The agenda was loaded—a breathtaking 73 items to consider, including 17 resolutions, ranging from the Albright-Knox’s pending deaccession to genocide in Darfur, from the price of cable TV to the price of emergency demolitions. Our city government hard at work:

■ It began, after the Pledge of Allegiance, with irony: University District Councilwoman Bonnie Russell took the floor to recognize four young new hires at Rural Metro, which contracts with the city to provide emergency medical services. The three women and one man had taken part in a laudable job training program conducted by Rural Metro; the program began last June and a new round of trainees will enter the program in April. This program, Russell said proudly, enables young people in a job-poor city to “get jobs” and “make their own money.”

It’s too bad those jobs don’t pay a little better. Rural Metro refuses to comply with the city’s Living Wage Law, passed by the Common Council, requiring companies that contract with the city to pay employees $9.59 an hour, or $10.77 without health benefits. Rural Metro claims they are immune to the statute because they don’t have a “contract” with the city; they have a “franchise agreement.” (The company pays the city a $350,000 annual fee for its franchise.)

Which means, well, whatever. Rural Metro employees asked Byron Brown’s administration to enforce the law a year ago, but despite some initial promises the mayor hasn’t done anything. The city’s Living Wage Commission has dismissed Rural Metro’s argument but must rely on the mayor to enforce the law.

The irony—that the Council should celebrate a company that flouts the laws it passes—was nowhere evident in Russell’s sunny speech. But North District Councilman Mike LoCurto took note, later in the afternoon: “It’s great that those young people got jobs,” he said, “It would be even greater if they were paid a living wage.”

■ But irony soon died, overwhelmed by the sincerity of South District Councilman Mickey Kearns. It was Kearns’ day in the Common Council on Tuesday. No one held the floor for as long, on as many issues, as Kearns did. For example, agenda item 48A, a late addition to the agenda by Kearns: “Buffalo News Article—Hickory Woods.” Kearns spoke for a good 10 minutes about an article in Sunday’s Buffalo News (“Not out of the woods yet”), a solid piece by Phil Fairbanks reporting Judge John Michalek’s frustration with delays in compensating homeowners in the neighborhood and the Brown administration’s stated intention to find a “global settlement” to the issue.

The Hickory Woods neighborhood was developed by the city in the late 1980s and early 1990s on what turned out to be contaminated property formerly owned first by Donner-Hanna Coke, then by LTV Steel, a megalith of a multinational corporation that seems to trade in the acquisition and disposal of polluted post-industrial landscapes. The neighborhood is also adjacent to a former Superfund site. No question that the Griffin and Masiello administrations knew that developing housing there was foolish. In 2001, with their children getting sick, the homeowners—many of whom had been encouraged to buy houses in the neighborhood with city subsidies—revolted.

Kearns, whose district includes Hickory Woods, decried the delays and celebrated the article and its news at great length, especially Corporation Counsel Alisa Lukasiewicz’s apparent willingness to take the lead in finding a resolution. He was in constant communication with the residents, Kearns said, and fielded a steady stream of calls asking why the money set aside to buy out the residents—whose houses are, of course, utterly worthless—was not forthcoming. “There’s only one quarterback on a football team,” Kearns said. “That’s the Corporation Counsel.” He sounded a bit relieved when he added, “That’s who should be taking the calls” on the issue from now on.

Council President Dave Franczyk, impressed by how much Kearn had to say on the matter, expressed his opinion that it was a shame that Fairbanks had not interviewed Kearns for the article.

“I did get interviewed, “ Kearns replied, smiling sheepishly, then returning to sporting metaphor: “But I didn’t make the cut.”

■ His sheepishness disappeared when, near the end of the session, he presented agenda item 67, a resolution he’d written in regard to the return to the city of more than 600 properties whose liens the city sold in 2003 to the state’s Municipal Bond Banking Agency.

Strapped for cash, staring at a $30 million budget gap, in 2003 the city took advantage of a new program developed under Governor George Pataki, in which MBBA, a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation, would buy the liens on dilapidated housing stock that was headed to foreclosure auction in a number of depressed markets throughout the state. The sale netted the city close to $4 million and shifted responsibility for the properties—1,499 throughout Buffalo—to MBBA and JER Realty Services, the company MBBA contracted to manage and auction off the properties.

What has ensued since 2003 is a tragic case of near-criminal negligence: Perhaps because MBBA repackaged and sold its debt portfolio, the sale prices JER attached to the properties were sky-high. (Who in his right mind would pay $30,000 for a bombed-out shell of a house on Buffalo’s far West Side?) The houses languished. JER made no efforts at upkeep. One house in his district, said Niagara District Councilman Nick Bonifacio, was being used by its occupant to sell drugs. Many on the East Side have attracted arsonists. The Council’s 2003 deal, though well intentioned, has promoted blight in the city’s neighborhoods.

The MBBA debacle has been the focus of a campaign by a relatively new group of neighborhood activists, People United for Sustainable Housing, or PUSH Buffalo. Led by PUSH’s Eric Walker and Aaron Bartley, and enlisting citizens in endangered neighborhoods on both the East and West Sides, the campaign has comprised lobbying as well as public shaming: One noteworthy tactic has been to nail posters bearing George Pataki’s image to houses that bear witness to MBBA’s neglect.

Governor Eliot Spitzer’s administration have been far more responsive that Pataki’s people, according to Walker and Bartley, and the campaign recently won a sort of victory: MBBA is returning control of more than 600 of the offending properties to the city. As many as 400 more properties may follow.

This is a victory, according to PUSH members, because it brings control of the problem closer to home. It is also dangerous, according to Kearns, because city government’s financial constraints and slapdash housing policies are what caused the problem to begin with. MBBA made matters worse, but it didn’t send those houses to auction back in 2003. The city has enough trouble doing justice to the property in controls now.

“Simply adding these properties to the foreclosure auction for unscrupulous flippers or leaving these properties sit on a demolition list with our current demolition backlog is not the answer to revitalizing our neighborhoods,” Kearns wrote in his resolution.

The properties that MBBA is returning to the city are problems, according to East Side housing activists Michele Johnson, who has worked with PUSH on the MBBA issue and sits on the mayor’s Anti-Flipping Task Force.

“Many of the properties ‘given’ back on Goodyear are vacant lots,” she says. “One that was located at 39 Goodyear was an arson last year…The Koons Avenue properties being returned to the city have been vacant four years or more and definitely would need major rehab, $25,000 or more. Who is going to invest that kind of money on a street where the average home sale is $5,000 or less? There are some saveable and decent MBBA properties on the East Side but the list prices are so outrageous that nobody is going to invest that kind of money without knowing what the interior looks like, or because there are no utilities on they cannot check for plumbing, heating or electrical issues.”

In that light an influx of new problem properties might be viewed by city officials as a looming crisis. But crisis begets opportunity, and that’s what Kearns’ resolution seeks: He, and PUSH Buffalo, are asking for city departments to coordinate with the Good Neighbor Planning Alliances, the Board of Block Clubs, PUSH, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, Buffalo ReUse—with anybody who has expertise or a stake in creating a comprehensive plan to address the city’s housing issues and offer remedies to endangered neighborhoods.

“All of these issues we’ve been talking about today—Hickory Woods, emergency demolitions, water bills, MBBA—it’s all housing,” Kearns said to the Council. “We need a housing a plan.”

Never waste a good crisis.

—geoff kelly

PUSH Buffalo is hosting a fundraiser on Saturday, February 24 at the Nickel City Housing Co-op at the corner of Elmwood and North. 7pm.