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State of the City

Here’s the question Byron Brown will try to answer next Tuesday at the Buffalo Convention Center: What’s the state of the city we live in?

Let’s call it the week’s $30 question, because that’s how much it costs to attend the rubber-chicken luncheon at the Convention Center, at which Brown will deliver his first annual State of the City Address. Limited seating available: By the time you read this, the tables surely will all be booked—taking reservations has the mayor’s staff at sixes and sevens.

The question we’ll address in this newspaper (for free, as we do every week) is, where does your $30 go?

The short answer is this, according to the invitation: It goes to Mayor Brown’s Fund to Advance Buffalo. Never heard of it? In smaller type at the bottom of the invitation is a little more information about the fund: “Mayor Brown’s Fund to Advance Buffalo is a local, not-for-profit organization that sponsors activities in the community to promote growth and development of our children through education, workplace training, financial literacy and civic responsibility.”

The invitation goes on to inform the recipient that $10 of the $30 ticket price is tax deductible, because it directly benefits Mayor Brown’s Summer Youth Employment Program. Never heard of that either?

Neither had we. Nor had we heard of Mayor Brown’s Fund to Advance Buffalo last January, when we learned that the $100 ticket price to Brown’s inaugural ball would seed the fund. Because three Artvoice staffers were paying to attend, we called then to find out what the fund aimed to do. The first woman in the mayor’s office to field our questions last January said, “Honey, you’re going to have to call back,” and hung up. (It was a Friday afternoon, just after three o’clock.) The next person referred our questions to mayoral communications director Peter Cutler, who didn’t get back to us. We went to the inaugural ball anyway and had a great time, along with many hundreds of others, none of whom seemed to know anything about Mayor Brown’s Fund to Advance Buffalo.

This week when we called, we were again referred to Cutler, who responded promptly by email, promising to answer our questions about the fund: What it’s accomplished in the last year, how much money it has and what it intends to accomplish in the near future.

He explained that the State of the City Address had been a paid affair under the Masiello administration too:

“They did charge in the past, but it was done in partnership with Working for Downtown, the Building Owners and Managers Association and the Buffalo Rotary,” he wrote. “Those [organizations] basically coordinated the event in terms of invites, day-of-event logistics, so they ended up distributing whatever profit they realized among themselves.

“The Mayor decided he’d rather have his staff coordinate the event and have the profits go into the Fund, which helps finance the Mayor’s Summer Youth Employment Program.”

Fair enough. Cutler also explained that $20 of the ticket price paid for the catering and the venue and the rest went to the fund—which is why only $10 is tax-deductible. He said he’d send specific information about the program the next day, as well as answers to our other questions, but, as of press time on Wednesday, he hadn’t done so.

Maybe it’s cynical to be suspicious when a politician establishes a not-for-profit and is less than forthcoming about how he or she spends the money raised for it. (After all, if an organization accomplishes great things, who crows more loudly than the politician whose name it bears?) Maybe it’s paranoid to think “patronage” when a politician says “summer jobs.” Maybe we’re old-fashioned to think that events in the public interest should not be turned into fund-raisers. (And maybe we’re crazy to think that it’s a little fishy if, for example, Buffalo Schools Superintendent James Williams tells companies and individuals that they’d better donate cash or in-kind goods and services to the not-for-profit he’s established if they want to stay on the district’s approved vendor list.)

Are we paranoid? Cynical? Old-fashioned? Crazy? We needed an outside opinion, an expert on all four qualities. So we called Jimmy Griffin. He answered the phone in his South Buffalo home on the first ring.

First of all, Griffin said, inaugural balls are a new invention. He never had one: “Let the people go out there and have their own fun. Who wants to go hang out with a bunch of politicians? That wasn’t my style.”

He added that he never used events in the public interest—such as a State of the City Address—to raise money for any cause. That, too, is a new invention, and Griffin sounded disdainful of his successors’ appetites for fund-raising.

“Tony had a $300 club and this guy [Brown] has a $500 club,” Griffin said. “I never had any of that stuff. The only thing we had was, we had a $25 party at the Convention Center every year, and if the guys bought a couple of tickets, that was fine. We had good crowds there, everybody had a good time. A few jokes, and a lot of times we made a good buck. That’s where we had our parties to fund the campaign.”

Then there was Griffin’s annual golf party: $20 for a round at a public course, some hamburgers and hot dogs, and the proceeds went to Timon High School, the Salvation Army or a local (Catholic) hospital. Private businessmen held parties to raise money for his campaigns, but Griffin said he instructed his commissioners and directors not to buy tickets—not like his old nemesis, former Erie County Executive Dennis Gorski, whose employees understood that they were expected to contribute generously to their boss’s campaigns.

“That’s sinful, for crying out loud, taking money like that,” Griffin said. “I never believed in that.”

Byron Brown famously gave himself an “A” when asked to grade his first year’s performance. Hopefully next Tuesday he’ll explain how the city got an “A” as well. An “A” for “advancement.”

geoff kelly