record of decision comes, you're safe in going ahead with the design. It's a judgment call on whether or not you go ahead with the design before that. You could. And in many cases agencies do go ahead, especially if they've worked enough with the permitting agencies and there's like,"Hey, everybody's kind of satisfied, we don't have any wrinkles on this thing."
And if there was a repeat of what happened last time with one of the major senators, like Moynihan, saying, "Hey, look: don't do this. Coast Guard, don't give the permit"? We don't want that situation to develop. We're going to do everything we can by engaging the senators and congressional delegation and the rest, and the public, so hopefully that won't happen. That gives you less uncertainty. So you say, "My judgment call is I can go ahead with the design." But I need that ROD to really trigger certain things—serious discussion on right of way acquisitions, for instance. Because you need some lead time to get that done, and a lot of work would have to be done on the first part of the design to finalize exactly the properties that were needed.
I want the public input. I like those neighborhood meetings, like that kid getting up, people who live there being able to get up and ask questions. It's like everybody sitting in a living room and talking, talking about the subject. That to me is vital to the process. It's more important than meeting with 400 people or 300 people. Not that that isn't important. That is important. But it's trying to inform them. Trying to let them understand number one how the process works and number two that they do matter, their points of view do matter.
Why am I doing what I'm doing on Saturday? Because I'm listening to people.
(We continued our conversation on December 19th)
Homeland Security
JACKSON: How does the Homeland Security affect us?
LAMB: I think the formation of Homeland Security is a positive set of circumstances. I think it's a positive thing for all of us, and for the project itself, because it's bringing together and integrating Customs Service along with INS and Transportation Security Administration all under one roof so the work will be integrated and coordinated. I think that's a very positive sign that we can expect better definition and probably more efficient plans of action being produced because they're organized instead of having three independent bodies.
JACKSON: This will save you time?
LAMB: I think it will save us time. I have very positive reaction to meetings that we had in Washington last week. [Peace Bridge General Manager] Steve Mayer and [BFEPBA board member] John Lopinski and I met with officials of the INS, Customs and Transportation Security Administration. I got the distinct impression that they've got their act together and they're developing what looks to be a plan of action.
They're focusing on action plans that I think are going to make the border operations more efficient. That obviously is a goal of theirs. They want to move people and commerce—that's what FAST is all about, you know, this new program FAST: Free and Secure Trade. The idea is to make trade easy to get across the border, commerce easy to get across the border and people easy to get across the border. So they're on the right track, I think.
JACKSON: So you think this might accrue to our benefit rather than screw things up further?
LAMB: Yes. I think it's the precursor of things to come and those things to come I think are going to manifest themselves in a more efficient border operation. It's obviously due to the cooperation that's going on between the Canadian and US border officials.
Bruno Freschi
JACKSON: When you were in Washington you also saw Bruno Freschi. Can you say a little about that?
LAMB: It was my first meeting with Bruno. He's been out of Buffalo for some time. We did talk about the Freschi plan. He's fleshing it out for me with details about it that either I hadn't heard or had forgotten about when I first came to Buffalo. He's going to send me some more information to clarify and elaborate why he and T.Y. Lin believe that their plan represents a preferable solution for us at the Peace Bridge. When I say "plan" I'm talking about the bridge, I'm not talking about the plaza locations.
JACKSON: You're talking about their curved single-pylon—
LAMB: —Yes, their curved cable-stayed bridge. Their scheme had a plaza that we questioned the practicality of, but when I talk about them demonstrating or clarifying their plan it would be the bridge itself, not so much the relationship that they had developed between the bridge and the plaza.
JACKSON: Things have moved a long way in plaza thinking since Bruno was involved in this.
LAMB: Sure. So we don't tie that early concept of plaza to their total concept. We divorce the two of them. I think it was a positive meeting for me. I'm going to have further discussions with Bruno. He's interested in giving me more and better information and I'm interested in receiving it.
Making the final decision
JACKSON: Finally, some questions about the December 7 public meeting. One of the questions that a lot of people had after it was over was, how do all these differing opinions impact the final decision?
LAMB: They all impact the final decision in one way or another. The whole idea of public involvement is to consult with the public. Let them know what's going on and let them weigh in with their opinions, suggestions, objections. And I think we're accomplishing that. What you saw on Saturday was a large outpouring of feelings, especially from Grand Island folks that got together and they wanted to let us all know, let you know, let everybody in Buffalo and the region know, and certainly let the Peace Bridge authority know, how they feel about certain alternatives that may impact directly the citizens there. That's what this is all about.
That's input for the process. These meetings are not decision meetings. They're input meetings. Meetings that give the people the opportunity to find out what's going on and weigh in and give their viewpoints. We take seriously what their viewpoints are.
JACKSON: How do you correct for people loading up a meeting?
LAMB: We don't. There's no way you can correct and I think it's foolish to try and correct. What we look at are examples. I don't discount anything. What we had on December 7 was an expression of viewpoints about certain alternatives. When it comes to how we react to that, we look for issues that have been raised of substance. It's one thing to say, "I don't like this plan, get it out of my back yard." It's another to discuss issues, concerns of substance that drive that feeling. And questions that are raised on technical issues on any one of the alternatives, alternatives for example that were suggested by the group. The group came down basically to suggesting put it somewhere else, put it at the International Railroad site. There was not a lot of discussion about what the merits would be of putting it International Railroad. It was more, "We don't want it where we are. Let's put it somewhere else."
We appreciate that, we certainly have to be cognizant of viewpoints and opinions, but in terms of technical evaluation we look for issues of substance that we would have to address. Such as environmental issues—noise, air, the public health issues, the archaeological issues. And some of them were brought up by individuals. They're important even though we're aware of most, if not all, of the issues that were raised by people who got up and talked about the alternative.
So it's input, it's important input, and what I'm doing is, I'm reviewing, it all. I took notes on every one of the persons that spoke in the public meeting as well as I could. And I'm reviewing the video of the public input portion to make sure I haven't missed any points of substance that were raised.
But what I think is demonstrated here is that you cannot rely on these meetings to be representative of a decision by the public or even a comprehensive direction, let's say, that represents the public in the region. Because you could take any one of these workshops and mobilize or organize a large group to push for a certain issue or concern. That's very important and we need to listen to that, and I'm not saying that it shouldn't be done. We recognize it and want those things to come out earlier in the process instead of later.
But it's clear that it may not represent the public, the full spectrum of the region. We hope to get more diversity in these meetings. There were not as many Canadians as we would have liked. There were not as many people from Tonawanda as we would have liked.
We're interested in viewpoints from all the communities, and when they're all taken together and the public and ourselves can focus on what's best for the common good, we're going to end up with a better decision. That's kind of how I feel about it. I thought it was a great workshop and I thought it demonstrated the very point that I'm making now. As I said before, these are input, not decision meetings.
JACKSON: That's an important distinction.
LAMB: It really is. And it certainly does not minimize the input from the public or minimize the impact on us and on the Peace Bridge Authority of that input. It's all important. But it's quite clear that the decision process will be exactly what we said it would be. We've shown that we need technical input, we need input from the public, we need input from the agencies, we need the recommendations and analyses that the consultant team makes, and we need all of that combined to give to the decision-makers.
JACKSON: And the decision makers are...
LAMB: The decision makers are the partnering group. The Peace Bridge Authority is one of the partners. The others are the city of Buffalo and Fort Erie. In the case of an alternative like Tonawanda, we would go to the town of Tonawanda or any other town—in this case, that alternative is in the town of Tonawanda and town of Fort Erie—and we would ask the town of Tonawanda to weigh in officially with their viewpoints in respect to retaining that alternative in the next phase.
copyright 2002 by Buffalo Report, Inc.
