Trucks, trucks, trucks. The Peace Bridge expansion project is all about trucks. Truck traffic on the Peace Bridge is up as a result of NAFTA and it is expected to increase in decades to come. Passenger car traffic, on the other hand, is down, and is expected to decline even more when the new border personal identification requirements go into effect. The border is ever less friendly to people, more friendly to raw materials and manufactured goods.

If you haven’t kept track of the Peace Bridge expansion project in recent years or if you’re not one of the West Side families now at risk of having their homes reduced to rubble to provide space for an expanded parking lot and duty free shop, you might be thinking that everything about the Peace Bridge was settled years ago, that we knew where we were going and were well on the way to getting there.

Chertoff sticks it to us

Until April 26, you would have been right. But on that day Homeland Security boss Michael Chertoff sent a letter to Canadian Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day informing him that the Bush administration was abandoning the shared border management agreement, which would have put nearly all the inspection operations on the Canadian side. The US, Chertoff wrote, would instead expand the US plaza on Buffalo’s West Side.

Shared border management had been an elegant solution to an apparently intractable problem. If the Peace Bridge were to expand, there would have to be more inspection facilities, and after 9-11, more things were inspected by more agencies with ever-increasing frequency. The Peace Bridge had already consumed Fort Porter and, with its various offices, booths and access roads, had made Front Park all but unusable and many neighborhood streets all but impassable. How could it possibly handle more?

Shared border management would have moved all the border business to Fort Erie, where there was already room to spare: Customs, Immigration, Agriculture, FBI, everybody. The bridge footprint on the American side would be significantly reduced, and the traffic patterns would be significantly simplified. Trucks entering and leaving the country would spend far less time clogging Buffalo’s roads and poisoning Buffalo’s air. Front Park would once again become accessible, and residents of Buffalo’s West Side would be able to get on with their lives.

For two years the US dragged its feet on finalizing the deal. For a while the hangup seemed to be whether or not US officials could carry (and potentially use) firearms on Canadian soil. They got that worked out. Then the Bush administration demanded the right to fingerprint people who approached the bridge but who were denied access by US officials. The Canadians said they only fingerprinted people who were being arrested or who wanted to be fingerprinted; the Americans said they fingerprinted anybody they wanted to. The Canadians said that was against Canadian law, whereupon Michael Chertoff wrote his letter, killing the plan, at least as long as the Bush administration controlled the US government.

A choice

At that point, the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority (PBA), the entity that operates the Peace Bridge, had two choices. It could have simply waited until the next administration took over the White House in case the people who replaced the Bush appointees would be less hostile to New York and less paranoid about the border. That would almost surely be the case if Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani, the two current frontrunners, won the election. And if that new administration refused to undo Chertoff’s decision, then the PBA could have gone ahead with an alternative construction plan, one that put expanded facilities on the US side.

Instead, it accepted Chertoff’s decision as binding and moved immediately to a plan that removed much of what would have been the buffer zone between bridge traffic and city streets, more than doubled the size of the bridge’s parking lot, expanded truck inspection zones, enlarged the duty free shop and changed the number of presently occupied Buffalo homes it would destroy from two to 128 and businesses from zero to 10.

Which is to say, it went from an elegant solution to the truck problem to a stinker of a response to Chertoff’s intransigence.

The EIS Process

The Public Bridge Authority is presently engaged in a Draft Environmental Impact Study (DEIS) having to do with that expanded plaza.

Any entity wanting to engage in a construction project that might impact human, animal or corporate life has to produce an Environmental Impact Study (EIS) that must be approved by a “lead agency” before the project can begin. Since any major project comes at least partially under the aegis of more than one federal and state agency, one of them is selected (by agreement among the entity wanting to do the construction and the political entities affected by it) as the “lead agency,” the one that gets to finally say yes or no. That comes in the form of a Record of Decision (ROD). Last time around, back when the PBA wanted to put up a twin span in the late 1990s, the lead agency was the US Coast Guard. (That seems ridiculous? It is.) This time it is the US Department of Highways (USDOH—the world of public works is a world of acronyms).

Before the EIS can be submitted to the lead agency and an ROD issued, the plan must be open to public scrutiny and the public must be given an opportunity to comment. The entity wanting to undertake the project publishes the DEIS (you can see the one for the Peace Bridge online at www.peacebridgex.com). Comments can be submitted by mail, email or orally at a public hearing. The entity wanting to undertake the project must respond to those public comments in the final version, the EIS itself.

The public session for this project took place October 11 at the Connecticut Street Armory. The PBA, this time, seems to be following the rules scrupulously. The fact that you follow the rules scrupulously doesn’t mean that justice will be done or the right thing will be done; it means only that you have followed the rules scrupulously. The Nazi regime was careful to put everything it did into laws and rules and it punished its soldiers and death camp commandants when they violated those laws and rules. So what?

Big armory, little people

Once you got through the armory’s entryway and by the registration table, there were three paths to the seating area, all of them lined with huge photographic blowups of aerial drawings or photographs of the zone of expansion, on which were marked the footprint of this or that plaza and traffic plan, all but one of which had, in fact, been discarded. At each table, there was a person in a suit wearing a nametag, presumably ready to talk about his blowup. Flat-screen monitors were all over the place as well. One of the PBA’s press people said to me, “Isn’t it great? It’s just like a trade show!”

Someone outlined the process in mind-numbing detail. Someone else described the project in similar fashion. Someone else said general things about the process of taking people’s homes to make room for the new plaza.

By the time neighborhood people got to talk, a third of the audience had left. The only news people I saw there were Buffalo News columnist Donn Esmonde and Mike Desmond from WNED.

The scene reminded me of Italian fascist propaganda films from the 1930s. A huge space with an enormously high ceiling in which people sat on folding chairs surrounded by flats of uncertain meaning. Before them, in relative darkness, four men sat behind a table atop a dais, their faces, for most of the evening, expressionless and in shadow. People talked into a microphone facing the four men; the sound came from black speakers on black poles, always boomy and echoing. Sometimes the voices were barely intelligible. Even amplified, they were often drowned out by the rising murmur of conversation coming from the trade show zone behind the chairs. Only one member of the PBA showed up for it. There were nametags for several others at the registration desk, but they went unclaimed.

Houses on the streets around the Armory had lawn signs reading “Don’t Truck Up Our Neighborhood.” All but two of these were stolen during the night of October 16.

Is anybody listening?

What will change in the EIS after the comments and responses are folded in? Will the PBA back off its street design merely because one of Buffalo’s oldest and most stable neighborhoods will be destroyed? Not likely. They knew they were going to destroy that neighborhood and what the neighborhood was when they finalized the plan; nobody on the PBA or in PBA headquarters in Fort Erie is surprised that these people don’t want their homes destroyed. Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown has already signed off on the deal, so there will be no trouble from city hall. The county executive’s office isn’t likely to meddle in this. Other than the people who don’t want to be kicked out of homes their families have occupied for generations, the only serious objection to the plan comes from Detroit billionaire Manuel Moroun, who wants to build a privately owned truck bridge on the site of the present International Railroad Bridge. City hall and the PBA work very hard acting as if Manny Moroun doesn’t exist.

It is unlikely that the USDOT will pay attention to the grief of a several dozen homeowners when the local congressman, the mayor and now the governor are all urging USDOT to ignore them.

Unless there is a successful lawsuit, the current DEIS will, in all likelihood, become the EIS and will form the basis of the ROD. Which means Buffalo will get a real stinker of a plaza. The new bridge alongside the old bridge will be more interesting than the bridge the PBA wanted to build nine years ago, and the traffic flow will be better. But basically, Buffalo would be getting one more lousy public works project.

The Partnering Group

The PBA wasn’t the only agency with a choice about what would happen and when. As a result of public opposition to the twin span and the decision seven years ago by New York Supreme Court Judge Eugene Fahey that the PBA would have to start obeying New York’s environmental laws, the PBA entered into an agreement with the City of Buffalo and Town of Fort Erie that created something they called the Partnering Group. No decision about bridge or plaza design would be made unless all members of the Partnering Group signed on to it. The Partnering Group’s members, according to the DEIS, “includes the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority’s Board Chair and Vice-Chair, City of Buffalo’s Mayor and Common Council President and Town of Fort Erie’s Mayor and designated Town Councillor.”

The PBA’s agreement to join the Partnering Group and honor its decisions was one of the reasons the City of Buffalo agreed to let the PBA get the power of eminent domain—the authority to take people’s property even if the people involved didn’t want to give that property up—for the expansion project.

Assemblyman Sam Hoyt opposed the deal, saying local folks didn’t have enough protection. A number of people, I among them, called Sam untrusting and obstructionist. We had a good deal, we said, it was now time to move forward. It turns out that Sam was right to be cautious and we were wrong to be optimistic and trusting.

Three changes

Three things changed.

One was Michael Chertoff’s decision to dump all the planning and negotiating that had been done to minimize the harm done by the US plaza.

Another was Byron Brown replacing Tony Masiello as mayor of Buffalo. The third was the Buffalo Common Council being almost totally defanged as a result of the very expensive and finally successful campaign waged by the Buffalo Niagara Partnership (a strong supporter of the deservedly-scorned twin span ten years ago) and developer Carl Paladino to get rid of the Common Council’s at-large members, in particular the Council’s fiercely independent president, James Pitts.

Under Buffalo’s previous administration and governmental structure, there was a Common Council dedicated to getting the best bridge it could for Buffalo, headed up by a Council president who chaired a binational committee that kept everyone up to date on everything that was going on. There was a mayor who more or less took the same position. With that set of actors and that structure in city hall, it was unlikely that any bad plaza plan would be imposed on the city without at least a semblance of a fight.

A longtime city hall observer told me “Tony Masiello wanted to be mayor; Tony Masiello loved being mayor. Likewise Jimmy Griffin before him. I don’t know anybody who thinks Byron Brown likes or has any real interest in being mayor, except perhaps as a step on the way to his next job.”

Brown indeed seems far more interested in being photographed at ribbon-cuttings than dealing with the city’s long-term problems. When the Columbus Parkway residents asked him to meet with them about the potential loss of their homes because of the current plaza design, he blew them off twice before actually showing up at his third appointment, and that was only after the residents had to promise his office they wouldn’t bring up any issues of substance but would instead have what one of them called a “meet-and-greet thing.”

Brian Higgins was worse. He refused to meet with the residents in their homes but insisted on a “public meeting,” which consisted of Higgins and four staff members and only three representatives from the neighborhood.

Couple Brown’s lack of interest in long-term issues with a defanged Common Council (it does virtually everything he wants now, and he tried to make sure it did it in silence in the recent primary by putting a huge effort and a lot of time by city workers into an attempt to displace Delaware District Councilman Michael LoCurto) and you’ve got a “Partnering Group” that is little more than a PBA rubber-stamping group.

Brian Higgins

Perhaps Byron Brown could have blocked this plaza, but he has chosen not to. And recently Congressman Brian Higgins has climbed on the PBA bandwagon, saying there can be no further delay in bridge construction, that further delay is unacceptable.

Why would Brian Higgins say that? Why would he back the Bush administration in this bullying? Why wouldn’t he say, “Chertoff is a thug, he’s going to be gone in 15 months, so let’s put this whole thing on hold until we get an administration in Washington that is not as paranoid or repressive, or as anti-New York, as the present administration?” Why wouldn’t he say something like that?

About other people’s motives, one can never do more than speculate. The primary speculation I hear about both Brown and Higgins is that each of them is terrified of offending and desperate to please the construction trades unions. Those unions are clamoring for the bridge construction jobs, which from their point of view is perfectly reasonable. They only get paid when they’re working, and building a new bridge will provide work for a lot of union members. Union members make political contributions, individually and through the union, and they vote. It’s reasonable for politicians to take them seriously.

But politicians should pay attention to everyone. Members of construction unions who might get a job on a specific project aren’t everybody in town. And serving their immediate needs isn’t a politician’s sole responsibility.

Those jobs, furthermore, will be there if a bridge is built next year or two years from now, if it is built at the present location or another. Their passion to have those checks sooner rather than later is understandable, but that isn’t sufficient reason for a congressman and a mayor to let the whole town suffer.

It is possible that the Peace Bridge expansion project wouldn’t have degenerated into the present mess if Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown and Congressman Brian Higgins had stood up for the city when it mattered instead of being lapdogs for the White House and panderers to the construction unions. But they didn’t stand up, so we’ll never get a chance to find out.

Byron’s hubris/Byron’s ambition

I’d long thought that Brown was lusting for Louise Slaughter’s seat in the House, and that was why he refused to look realistically at the impact of the Seneca Creek casino and the current Peace Bridge plaza. But someone who knows him well tells me I’ve been thinking too small. He was, indeed, lusting for Slaughter’s seat, the friend says, but now that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic frontrunner for the nomination and the Democrats are favored to win the next election, he is, the friend says, now lusting for Hillary’s seat in the US Senate.

Hubris, yeah, of course, but look at some of the other people holding similar chairs: Norm Coleman in Minnesota, Chuck Grassley in Iowa, Joe Lieberman in Connecticut and the primo Senate idiot of them all, James M. Inhofe of Arizona. Brown wouldn’t be close to the top of the class, but he wouldn’t be on the bottom of it either.

If Clinton gets the presidency, then New York Governor Eliot Spitzer gets to appoint someone to fill out her term. Who gets the golden apple? Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, would probably be an excellent senator, but he is a Republican recently turned Independent. No way Spitzer is going to give the job to him. One of the Albany hacks? They are all at war with Spitzer and he’s at war with them. Who is the mayor of the second largest city in New York State, and a Democrat? Who has been making all the right moves these past few years for everyone with money and power and who is likely to continue to make the right moves for those with money and power if he ever gets a job he really wants to keep?

Changing the rules

while the game is still going on

And what if Byron Brown, Brian Higgins and Eliot Spitzer hadn’t folded? What if they’d stood up for Buffalo? What would the PBA have done then?

It’s trying to change the rules, just in case they suddenly decide to. The DEIS is 584 dreary pages long and it is perhaps easy to miss the paragraph on page 18, at the end of section I.L.2, that says, in essence, if Buffalo doesn’t like what the Public Bridge Authority now intends to do to Buffalo, well, Buffalo can piss off.

According to this new text, if Buffalo is upset, then the PBA will discuss it with some people in Washington—but not with anyone in Buffalo. The paragraph dismisses out of hand the collaborative structure Buffalo, Fort Erie and the Public Bridge Authority have operated under for most of this decade:

In the event that one of the parties does not ratify a specific Milestone event, the PBA in consultation with the NEPA Lead Agency, the involved agencies and affected political subdivisions will consider the following:

(i) Actions to undertake that will address and attempt to resolve the cause or reason for a party’s determination not to ratify the action;

(ii) Actions that would justify continuation of the process without unanimous ratification.

(iii) Other actions in the event actions considered in (i) or ii) are not practical.

You don’t have to be a lawyer to see what fluff, obfuscation, waffle and wiggle is in that piece of prose. The PBA will discuss with “the NEPA Lead Agency” how they can continue without unanimous consent? There goes the Partnering Group down the toilet. “Other actions in the event actions considered in (i) or (ii) are not practical”? That opens the world to everything. Considered by whom? Practical by whose standards?

This is one of those paragraphs lawyers and bureaucrats love to tuck into long, boring documents. The expectation is that no one will notice them, or understand them if they do. The rough translation of this one in plain English is: “You have no say in anything; we’ll do what we want; sign on or bail out. Up yours.”

The fact that the PBA put this paragraph in the DEIS doesn’t mean it would hold up in court, but someone would have to get them into court to challenge it. At this point, it’s just something they wrote. But if it goes into the final EIS, then it has more substance, and it will go into the final EIS unless Buffalo’s mayor objects to it. Thus far, he has shown no indication that he objects to anything being done by the PBA, or anyone else—if there’s a ribbon-cutting and photographers at the end of the process.

The imperial PBA

The PBA is now taking the position in federal court that it is not subject to New York’s Freedom of Information Law, State Environmental Quality Review Act and Open Meetings Law. It was the PBA’s violation of New York’s environmental laws that lead to the decision in 2000 by New York Supreme Court Judge Eugene Fahey that stopped construction of the technologically anachronistic and environmentally harmful twin span nearly a decade ago. If the PBA is successful in its current claim to what is very close to the same kind of sovereign immunity Native American tribes enjoy, no New York judge would have the power to interfere with anything it chose to do.

Couple that with Byron Brown’s studied fecklessness and it looks like the PBA can do just about whatever it pleases. Unless, as last time, Buffalo citizens start standing up for their rights and their community. More about that next time.

Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture at UB. He edits the web journal BuffaloReport.com. All previous installments in the Peace Bridge Chronicles are online at http://buffaloreport.com/allbridge.html.