February 6, 2003
Buffalo needs a mayor
by Bruce Jackson
Jokers
“Tony Masiello’s main problem,” a good friend of his told me a few years ago, “is that he isn’t as dumb as he thinks he is.”
I don’t know how dumb Tony Masiello thinks he is but if public behavior by public officials is any evidence of where someone lands on the dumbness scale, Tony is moving up there with the overachievers.
He shows less and less evidence of understanding what political party he belongs to, or even how the political system works. His passion for a casino across the street from city hall and adjacent to the federal courthouse is breathtakingly mindless. He’s lagged behind the public or been on the wrong side of almost every major public works and public policy issue. Last year it was a joke. But the same joke stales after too many retellings. Buffalo is a city in real trouble. A patient bleeding in the ER needs competent care, not jokes.
Party? What party?
Late in last fall’s election he endorsed George Pataki, though everyone in the business knows that that kind of endorsement gets a city bupkis—nothing. No New York governor denies cities aid because they have mayors from another party who honor their party commitments. You want to get favors from the governor, contribute to his war chest, the same way you get favors from just about any other politician. Crossing the party line to pretend to hustle votes in a town that’s not going to give them won’t do it.
Last week Masiello expressed despair, dismay and anger because Pataki refused to underwrite Mark Hamister’s attempt to make the State of New York his partner in his attempt to buy the Sabres and get control of HSBC Arena. The governor’s office for weeks has been sending out signals that Pataki wasn’t going to use public funds to bail out Adelphia stockholders in a huge deficit season.
This wouldn’t have floated even if it had come up last year, before the election, when Pataki was going about being Lord Bountiful, making whistle stops at which he kissed babies, shook hands, and promised millions for whatever local project was of dominant concern to local voters. Pataki would have promised something vague, then the promise would have vaporized when he discovered that $14 billion deficit mere days after the election. Has Children’s seen a penny of the huge bundle of cash he promised in his dog-and-pony show appearance here with service employees union boss Dennis Rivera, ending Kaleida’s attempt to fold it into Buffalo General? Basing critical community decisions on what a politician promises just before an election is the political equivalent of taking seriously lines like “Of course I’ll respect you in the morning.”
Timing
Tony Masiello has been behind public opinion on every major issue, except the wrong ones. He rolled over for Carl Paladino and the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership in their campaign to get rid of Jim Pitts and defang the Common Council. Lately, he’s been negotiating with Erie County officials to farm out the city’s comptroller’s office. Instead of protecting the city he’s giving away the keys.
By the time he got on board the Peace Bridge issue he had to run like hell just to catch up. What mayor of substance would let a small group with undisclosed personal, political and financial interests (the ten American and Canadian political appointees comprising the directors of the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority), meeting in private, decide everything about a major public works project? He joined the tail end of the parade—but he should have been leading it.
He never did figure out where to stand on shutting down Children’s Hospital and folding it into Buffalo General on High Street. He didn’t show his face at the downtown rally to save Children’s Hospital, but instead sent his wife who said he would have come but he was home preparing dinner for out-of-town visitors. Neither did he appear at Pataki’s Children’s Hospital dog-and-pony show announcing that Kaleida management was calling off the ghouls. (Maybe that second absence was a smart choice: had he turned up, he’d surely have been booed on all three local TV channels by hospital workers angry at the way he’d failed to back them in their time of need.)
Crapping out
Worst of all is the casino issue. He is still fronting for Carl Paladino and other local developers who want to put a gambling joint on Niagara Square. It is, in all regards, the most boneheaded idea I’ve seen to come out of City Hall in the 35 years I’ve lived in Buffalo. It is on the order of lobbying to get a whorehouse moved into the house next door because you’ve heard those people are good to their lawns.
Masiello set up a Casino Task Force, which he told to focus on how best to get a casino working in the heart of town, not whether or not we should have one at all. He has never had any objective study done on the impact of a downtown casino. He fiercely opposes a casino at any other location, such as the waterfront. The Buffalo News says the Task Force has met only once since Pataki and the Senecas signed their compact a year ago. Buffalo had nothing to do with anything in that compact. All it can do is beg not to get screwed too badly by all those people looking to take local money out of town by the ton.
Developers Carl Paladino and Larry Quinn, nursing home owner Mark Hamister, and Assemblyman Sam Hoyt are all members of the Task Force. But for me, the Task Force member who most exemplifies its character and function is Sergio Fornasiero, a retired construction executive, who was introduced at a recent Studio Arena event as the chairman of an organization called Coalition for a Casino in Buffalo. So far as I’ve been able to find out, the Coalition for a Casino in Buffalo consists of Sergio Fornasiero. Ten years ago Sergio formed an organization called Casino Gaming for Buffalo’s Renaissance, which may also have had just him as a member. Sergio seems like a pleasant man. He wears very good suits, is well-tanned, and is perfectly impervious to information. He says things like, “You want to know what a casino can do for Buffalo, just look at what the casinos did for Las Vegas,” and he talks at length about the first-year’s profits of the month-old casino in Niagara Falls. You want to know how seriously Tony Masiello takes citizen participation in the matter of casino gambling, go listen to Sergio Fornasiero sometime.
A guy with guts
Tony Masiello was a very scrappy high school basketball player and a good enough Canisius College basketball player to be drafted by the Indiana Pacers in 1969. Everybody who knew him in high school says he had a lot of guts.
“I used to watch him diving for the ball on a concrete court,” someone from his old neighborhood told me.
“He must have had wicked scabs on his knees,” I said.
“On his knees and on his elbows. For years. I don't think they ever healed. He had guts.”
“But it’s kind of stupid to dive onto concrete after a ball,” I said.
“That, too,” the man said. "But Tony sure had guts when he was a kid."
On the basis of his basketball fame, he got elected to Buffalo Common Council in 1971. He got elected to the State Senate in 1980 and then mayor of Buffalo in 1994. He’s a nice guy. Everybody who knows him likes him. I like him.
But he’s a lousy mayor in a city that can’t afford the luxury of a lousy mayor. Buffalo can’t afford any major mistakes because all mistakes are critical to a city in Buffalo’s condition. Driving a Cadillac Escalade or Ford Excursion, you can get a little careless; driving a Harley on wet pavement you cannot be the least bit careless.
The city is in such dire straits that last time around the Republicans couldn’t find anybody to run for the job. It wasn’t just that Tony’s business friends had given him a million bucks to stave off competition. It was also that the Republicans thought they might as well let a nominal Democrat take the heat for the disaster they were certain was about to come, plus the fact that Tony was so absent-minded about his political affiliation he might as well have been a Republican anyway.
Every four years Tony endorses Republican George Pataki, and every day of the week he dances the two-step with Republican County Executive Joel Giambra. People keep telling him that the needs of the Republican southtowns aren’t always the same as the needs of the Democratic city of Buffalo, but Tony doesn’t hear a word of it. Tony Masiello only listens to people he wants to hear from, which, coupled with his stubbornness, is perhaps his greatest fault.
Somebody’s got to do it
So Buffalo really needs a mayor. It can’t get one this year, but the year after that it can. Sam Hoyt seems to have started running several months ago. If you had any doubt, you just had to see the publicity attendant on his distribution of discretionary money after the last election. If he was handing out money after the election and calling press conferences to crow about it, it’s because he was looking ahead to next time.
Some people say Byron Brown is already getting bored in Albany, where most of what you do is what Sheldon Silver tells you to do, and has higher ambition. Brown is energetic, and he’s certainly been saner than nearly everybody else around here on the Sabres funding issue, but I don’t know if Brown has the analytical and synthesizing capabilities a good mayor needs. We’ll have to see what he has to say about things that matter over the next year.
Both Sam and Byron have a quality that Tony Masiello has lost, if he ever had it: they seem capable of listening to people outside a very small circle of pals and moneyguys and letting what they hear influence what they say next. I don’t know how good either would be as mayor, but I’m very sure either would be far better than what we’ve got now.
And then there’s Common Council President James Pitts. Some people say he’s the most qualified of them all, but he’s too divisive to govern effectively. I think Pitts is vastly underrated, in part because of the negative advertising underwritten for so long by Carl Paladino and the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership’s Political Action Committee. Jim Pitts could be on Main Street helping an old lady who’d slipped on the ice and Paladino and Partnership CEO Andy Rudnick would be pointing fingers out of the BNP office and telling visitors, “Muggings like that are rare in Buffalo.”
A friend said to me, “I hate Pitts because he’s obstructionist.”
“Like what in particular?” I asked.
“Like when he held up the Adelphia deal.”
“When he held up the Adelphia deal he was saying that the Common Council should have a chance to see it and the city should get some guarantees out of the Rigases before committing itself. He was the only guy in City Hall who had that one right.”
“Yeah, but there’s other things.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t remember.”
Whoever did that advertising job for Paladino and Rudnick should get some kind of prize to have hung that heavy a rep on a guy for things people can’t remember or never knew or never even happened.
Is there time for someone else to step on the stage and try for the job? It would have to be someone plausible. The Buffalo News seemed to have been touting Kevin Gaughan a while back, publishing his picture now and then for no good reason and referring to him frequently as “community leader.” So far as I know Kevin has never led or run anything. He produced a conference on regionalism at Chautauqua some years ago and has written several op-ed pieces since. At the Pan-American Exposition centennial parade two years ago he sat on the back of a convertible and threw away a hundred toy footballs. He made noises about running for mayor not long after that, which explained the toy footballs, but there was some kind of residency problem since he lives and has his office in Hamburg.
That sort of experience no more fits somebody for the hurly-burly of mayor in a town like this than getting drunk at three Bills games fits somebody for suiting up and getting down on the field with the big guys.
Fixing the problem, fixing the blame
I know what we shouldn’t do: we shouldn’t just sit back and wait to see who the two parties feed us. That’s what we did last time and they both fed us Tony Masiello, who seems incapable of thinking more than ten minutes into the future, whose vision of downtown Buffalo is a sea of parking lots surrounding a gambling joint owned by Indians who don’t pay any real estate or sales taxes. We need somebody who can get out in front of the hustlers, the developers, the panderers, the opportunists. Somebody who cares about the city and who is willing to tell us what he or she is going to do to make it well. We need more than a nice guy who once had what looked like a promising basketball career ahead of him.
There has been a persistent rumor that Tony Masiello has been promised a fat job in Albany that will let him earn the last years he needs to complete his pension but he’s holding out until next year so Jim Pitts won’t get to sit in his chair. We’ll know if that’s true if it happens. It might just be wishful thinking.
I’ve also heard that Tony has told a few friends that he’s thinking about running for another term. If that’s true, he understands the mess he’s created even less than I’ve indicated here. It’s like a dentist who took out the wrong tooth trying to schedule you for another appointment, saying he’s almost certain, really almost certain, he’ll get the right tooth next time.
Would the two parties go along with a fourth term for Masiello? Why not? He’s not the least bit creative so he’s infinitely pliable, and he’s given every evidence that he’ll listen to Paladino and Rudnick and the other moneyguys nearly all the time.
And us? If we put him in that office again? Or someone just like him? How stupid do they think we are? Well, look how stupid we’ve been.
Tony can’t help who or what he is. None of us can. As Little Richard put it, “You can’t help who you are. If you could you would a been somebody else.”
But we can control whom we elect to sit in that office for the next four years. We’ve learned what happens when we let other people make the choices for us. If we get four more years of this mindless stubborn inertia, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
Copyright 2003 by Buffalo Report, Inc.
