14 March 2003
David Franczyk gets his name on the resolution and Buffalo gets to climb on the hind-end of the peace parade
Bruce Jackson
It looks like Buffalo is going to join most other American major and mid-sized cities with a peace resolution after all. We're late, maybe joining the line only a few days before Bush's killing starts. But the petty politics that shattered last week's Common Council meeting may have left a space wide enough for the egos of Buffalo's pols to let us join New York, Los Angeles and all those other urban governments trying to remind Bush & Co. that American cities are in desperate shape and that his dubious war halfway around the world costing hundreds of billions of dollars isn't going to help us one bit.
Some time before the March 4 Common Council meeting, Council Member David Franczyk drafted an amendment to the peace motion scheduled for discussion that day that had been submitted by Council President James Pitts and Council Member Antoine Thompson.
Franczyk, as all other members of the Council, had been asked by one of his own staff members to join the Pitts Thompson resolution or to suggest changes to it, but he had refused. At any time prior to the March 4 Council meeting he could have added his clauses to the Pitts-Thompson motion or he could have put them forward as a substitute motion, or he could have blended them in, but he did none of that.
Even so, just before and during the March 4 Council meeting, Pitts said that he'd admit the Franczyk motion as an amendment to the resolution that he and Thompson had offered for discussion. They could just combine the best parts of the two texts.
Franczyk and his colleagues refused to let that happen. On Rosemary LoTempio's motion and Dominick Bonifacio's immediate second, Franczyk, Joseph Golombek, Mary Martino, Marc Coppola, Richard Fontana and Charley Fisher voted to table the Pitts-Thompson resolution. There was no discussion of that peace resolution or any other. It was ugly, it was angry, it was civic government at its Buffalo worst.
And now Franczyk and his companions seem to be saying that Franczyk's amendments to the Pitts-Thompson peace resolution should be voted on alone at next Tuesday's Common Council meeting. Instead of the combined resolution which they'd agreed to last week, they now want the vote be limited to Franczyk's text alone, with the original resolution to be dumped entirely.
Pitts said Thursday that he would go along with that because what really matters is getting a peace resolution passed, not who gets credit for having submitted it, and not niceties of text.
A Franczyk staff member told me last week that the reason Franczyk and some of his collaborators had voted to prevent any discussion of a peace resolution because they were afraid of being tainted by political backlash that may have hit council members who voted for a similar resolution in 1991.
They may have been frightened of losing some war-crazed voters in next year's election, but far more likely is that the same seven council members who spent much of last year working in the dump-Pitts campaign underwritten by developer Carl Paladino and Buffalo Niagara Partnership CEO Andrew Rudnick just couldn't bring themselves to sign on to this resolution coming out of Pitts' and Thompson's offices. They'll only vote for a peace resolution it if they can say its theirs.
If you live in Buffalo, this might be a good time to call or write or email your councilperson's office and say "Yes, damn you! Vote for the resolution, niceties of text don't matter and I don't care who gets credit for it. What matters is taking the right stand before it is completely meaningless."
The March 4 Buffalo Common Council meeting at which the Pitts-Thompson peace resolution was tabled is described in "Buffalo Goons," Buffalo Report, 6 March 2003.
And further in "Scoundrels and liars at the Buffalo Common Council," Buffalo Report, 6 March 2003
click here for phone numbers and email addresses for all members of the Buffalo Common Council
Copyright 2003 by Buffalo Report, Inc.