Tuesday, February 12, was one of those rare days that can lighten the heart of an unimaginative, deadline-dogged journalist. Two events fortuitously coincided that day, and together, they whispered seductively, “article lead” and “framing device.”

At 9:30 in the morning of that Tuesday, representatives of Silvestri Architects in Amherst showed up at a City of Buffalo Planning Board meeting to seek approval for the plans of their client, Kissling Interests, for a $2 million renovation of an old Allentown industrial building into luxury-rate apartments.

By the time that meeting commenced, the news media had already carried reports of New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s findings after a survey of Empire Zone programs in eight localities across the state, including Buffalo. It wasn’t brought up during the Planning Board’s hearing, but Kissling had applied for inclusion in Buffalo’s Empire Zone, and for the substantial financial subsidies that brings.

DiNapoli found that Buffalo’s city government lacked reliable data and methods to evaluate the success of its Empire Zone, as well as a procedure to “decertify” business beneficiaries that didn’t meet operating goals and standards. (All of the eight zones audited had deficiencies in their operations.) Buffalo had no way of determining, the comptroller found, if its Empire Zone was producing tangible beneficial results for its citizens and taxpayers.

By the time Kissling submitted its Planning Board application, Mayor Byron Brown’s administration had already approved its property at 430 Virginia Street, for decades the home of the National Casket Company, for inclusion in the city’s Empire Zone, and had handed it off to the Common Council. Council members gave their official consent on December 26, although there’s room for doubt that all of them knew just what they were voting for. The proposal has since been sent to the state for its consideration.

The processing of the Kissling application has occurred against a recent history of discussions, questions and frequent skepticism about the use of Empire Zone benefits in Buffalo—and much of the rest of New York.

The Empire Zone program was established by New York to assist job creation and investment in economically distressed areas, but many doubt that they’ve been consistently enough used to achieve those ends. Buffalo Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, for one, has spoken of “loopholes” that permit the city to dispense those benefits to business interests that were neither favored nor contemplated by the state legislature when it started the zones years ago.

430 Virginia Street

On a smaller scale, the Kissling project, and the way the city has handled it, recalls last year’s controversy surrounding Carl Paladino’s waterfront residential development. Buyers of the $500,000-$660,000 homes will receive property tax exemptions averaging $100,000 over the 10-year term allowed by the Empire Zone, one of the loopholes to which Hoyt referred.

The widely perceived inequity and waste involved in gifting affluent home buyers with tax holidays denied less favored people generated a lot of protests against the Brown administration and Paladino (“Padding the Relief Rolls,” Artvoice v6n21). Paladino’s nifty adaptive use of the Empire Zone even attracted the attention of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times financial reporter David Cay Johnston in his recent book about government giveaways to the undeserving and politically well connected, Free Lunch (Portfolio, December 2007). Buffalo officials, Johnston wrote, seem particularly prone to divert public money to dubious projects despite the city’s straitened financial condition.

In fact, although Brown enthusiastically embraced Paladino’s end run around the generally understood intent of the Empire Zones, it was initiated by Anthony Masiello, his predecessor. The Kissling rehab, on the other hand, was conceived of and is advancing with Brown and his administration’s active participation. Indeed, the company’s chief executive, Anthony Kissling, said in a telephone interview from his Florida home that the city “promised” him Empire Zone subsidies for 430 Virginia at the end of 2006.

Not that Brown and his minions are at all eager to discuss the merits of this agreement. When it comes to sharing information about this and a number of other administration activities with the public, Brown and his people are about as forthcoming as the banking industry in the Cayman Islands. Voting in the Vatican’s College of Cardinals for a new pope sometimes seems more transparent than this administration’s information management (“FOILed Again,” Artvoice v7n8).

The recently resigned Director of Strategic Planning, Timothy Wanamaker, whose office oversaw the city’s zone, never responded to a half-dozen phone calls and three e-mail messages requesting information about the Kissling deal. Peter Cutler, the mayor’s communications majordomo, twice promised to provide basic information, but never did.

Laurie Abounader, who coordinates zone business in Strategic Planning, didn’t respond to eight phone messages requesting information. She, however, may have had her hands full just getting the Kissling package to the Common Council for its approval, which seems to have been granted without at least some of the members knowing what they were approving.

A list of the December 26 Empire Zone reauthorizations and additions to it that was examined in the City Clerk’s office in mid-January didn’t include the Kissling Virginia Street property. Several weeks later, an online version of that list did. There may have been still another list, and which one the Council voted on is difficult to determine.

North District member Joseph Golombek, who was chair of the economic development committee, said in a recent interview that he doesn’t remember any discussion of Kissling’s inclusion.

One man who evidently did know something about this is Ellicott District member Brian Davis. 430 Virginia lies in his district. And Davis must know something about Empire Zone benefits: He lives in a tax-exempt house in the city’s zone that is said to belong to his girlfriend.

While Davis didn’t respond to inquiries, he had evidently been having conversations with someone else about this matter. One of his aides told me that Anthony Kissling had been phoning Davis in December and January, asking when his property would be included in Buffalo’s Empire Zone.

Kissling may have felt that he’d already paid for this. Last April he gave Davis a $250 political contribution. At the end of September he gave him another $1,000; and at the beginning of November he contributed another $500 to him. Kissling also spent $12,000 last year on the services of a Buffalo consultant who advertises his expertise in obtaining tax credits for developers, according to Project Sunlight (sunlightny.org).

Speaking by phone from Florida, Kissling described the conversion of his building to what he called 10 “live-work” lofts, intended for professionals and entrepreneurs, and fetching what he estimated would be $2,000-2,200 monthly rents. These inhabitants would be eligible for sales tax exemptions on any work done at home, Kissling noted. At one point, he asserted that the occupants would generate as many as 25-30 “high-paying” jobs, a somewhat startling claim that may only have been meant to justify his other zone benefits, which can be extensive. A moment later, he called these jobs “immaterial.”

Under the law, Kissling would be entitled to that Empire Zone sales tax exemption merely by having his building included, but since he says he’d scrap the project and sell 430 Virginia without that, it seems likely he’s aiming to access the full menu of benefits. On what grounds he could claim them remains unclear because the city won’t divulge the pertinent, supposedly public information.

In a memorandum Wanamaker sent to the Council on January 12, 2006, he advised its members that to be considered for inclusion in the Empire Zone boundaries, a project must be “ranked according to the new total investment dollars, number of new jobs created and number of new jobs retained.” How, or if, the Brown administration and Kissling intend to meet that requirement is, as noted, unclear. Approval provides the enjoyment of as many as nine different tax credits, abatements, or refunds.

“I don’t fault Kissling for playing with the rules,” Hoyt says, “but this isn’t what I intended when I voted [for the Empire Zone legislation].” He mentions the need for the state to tighten the legislation to prevent this kind of project from being included again.

University of Buffalo urban planning professor Henry L. Taylor, Jr. says the Kissling plan is fundamentally wrong. Empire Zone benefits, he says “should be used for areas that aren’t hot, not ones like Allentown that don’t need to be incentivized.”

Kissling, like Paladino before him, complains that residential projects are impossible in Buffalo without heavy subsidy from the public purse, but this claim seems to fly in the face of important facts. Only two blocks from 430 Virginia sits the former University Club building that Paladino converted to luxury apartments eight years ago, without Empire Zone subsidies. A controversial residential tower is planned for Gates Circle, which isn’t in the city’s Empire Zone. The Buffalo News last year editorially celebrated the increasingly residential construction in or near the city’s downtown, most of it undertaken without Empire Zone benefits.

More striking a discrepancy is the rank disproportionality of the benefits sought by Paladino and Kissling in comparison to the condition of the city and its residents. The annual rents Kissling wants to receive for his proposed apartments are almost as large at the median household income in Buffalo. Those households will pay, one way or another, for the generous dispensation Kissling seeks.

On the infrequent occasions anyone from the Brown administration or the business community defends these public fund gifts, they espouse a version of the rightist trickle-down theory: Directing benefits to those at the top results in gains for those lower down. But, as Comptroller DiNapoli found, the Brown administration has established no means to demonstrate even a limited, belated public benefit from its largesse to private interests.

If the condition of the American working and middle classes after seven years of the Bush administration’s efforts on behalf of economic elites doesn’t serve to refute that top-down approach, it’s difficult to imagine what would.