8 April 2004
Bruce Jackson
Killer Entropy, or Triumph of the Will at the Peace Bridge
The public speaks. Who cares?
Cynics worried that the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority would use the two public forums it set up to provide public input on bridge and plaza expansion issues to produce votes it wanted and then it would go ahead and do what it wanted to do anyway. PBA officials said, no, no, that’s paranoid; we’re listening to what people say. We’re responding to what people think.
I don’t know what the plan or intention was in the beginning, but more and more it appears that the cynics had it right.
The expansion project's Bi-national Civil Advisory Committee (BNCAC) with 120 named members, and the workshops in which anyone was free to participate, seem to have been turned into little more than publicity machines, instruments to ratify what the PBA and its consultants want to do anyway. The BNCAC and the workshops are set up to perform in certain narrow ways, they do it, and Patrick Lakamp writes it up the next day in the Buffalo News, whereupon the newspaper article is offered as evidence Progress Being Made. I can’t see the BNCAC and public workshops these days as anything but busywork, a lot of people running around, with Bruce Campbell, who has pretty much replaced Vincent “Jake” Lamb in running the Peace Bridge Expansion Project, picking and choosing what results he wants or what results his bosses want him to provide.
When Jake Lamb set the project in motion, his idea seemed to be that BNCAC and the public at the open meetings would express opinions and rank the various options available. The PBA, based on its own sense of its options and its interpretation of those two kinds of public input, would decide what bridge and plaza it wanted to build, but their decision could not be put into effect unless the governments of Fort Erie and Buffalo both accepted it. The municipalities, on the other hand, couldn’t decide what bridge could be built, but if the PBA’s decision didn’t meet with the municipalities’ approval, no construction could take place. In theory, that’s a nice balance of power between elected governments and an appointed authority answerable to no one except the politicians who put its members in office, with the behaviors of both modulated by citizen input.
It's a nice theory. The operative question however, is, does that input have any meaning at all? And the answer, more and more, is, No, it doesn't.
A meaningless vote that took place last year
The voting didn’t just start being meaningless; it’s just meaningless for a different reason now than it used to be. Before, the votes were meaningless because nobody had quite figured out how to make them consistent, so a vote at one meeting had nothing to do with a vote at a subsequent meeting.
An example, perhaps the most egregious before the vote they had up in Niagara-on-the-Lake last week, came out of the public meeting about sites last year, when one of the sites under consideration was just south of Grand Island. That was back when every proposition submitted by anybody for bridge and plaza locations was ostensibly on the table. A large number of Grand Islanders who had never been to any of the previous public meetings and who have not been to any subsequent public meetings turned out in force to speak against any option anywhere near their island. They voted en bloc to locate the bridge at the International Railroad Bridge (IRR) site. It wasn’t that they thought IRR was a perfect site for a new bridge; rather it was that they thought Grand Island was a hateful site for a new bridge, so they literally pushed the proposal upstream. It made for a big splash in the Buffalo News: the public wants the PBA to build the bridge at the IRR site.
Nonsense: it was a one-time vote by one-time visitors to the process making sure that whatever the Public Bridge Authority did, it wouldn’t screw up their quality of life. That was a reasonable thing for them to do. That’s democracy at work. But did it help the bridge process along?
Whatever the merits on demerits of building a bridge at the IRR site, that vote represented nothing other than the very specific interest of the people who came out at that meeting to cast a NIMBY ballot.
The staff of the Peace Bridge Expansion Project, honoring that vote, brought the IRR site back into the process even though its consultants had advised dropping it. A few months later, after further consideration and a lot of talk, the IRR site was dropped again. That entire meeting, vote, and the flurry of discussion that followed it might as well never have happened.
The meaningless vote that took place last week
The BNCAC had a meeting at Niagara College in Niagara-on-the Lake (Canada) on March 23 at which its 120 members were invited to view computer modelings of each of the bridge designs suggested by the PBA’s design consultants. Some of the designs were positively ugly; the designers who came up with them should give the money back. Some were so close to the vilified twin-span of five years ago that you can’t tell them apart; those designers should be charged with plagiarism. Some were okay—just okay. All of them make me think of sorely-missed Pat Moynihan’s letter saying why the PBA’s twin span was a lousy idea:
The grand American architect and scholar Daniel Burnham – whose gift to Buffalo was the magnificent Ellicott Square Building – challenged us to ‘make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.’
The Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority proposal to construct a ‘companion span’ alongside its existing bridge is indeed a little plan. Should it ever be built, it would stand for decades to come as a bitter reminder of what might have been done in its place.
The okay designs aren’t as mind-numbing as the twin-span , but none of them gets the blood stirring either.
After the viewing at Niagara College there was a vote, the results of which were: three-arch 73, two tower cable stay 68, two-tower asymmetric cable stay 61, rigid frame arch (sort of like the old bridge) 30, rigid frame (also sort of like the old bridge) 29, twin span (exactly like the old bridge) 24, two-tower cable stay 17, three-tower cable stay 10, steel arch (another twin span cloning the old bridge) 9, two-tower cable stay 9, six-tower cable stay 6, two-tower cable-stay needle pylon 5, two-tower asymmetric cable stayed 5, multi-span segmental box 4, multi-span segmental box (yes, there were two of them) 4, three central arches 3, three-tower cable stay needle pylon 3, three-tower cable stay needle pylon Black Rock replaced 3. Then there were 12 other designs, all of which got zero votes.
What are we to make of that vote? Patrick Lakamp’s March 25 article on the event in the Buffalo News was headlined “Three-arch bridge design leads the pack,” and began “A span with three arches, each similar in height and length and together crossing the Niagara River above the bridge's deck, emerged as the favored design Tuesday among residents who sit on an advisory committee for the Peace Bridge expansion study.”
Well, not really.
First of all, at most 25% of the BNCAC members were at that meeting. According to a PBA spokesperson, only “25 to 30” members of BNCAC were there. Some other people set the number lower. Most of the votes were from people who don’t live anywhere near the Peace Bridge. The meeting was held up in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, no vote was on the meeting announcement or agenda, so most of the members from Buffalo and Fort Erie just didn’t bother to go. Some of them couldn’t figure out why it was that far away. The PBA said it was so they could use the 3-D modeling computer at Niagara College, but there’s a 3-D modeling computer at UB they’ve used before. And, some of the voters told me, they didn’t spend that much time looking at the models anyway. “Most of the time I was there,” one said, “it was doing the voting they’d never told us they were going to do.” One member of BNCAC said he spent more time looking for Niagara College than he spent at the meeting.
Second, the vote was stacked from the beginning. People at the meeting were told that taking down the old bridge was not an option because it was eligible for listing as an historic site and because cost estimates showed maintaining it for 75 years would be less than tearing it down and replacing it.
But the fact that something is eligible for listing as an historical site doesn’t mean it can’t be taken down; it means only that it is eligible for listing as an historical site. And nobody is saddled with maintaining something that is listed as an historical site forever anyway. Sometimes things that are listed as historical sites need only be documented before they are replaced. There is no justification for foreclosing a replacement bridge—other than that the PBA may have privately decided that it would not consider a replacement bridge under any circumstances.
Furthermore, no one outside the PBA has seen numbers justifying the claim that replacement of the old bridge would cost more than maintaining it for 75 years. Since there are no compiled numbers of what it has cost to maintain the bridge for the past 25 years, how could anyone project what maintenance would be for the next 75 years?
So the Peace Bridge Expansion Project had a much-hyped design meeting at an out-of-the-way campus in Niagara-on-the-Lake. They took a vote and some people voted. The Buffalo News had an article about the results of that vote. And none of it meant a damned thing—except for what it revealed about the PBA's plans. The real report of that meeting was written half a millennium ago by William Shakespeare in the fifth act of Macbeth:it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Ascendance of the bureaucrats
Even if that meeting of the BNCAC had been held in Buffalo or Fort Erie they wouldn’t have had close to their full complement of 120. Attendance has been declining at both BNCAC meetings and workshops anyway. People attend when they think their participation is useful; they don’t attend when they feel peripheral or used. They don’t issue press statements saying that; they may not even realize what they’ve decided. They just don’t go to meetings any more. And that’s what has happened.
At a recent meeting of Buffalo’s Bi-National Peace Bridge Task Ford, Bruce Campbell said the vote at the next public workshop might be done online or by telephone. That may be even more meaningless, if meaninglessness can be ranked, if all meaninglessness isn’t pegged at absolute zero.
How many times a minute can you hit the REFRESH button on your computer? How many times can you hit REDIAL on your phone? A lot, I bet.
I don’t think the PBA wants to foist a mediocre bridge and plaza on us, but I have no confidence that on its own it has the capability of doing anything else. I know Jake Lamb, who designed the expansion project, wants us to have a fine bridge and plaza. But Jake is less and less involved in this and Bruce Campbell is far more bureaucrat than visionary. Every time I look at Campbell's face while he's giving one of his reports at the meetings of the Bi-National Bridge Task Force, I never think, “Here is someone who has a vision of where we’re going.” What I think is: “Here is somebody who wants to get through this meeting and get out of this room.”
Campbell is a recent employee of the PBA. He has wasn’t here for the Peace Bridge wars of 1997-2002 and seems to have no interest in them. He hears us talking, but I never sense that the issues resonate for him as they did for Lamb who, as I said, is seen here less and less frequently. At the April 1 meeting of the Bi-National Bridge Task Force, I asked Campbell about Lamb’s current involvement. "Oh yes," Campbell said, “He’s still involved. In fact, he was in town yesterday.” “Why isn’t he here today?” I asked. “He had something else to do,” Campbell said.Maybe. But last year, Lamb never missed a meeting of the task force.
If the PBA comes up with another ugly design for the bridge and plaza, or a design that isn't so much ugly as mediocre, it is unlikely that citizens will be able to mount another lawsuit that will block them. The citizens won the previous suit because the PBA wasn’t following the law and Judge Fahey nailed them for it. Now they’re following the law. But more and more it seems pro forma, “proving they did their homework” in the words of one critic. It’s holding them up, but that’s just a matter of time on the road to getting what they wanted all along. To satisfy the agencies involved in approving the environmental impact study, the PBA doesn’t have to come up with a good design or a pretty design, let alone an inspiring design. All it has to do is give evidence that it did its homework, that it checked out the environmental factors and it gave the public a chance to have input. The bar is not set very high, and input is not the same thing as influence.
Two things are missing this time around: there is no Public Consensus Review Panel holding high-level public forums in an unimpeachable way and the New Millennium Group is no longer actively involved in this as a major civic issue.
What’s left for us? Are we once again dependent on the aesthetic sensitivity of the ten politically appointed members of the board of the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority, not a single one of whom represents the citizens of Buffalo?
Buffalo’s last hope...
...is its Mayor, Anthony Masiello and the Common Council.
As one-third of the Partnering Group, the Mayor and the Council have the power to block any bridge and plaza the Public Bridge Authority wants to build if the design doesn’t meet the community’s needs. The question is, will they do it? Do they have the will to stand up to the kind of media barrage the PBA mounted last time? Do they have the will to stand up to the PBA’s business (read: campaign-time check-writing) friends and the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership?
Former Common Council President James Pitts did, which I am convinced is one of the primary reasons the Partnership and a few rich developers spent so much money driving him from office. That hugely expensive campaign wasn’t, as some people said at the time, merely to bleach the Council by erasing the seats then held by non-whites; rather, it was to get a Council that could be managed, that would do what the Partnership and developers wanted. It is yet to be seen if the Council will be the docile creature they hoped their money would buy.
The Bi-National Peace Bridge Task Force, set up and formerly run by Common Council President James Pitts, is now chaired by Niagara District Councilman Dominick Bonifacio. Bonifacio doesn’t have the political clout or experience Pitts had, which is apparent in the way the committee now operates. Three of the four most recent sessions were simply PowerPoint lectures by Bruce Campbell, which could as easily have been sent out as email attachments. A few people ask him questions—Mark Mitskovski regularly asks why we need a new bridge at all and lobbies for the IRR site, and Harvey Holtzworth reminds them of his plan to put a new bridge across adjacent to the IRR—but most of the time, little else of substance goes on. At the March 18 meeting, Buffalo City Attorney Rich Stanton asked Campbell questions as if he had a hostile witness on the stand, which I took not so much as a sign of hostility but rather an indication of Stanton’s frustration at the entropy that seems to have overtaken the entire process.
But Bonifacio has an intense interest in the bridge. He’s honest and dogged and the Task Force may once again get some traction. One indication of that possibility came at last week’s meeting, which was attended by Mayor Masiello and Common Council President David Franczyk, neither of whom, so far as I can remember, ever took part in one of those meetings before. Franczyk made a big deal of saying that the Council backed Bonifacio and this committee. (I wasn’t sure to whom he was making that speech. Maybe it was to Pat Lakamp and me, the only press in the room, or to Bruce Campbell and whatever staff he had with him. Or maybe he was just there because the mayor was there, and since the mayor was making a statement Franczyk felt he had to make a statement too. Politicians are like that.)
What the mayor said was far more interesting. (I’ll post a full transcript of his comments to the committee in a few days.) Masiello talked at length about his request that UB urban planners help the city come up with a design for the plaza and neighborhood and he said that the city had to tell the PBA what it wanted and what it would accept, not wait for the PBA to tell the city what it intended to do. He described a far more proactive stance than anything I’ve heard out of City Hall previously.
An important collateral development is that Jeff Belt, who was one of the mainstays of the New Millennium Group’s Peace Bridge Project back when the NMG was interested in the Peace Bridge, has been hired by the mayor’s office as a consultant with a grant from the Baird Foundation. Belt knows more about this project and what it means to Buffalo than anybody, and he cares about it passionately. With Jake Lamb no longer driving the project, Jeff Belt providing the mayor and the council with good sense and solid information, and taking part in their continuing discussions among themselves and with the PBA, may be our last best hope that something decent will come out of this long affair.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.