1 June 2006
Bruce JacksonBarry Snyder and Byron Brown to Buffalo and Joel Giambra: Screw you! Five images from the Senecas' downtown destruction site.
Erie County Executive Joel Giambra has filed a lawsuit to stop destruction work on the site where the Seneca Gaming Corporation wants to put their downtown Buffalo gambling joint until legally required environmental impact studies are done to make sure the work won't dump intolerable contaminants into the air only a block away from a densely populated residential area.
The Seneca Gaming Corporation says it doesn't have to pay attention to state environmental laws because Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, after considering no studies and conducting no hearings, let the land slip into Seneca control.
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, who has pretended to be giving thought to all this foolishness, turns out to be complicit in it: without any public hearings, he has had his staff blocking off city streets so the Seneca Gaming Corporation could carry on demolition work and he has done what he could to help the Senecas avoid the kind of environmental impact studies any other organization would have to do before engaging in huge demolition projects and releasing all kinds of dreck into the air adjacent to populated areas.
Byron Brown needs the casino, not just for what the casino developers may be handing him or his campaign in the way of support funds, but also for the budget with which he hopes to get the city's control board off his back. He's projected $5 million a year in city income from the casino to offset other losses in city income in his budgets three and four years out.
That means that the Brown administration isn't a government agency dealing with a group that wants to put a gambling joint in the heart of town. It means the Brown administration has already partnered with that group, only they haven't yet had the decency to tell the rest of us about the intimate relationship.
On the afternoon of May 31, I drove by the site where the Senecas would like to put their casino. A huge wrecking crane was at work. The air for blocks around was full of dust. A single water misting device sprayed the air between the wrecking crane and the silos the crane was wrecking. The misting device wasn't there to keep the dust off the Perry Street projects just a block away. It was there to clear the air in front of the crane operator so he could see where he was dropping and swinging the huge U-shaped device with which he was alternately chopping at and whacking the walls of the silos. Within minutes, my car, my camera, my lenses and I were covered with that dust that drifted all day, and that had drifted over that residential area all this past holiday weekend while the destruction workers did their work, probably being paid the usual double- or triple-time holiday wages. Money to pay people to work on holidays or do work they might otherwise not wish to do is not a problem for the Seneca Gaming Corporation.
Since the Brown administration had kept its collaboration with the Seneca Gaming Corporation under wraps until the demolition began, and since they had avoided any public environmental studies, neither I nor any of those Perry Projects residents, or for that matter anyone in the Brown administration, had any idea what we were inhaling in that fine dust from the Seneca demolition workers. What were those kids in the Perry projects inhaling this past weekend, and what are they inhaling now: how much concrete, how much asbestos, how much of whatever else was in those old silo walls?
We'll come back to this. For now, here are five photographs from early on in the demolition process: the site, intersections of Michigan Avenue and Fulton Street and Marvin Street and Fulton Street (which the Brown administration seems to have given to the Seneca Gaming Corporation, also with no public hearings or public acknowledgement), and the wrecking device sto;; wjo;e a chunk of the elevators falls to the ground, where it will explode into more fine dust which everyone in the area will breathe.
How many members of the Byron Brown administration and the Buffalo Common Council do you think live downwind from that wrecking operation? Do you think the city would have let the Seneca gambling organization demolish structures like that without any serious environmental studies if it were their children living in those projects, playing on those streets?
Copyright 2006 by Buffalo Report, Inc.
