City Parks, Ethanol and Shopping Carts	by Geoff Kelly

“Did you bring a pillow?” a legislative aide asked, when I stopped to say hello on the way to Tuesday’s Common Council proceedings.

“You actually go to these things?” said a former pol, who happened to be visiting the 13th floor of City Hall.

It’s no secret that the real work of the Common Council is done in caucus and committee meetings. The meetings of the whole council every other week are essentially rubber-stamp sessions, required by law and televised for public consumption. Rarely do the city’s legislators break from the script they’ve prepared for themselves when the television cameras aren’t rolling.

And even when they do, the theater is pretty dull. Case in point: At the April 3 meeting, the biggest fracas occurred when Lovejoy Councilman Richard Fontana realized he had a mildly outdated copy of the agenda, in which an item submitted under the legislation committee that Fontana chairs was labeled “approve.” The other members of council had updated agendas that labeled the item as “receive and file.” Fortunately, the sure, calm hand of Council President Dave Franczyk kept the ship of state steady on its course.

The three most interesting resolutions at Tuesday’s council meeting were put forth by Niagara District Councilman Nick Bonifacio, Franczyk and North District Councilman Joe Golombek:

■ Bonifacio introduced a resolution requesting the city’s law, public works and finance departments investigate the feasibility of regaining control of city recreation facilities, including seven community centers, the maintenance and staffing for which the city outsourced to the county in the midst of its fiscal meltdown in 2004. The city pays $1.8 million a year to the county to take care of its parks and recreation facilities. The county, in turn, outsourced maintenance of the city’s Olmsted Parks the Olmsted Parks Conservancy.

Both the county and the conservancy have lately indicated that caring for the city’s parks costs more than they expected it would. County Comptroller Mark Poloncarz has said the county loses money on its deal with the city—$776,531 in 2005—and the Olmsted Parks Conservancy caused a mighty row when it suggested it might begin charging user fees for athletic facilities in the six Olmsted Parks it maintains. City residents and the council members who represent them, meanwhile, have expressed dissatisfaction with the county’s care for those city parks and recreation facilities that fall outside the Olmsted system—less lauded but no less loved facilities like those in Schiller Park, for example, where, according to Fontana, thieves recently broke into a building and stole the copper pipes. Franczyk cited similar problems in his district’s parks, and suggested that the hastily constructed agreement had left much confusion over county and city responsibilities.

Ellicott District Councilman Brian Davis, who opposed handing over the parks to the county from the outset, said, “We now see the true picture: They county can’t do it at the price they said they could do it.”

Bonifacio called his resolution “the first step of maybe bringing everything back. It’s complicated,” he added, “and obviously there are control board issues.”

Obviously there are, because, apart from the condition of the parks—and surely the county believes they’ve done as good a job at park maintenance as the city ever did—this is about jobs: a dozen or more full-time recreation instructors, plus seasonal jobs, that are now being filled by county workers. Bonifacio also said that city-controlled facilities are better able than the county to work out partnerships with, for example, the Board of Education and the Police Athletic League to provide programming in these recreation centers.

The Olmsted Conservancy’s Jonathan Holifield was present at Tuesday’s meeting but did not speak. The conservancy’s role is not on the table, in any case, according to Bonifacio, though in the future the non-Olmsted parks might be. The control board has not yet weighed in on Bonifacio’s resolution. The council voted unanimously in favor.

■ Franczyk submitted a resolution, co-sponsored by Golombek, asked the Planning Board to conduct a full Environmental Impact Statement of the $80 million ethanol plant proposed by RiverWright LLC in the Old First Ward. Neighborhood residents are pretty well divided on whether the jobs created by the plant are worth the potential nuisances; some environmentalists argue the impacts on air and water quality are unacceptable, especially so close to a residential area. RiverWright proposes an ethanol plant on 18 acres along the Buffalo River, reusing an existing grain silo and taking advantage of existing rail lines and lakeboat access to move the plant’s feed material, corn, and its product, liquid ethanol. The project, which came out of the gates quickly last summer, has slowed considerably as it traverses state and city permitting procedures, though site preparation work continues. Franczyk’s resolution was sent to committee.

■ Finally, Golombek declared war on the stray shopping cart, a native species first categorized by local artist Julian Montague in his award-winning study The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification.

Golombek maintains that stray shopping carts have become a public nuisance and an eyesore, blocking sidewalks and impacting quality of life. He wants to ban abandoned shopping carts, and target enforcement of the proposed new statute at what Montague refers to as “the Source”—that is, the supermarkets which provide carts to customers. Golombek suggests the city ought to impound the offending carts and fine the supermarkets from which they came. In Tuesday’s session, Golombek said that between 50 and 100 carts are discarded per week in his district alone. (Though Golombek would not name the principal culprit, he indicated that Wegmans on Amherst has been a “good corporate neighbor.” That, of course, leaves Tops.)

“It’s unfortunate that we would even get to the point that we would have to work on an ordinance to ban the abandonment of shopping carts,” said Golombek on Tuesday.

Even more unfortunate, perhaps, is Golombek’s apparently poor apprehension of the role the stray shopping cart plays in our physical, cultural and economic environment. In the introduction to his study, Montague writes:

Over the last several decades, the stray shopping cart has quietly become an integral part of the urban and suburban landscapes of the industrialized world. To the average person, the stray shopping cart is most often thought of as a signifier of urban blight or as an indicator of a consumer society gone too far. Unfortunately, the acceptance of these oversimplified designations has discouraged any serious examination of the stray shopping cart phenomenon.

Until now, the major obstacle that has prevented people from thinking critically about stray shopping carts has been that we have not had any formalized language to differentiate one shopping cart from another.

Montague’s work proceeds to provide the critical language required to appreciate those differences, and therefore to discern the stories that individual stray shopping carts tell, by providing clues as to their provenance and their probable uses, past, present and future. Golombek’s understanding of the “blight” caused by stray shopping carts betrays a monolithic, pre-Montague understanding of the species—as does his notion that “the Source” of a stray ought to be held responsible for the depredations of the users. (Do we fine trees for dropping their leaves?) As if Tops itself had caused a cart to be deposited in Scajaquada Creek, and not a narrative in which, for example, the drowned cart connects a mother without a car shopping for her four children, a homeless man collecting bottles and two 12-year-old boys chasing a wild hare on the way home from school.

“This language of scientific classification can be very powerful,” Montague told the New York Times last fall. “It affects your perceptions; it brings this peripheral stuff into focus…I like to speculate on what happened to the carts. How many people were involved, and is it in a permanent or ephemeral state?”

Golombek, a student of history, might do well to revisit the city’s charter, which contains a statutory memory of the city’s long-ago war on starlings. If that war seems ridiculous now, how will Golombek’s war on the stray shopping carts of Eastern North America look to future generations?

Telephoned for comment, Montague pointed out that his book and the accompanying exhibition and images have traveled the world. People in Moscow and China have seen and read about Buffalo’s indigenous, gypsy shopping carts. They are public art, he explains, and have become a part of the city’s cultural legacy, whether Golombek appreciates them or not.

“I’m thinking of contacting Buffalo Art Keepers in regard to this,” Montague said.