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Joel Giambra: "We're Going to Court"

On Wednesday morning, April 12, Erie County Executive Joel Giambra held a press conference to pronounce his own position on a downtown Buffalo casino. He also outlined the course of action he expected the county to take in opposition to such a casino.

Here is the text of his remarks:

Good morning. I want to welcome my fellow plaintiffs.

[Also] Scot Fisher from the Righteous Babe Foundation and the Preservation Coalition, Legislator Maria Whyte and Joseph Finnerty, who is the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

I also want to recognize Bob Kresse, representing Citizens for a Better Buffalo, which has been helping to organize the opposition to the casino.

Ladies and gentlemen: We are going to court. We are going to court to fight on behalf of our citizens, our children, our businesses and for the rule of law.

I have instructed the Erie County attorney to prepare documents by which Erie County will become a plaintiff in two lawsuits.

Erie County will join both the federal and the state lawsuits.

The legal issue at stake is the lack of an environmental impact statement. We will contend that it is a violation of local, state and federal law for the City of Buffalo, the State of New York and the federal government to ignore established law. The law requires that they perform an environmental impact study—including an economic impact study—of a tax-exempt casino complex.

The crux of the matter is the economic health of this community.

Over the past six years, my administration has invested unprecedented work and taxpayer dollars in revitalizing the Buffalo area as a tourism destination and a hospitality venue. Cultural sites, amateur athletic events and venues, Pilot Field, Ralph Wilson Stadium, our Erie Canal Harbor, new public access to the Buffalo River and the bike paths of the Outer Harbor—add this to our support of downtown development. These are the very hallmarks of our administration.

But all our investment, and the investments of many more people in the private sector, are put at risk by a tax-exempt casino-restaurant-retail complex.

Tax-paying businesses will face an impossible disadvantage if this tax-exempt casino-restaurant-retail complex ever starts operation.

Stealing restaurant and retail business from existing businesses makes no sense. It’s bad for business.

The federal lawsuit gets at the heart of this issue. It questions whether land in the middle of the City of Buffalo should ever have been made into tax-exempt Indian land and whether tax-exempt casino gaming should have been allowed on it. We objected in November to these events. That objection fell on deaf ears, so we have no recourse but to go to court.

But it’s more than that.

I am concerned about the economic impact on our poorest citizens. I am concerned about the message to our young people. Tom Golisano has warned that upstate New York is turning into a region of gamblers. We need to be a region of entrepreneurs. The promise of easy money is a false promise.

As our attorneys finish our documents, we will make them available to the public.

Giambra’s remarks came on the heels of Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown’s press release on Tuesday night, which itself came on the heels of Tom Golisano’s press conference on Tuesday afternoon. It’s worth noting, however, that Giambra officials alerted the media that the county executive would be making some such statement as far back as Friday. April 7. Brown’s statement came apparently out of the blue.

­—geoff kelly