28 November 2004
Bruce Jackson
Slash, burn and starting over at the Peace Bridge. It's about time.
Cutting the losses
The Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority (PBA) has scrapped the bi-national public involvement development plan it put into play four years ago. Good for them. Not a moment too soon.
The process had degenerated into a series of public votes without meaning and meetings without coherence. Vincent “Jake” Lamb, the project engineer brought in to oversee the public involvement and design process had been pushed out and Parsons project engineers had taken over. Every time you talked to them about doing something they seemed to come up with a reason why it couldn’t be done—everything except some version of the discredited twin span they came up with eight years ago.
The four years weren’t a total loss, say Authority officials. They did the groundwork for the necessary draft environmental statement and they learned things that will inform the next stage of the process. They established a tripartite decision making organization (Buffalo, Fort Erie, PBA) which will survive the current purge. And they probably got a very good idea of how not to go about producing a bridge design.
Getting to here
This mess started in the early 1990s when the PBA in secret settled on a steel twin span as a way to add more lanes at the Buffalo crossing. There was a phony-baloney design charette hosted by the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership and the Buffalo News. Individuals and organizations were invited to submit designs, though it later turned out that the PBA and the Partnership had made up their minds on the twin span already. The Partnership, though its CEO and president, Andrew Rudnick, worked hard and spent a lot of money trying to ram the anachronistic, expensive, ugly and environmentally dysfunctional twin span through.
For a time, following the Partnership’s lead, The Buffalo News washed its hands of the Peace Bridge design issue, and refused to engage it editorially or in op-ed columns. “We had an editorial board meeting,” Buffalo News editorial page editor Gerald Goldberg told me in 1997, “and decided that the bridge is a dead issue. The News is not interested in the bridge question any more and we won’t be running any more editorial comments on it.” Public pressure forced a reconsideration of that position and, after a few years, the News put air between itself and the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership by becoming a strong advocate for a well-designed, environmentally-sound bridge.
Good sense came back into the process because of a design by UB Architecture School dean Bruno Freschi for a curved single-pylon concrete bridge. That caught the imagination of the New Millennium Group, an organization of young professionals that was casting about for a community project with which to involve itself. Their intense activity lead in turn to a public process underwritten by the Community Foundation and the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation—the Public Consensus Review Panel. There was nothing official about the panel—no Canadians representative took part in the Panel’s work, and neither did anyone from the PBA. But Panel involved so many agencies and organizations and got so much publicity that it became impossible to ignore. The question of responsible bridge design was out there, and the PBA had to pay attention, and the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership could not bully its way around it.
The process was complicated by the composition of the PBA: five Canadians, all appointed by the federal government, and five Americans, three serving ex officio and two directly appointed by the governor. The five Americans on the ten-member Authority were often either disorganized or disinterested, so they were continually trumped on design issues by the five Canadian members, who almost always voted as a bloc and came to meetings prepared for what they wanted to accomplish.
The Peace Bridge lands in Buffalo and Fort Erie, and each of those municipalities has concerns about the kind of bridge that is built and how it functions. But the primary clients of the bridge are far from either municipality: sellers and buyers of raw materials and manufactured goods up and down the eastern portion of both countries. Those local and distant interests are rarely compatible. The real Canadian interest had nothing to do with design: it was about getting extra lanes into operation as quickly as possible, no matter how ugly the bridge was. Most of the problems with the ugly design were going to be on the American side anyway.
The process came to a halt when New York Supreme Court Judge Eugene Fahey told the PBA it had to obey New York environmental law, that it couldn’t just put up any old bridge it felt like putting up wherever it felt like doing it. The lawyers for the PBA wanted to fight, and the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership egged them on. But a new team of lawyers told the PBA that Judge Fahey’s order was well-grounded in law and was not likely to be overturned. Then-chair of the PBA Victor Martucci did a complete turnaround. He threw out all the plans that had been developed in secret or without public consultation and started the process all over again. But this time, he insisted, it would be in public and would involve the public.
An honest attempt to get it right
The PBA tried to invent a process that would have massive public involvement all along the way. What they got all along the way were complaints and criticism about how and why the process wasn’t working. They set up a process where people could vote via telephone and computer, then found there was no way to know who was voting, or how many times an individual was voting. They took votes at public meetings, then found that those votes said more about who was attending that week than about the bridge. There was no way to maintain consistency from meeting to meeting. It seemed to be a lot of flailing about, trying to figure out what to do.
Which is what it was: trying to figure out what to do. I think the PBA was making an honest effort to involve the public in the decision making process in the most democratic way possible. But the line between democracy and anarchy dissolved, especially after Jake Lamb was forced out, and the process degenerated into chaos. The PBA should be praised for having made the attempt, and it should also be praised for having the good sense to pull the plug on a process that could only end with a result no one on any side took seriously.
Design for a design
So now there is to be a design competition, a process not unlike the one that was used in the World Trade Center reconstruction project. If this design competition is open and honest (unlike the design charette/charade of the late 90s), and if it is limited to designers of real substance and competence (unlike the open design invitation of the just-terminated process that gave everyone, no matter how brilliant or moronic, equal time), something really good could come out of it.
The PBA has announced that Christian Menn and Figg Engineering, authors of the two most popular designs in the public voting, will be able to join the competition, and that Parsons Transportation Group, longtime consultants to the PBA and, for many, the source of many of the current problems, will not be allowed to compete. That seems a good first step.
The one place for serious mischief seems to be in selection of what the Authority says will be the four or five firms invited to submit designs in the competition. That choice will be made by officials from Fort Erie, Buffalo and the PBA. How visible will that be? How much a part will old grudges play? The Canadians on the PBA, for example, seem to remain hugely angry at Bruno Freschi, even though he’s a Canadian and Order of Canada laureate, perhaps because his design fired up much of the opposition to the anachronistic twin span favored by the PBA, Parsons, and the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership. If it hadn't been for Freschi, some of them say, they would have been able to build the twin span two or three years ago. That would have been the worst of all possible solutions for Buffalo, but Buffalo wasn't their concern then and isn't their concern now. If Cannon Design, where Freschi is now a principal, decides to enter the competition, will they get a fair hearing or will they be dismissed out of hand?
The four or five firms will be announced in March or April and then will have four or five months to come up with designs. Two panels of judges will consider them, one looking at feasibility, the other at aesthetics. The panels will be selected by the mayors of the two municipalities, not the PBA. Nobody has said yet what will happen if the aesthetic panel picks a design the feasibility panel says is off the scale. Maybe they’ll go to conference, the way the House and Senate do when they have bills on the same issue that don’t quite match.
Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello deserves praise for the role he has played in the Peace Bridge affair. If he hadn’t withheld the permits the PBA was demanding to start work several years ago, construction would have been well under way before the case got to Judge Fahey’s desk. Since then, he’s consistently had city attorneys pay close attention to what the PBA has been doing. Some of his friends say that he is determined not to let the Peace Bridge project be one more in a long line of major public works failures in the city. His choices for the judges on the two panels will test that claim.
Kvetchers
It’s only been a day since PBA chair Paul Koessler and bridge manager Ron Rienas announced the new process, but already there has been considerable kvetching about it, largely from people who have been involved in the process for years and who, therefore, should know better. They’re saying that building the bridge may now take a little more time. So, big deal, it will take a little more time. They talk like someone wanting to continue down a road that more and more looks like the wrong road rather than going back to where they made the wrong turn and taking what is likely to be the right one. Yes, doing this right may take a little longer. But this new process, if it is in fact fair and open, gives us a far better chance of getting where we want to be, getting a bridge and gateway that do something for, rather than to, the city of Buffalo.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.