The Buffalo News’s April 18 casino editorial, “Buffalo casinos always scary,” begins in gloom and quickly segues into a lie or an error: “Buffalo Sabres owner B. Thomas Golisano’s arrival as the latest prominent addition to a growing anti-casino movement in Buffalo may be too late. The casino project is under way and only court decisions in casino-related lawsuits can halt it.”

In point of fact, Mayor Byron Brown and the Common Council can halt it. They can stop it cold. Without any court order, they have the power and the authority to save the city. If the mayor and the Council do not issue easements affecting road use and access, if they don’t agree to widen streets and reroute traffic, if they refused to authorize construction of new sewer and water lines, put up new traffic lights and provide extra police and fire services, nothing of substance is going to happen. Nothing.

The Seneca Buffalo Creek Gaming Corporation could opt for eyesore, as one of its representatives seems to have recently said in a threat to the Common Council. He was quoted as saying that if the Council didn’t do what it was told, they’d put a dozen slot machines in a trailer on the property they bought from Carl Paladino, which Governor Pataki’s compact would allow. Not very likely. Barry Snyder and his fellow board members might go for public vindictiveness, but few members of the Seneca Nation would back them.

The editorial writers then imply that the News has been saying all along that the Buffalo Creek casino would be picking local pockets, which is untrue. They say it was just the politicians who offered sugarplum visions of hordes of tourists, which is untrue: The politicians did it, but so did the Buffalo News and the casino representatives.

They say what we really should be doing is getting Albany to give us a bigger piece of the pie, which is meaningless. As Phil Fairbanks pointed out in the Buffalo News Sunday, the Niagara Falls casino returns to the Niagara Falls area $11 million a year but in exchange it removes from the area’s economy $177 million a year. Don’t these guys even read their own paper? What kind of cockamamie economics is that? You pay out $177 million to get $11 million back? Even if Albany were willing to give Buffalo a larger slice of the pie, which is unlikely, it wouldn’t come close to compensating Buffalo for what it would have lost in the process.

The editorial ends with a variant of the same lie with which it began: “Golisano’s support, along with major financial assistance from the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation and the moral backing of local religious leaders and some politicians, makes it easier for Citizens for a Better Buffalo to fund its fight to stop the casino. But at the end of the legal day, decisions will come from the federal and state courtrooms. Those decisions now will be grounded in the law and whether it was followed, not just in public opinion.”

Public opinion does matter, and it is irresponsible for the Buffalo News editorial page to say otherwise. The Common Council and Mayor Brown will, at some point, respond to public opinion as much as they are responding now to past or future campaign contributors. If Byron Brown thinks the city’s voters believe he is failing them or he has sold them out on this issue, he will stop failing them or selling them out on this issue. It’s a simple matter of accounting; there is no issue of principle at stake in city hall.

We’ll never know why the Buffalo News editorial writers have been publishing this trash. We can’t see into their hearts. All you know in this life is what people do, and what the Buffalo News editorial page has been doing is misleading the Buffalo public.

Exactly the same exact thing happened before. During the Peace Bridge war the Buffalo News editorial page said again and again that the anachronistic steel twin span was a done deal and Buffalonians should just accept it and make the best of it. Then, because of a combination of public opinion and legal actions—just what is happening now with the two Citizens for a Better Buffalo lawsuits and the growing chorus of opposing voices—the supposedly done deal unraveled, and after a while the Buffalo News editorial page caught up with everyone else and began saying what a great opportunity we now had to do the right thing rather than the wrong one.

Maybe they’ll get a chance to do the same thing this time. But why not do the right thing now, when it would help, rather than later, when it is inevitable?