Peace Bridge Chronicles #92	Ron Rienas: "We Were Never in Front Park" by Bruce Jackson

Last week, Ron Rienas, general manager of the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority, laid out part of his argument for the current proposal for expansion of the Peace Bridge plaza. Specifically, he talked about the failure of the shared border management plan that would have allowed all plaza operations to be situated on the Canadian side of the bridge; he argued that diesel truck engine emissions will be greatly reduced by the time the proposed new plaza is completed; and he discussed the compensation program offered to those who lose their homes.

The following are excerpts from a lengthy interview in which Rienas continues to make his case:

LOCATING THE PLAZA

BJ: What happened to the plan to move the plaza to the north of its current location?

RR: The traditional plaza alternative moving to the north would basically take traffic from the Peace Bridge, and the plaza would basically stretch from the bridge all the way to Marco’s Restaurant. That’s a long stretch. The problem with that northern alternative is that it has much greater effects on the community than the one we have just been talking about. It takes a much greater number of properties than the one we have just been talking about, and it really doesn’t make much sense for the transportation.

When you look at the existing plaza, it connects very well with the 190. Ninety percent of the traffic movement on the bridge goes south on the 190, so you come off the bridge, go through customs and you’re immediately on the Thruway, or you go north on the 190 just by looping around here. The difficulty with the northern plaza alternative, which some people are proposing, is that you’re really trying to make water flow uphill. Whereas 90 percent of the traffic goes south, that would make it go north first, be processed, loop all the way around and go south. A lot of that plaza space gets taken up by unnecessary circulation movement, plus you’re getting very complicated geometrically, because you’re putting traffic lanes on top of each other. You’ve got all kinds of convoluted, looping traffic movements. It would be very difficult and expensive to do.

The other thing people forget is that the interface with the neighborhood [with a northern plaza] is much longer with the community. Now you’re impacting a lot of the West Side of Buffalo. The community interface would run from Fargo all the way to the bridge. It’s huge. Whereas this [proposed southern] plaza is relatively compact and there’s less of an impact.

There’s been a big push from the New Millennium Group and the Olmsted group that we need to get off of the Porter site, and we need to allow for the expansion of Front Park. There are also tremendous opportunities along the river between Fargo and the Peace Bridge. The area along the Niagara River where people can’t really see the river because of those, in a lot of cases, old, decrepit, industrial buildings, is on a high bluff, and the Thruway runs below. The view, if you go behind some of these buildings, is spectacular.

BJ: You’re talking about the area between the river and Niagara Street, north of the bridge.

RR: It’s an area that has tremendous potential, and the city saw that and concerns with this northern plaza alternative, or Alternative #2 as it has been referred to. It took away a tremendous economic development opportunity for the city. For all of those reasons it was deemed not to include further study in the DEIS. It’s included in the document, and you can see that we did a lot of work on Alternative #2, and it’s included in the appendix, but it has to be concluded that this northern plaza alternative has a huge negative impact, and you also have to be concerned with environmental justice impacting the neighborhood…people saying that the homes aren’t as nice over here, well that’s just an environmental justice lawsuit waiting to happen. You simply can’t do that.

In the document right now, we continue to carry the shared border management alternative. The reason we did was that we made a commitment to the city and to the groups that wanted to have shared border management, and also to our board, to keep that option alive for as long as possible. One of the shared border management alternatives was Alternative #2. That was puzzling to me, carrying a shared border management, northern plaza alternative that took almost as many homes as the traditional plaza alternatives. It’s very difficult to describe that to Homeland Security when the reason we were doing shared border management was stated from the very beginning by Senator Schumer, in several press releases where he stated that the reason we were doing shared border management was because we were reducing impact on the neighborhood and reducing encroachment into the neighborhood.

When we included a northern, shared border management alternative—at the request of the city, at the request of some special interest groups, at the request of some residents of the area—that severely weakened the case for shared border management. Because the rationale for it no longer existed: If you’re going to move into the neighborhood anyway, then why are we doing shared border management? And it really related to expanding Front Park into what is currently the plaza. But it really weakened the argument, and the difficulty we now have is that the people who are now advocating for shared border management to remain on the table, they are also still the ones who are advocating for moving to the north. It’s really a conflicting argument, and it doesn’t make sense.

And the other issue, and this is really more of a political issue in Canada, is that the northern shared border management alternative was primarily designed to create more land for the expansion of Front Park. But to do shared border management in Canada required the taking of five acres of Canadian parkland. And that was very difficult for the town of Fort Erie to accept. Not that they didn’t accept the concept of shared border management; they did. But when groups were pushing for a northern alternative, which was seen as just an attempt to create parkland in Buffalo, Fort Erie was not prepared to accept shared border management to create parkland in Buffalo but have to give it up in Fort Erie. It simply just doesn’t work.

So people lost sight of what the real rationale for shared border management was and that was unfortunate.

ENHANCEMENTS

RR: There is a tremendous opportunity for reutilization of the space, and the city of Buffalo included this area in our community enhancement plan. We are going to be sending $25 million in community enhancements in that area.

How that money is spent will be determined by a very grassroots effort of community meetings which will be starting sometime in January. Bob Shibley from UB will be heading up the public consultation aspects of that. We have a health component being done in that study to improve the community health in this area, notwithstanding that the emissions are going to be less. Part of the concerns of this neighborhood includes recreational, social impacts and concerns, but there’s also health concerns. Even if the bridge was gone and this plaza was gone, there would still be health concerns in this neighborhood. What we’re saying is that we’re taking a holistic approach to neighborhood improvement in one census tract. We think it’s going to be a model for other community reinvestment in other areas of the city. We’re really excited about doing it.

People tend to forget that we have been taking properties in Canada for a long time, because the rules are a little different in Canada than they are in the US. In the last 20 years, we’ve only taken six properties in Buffalo and they’re all on Busti Avenue, only six properties with very small acreage. In Canada, over the last 20 years, we’ve taken approximately 50 properties. A lot of people don’t know that. It’s happened over a long period of time and it’s been incremental. About half of those were homes, a number of businesses and three hotels. So in terms of impact, the impact on Fort Erie has been significant. We’ve tried to compensate for that in a whole host of ways…we make improvements around the perimeter, and we’ve contributed to improvements along the river. We’re undertaking a project next year on the north side of our plaza that will cost $2 million to enhance the street.

That’s what we’re committing to do in Buffalo as well. No different. We want to treat both sides the same, but for people to suggest [we’ve just acquired] vacant properties in Fort Erie—nothing could be further from the truth. That’s been done with some upset in Fort Erie. A lot of people have quite legitimate concerns about us doing that, but we’ve tried to compensate for that, and that’s, in part, why we’ve made that $25 million commitment to the neighborhoods surrounding the area.

TRUCKS

BJ: What good do all these trucks do for Buffalo?

RR: I think what happened was, in the ’90s, as the result of free trade agreements, we saw a tremendous increase in the number of trucks crossing not just the Peace Bridge but all of the border crossings. It was just a function of continental trade—Mexico, Canada and the US. The Peace Bridge Authority was responding to that.

If you look at the truck numbers over the past six, seven years, as I said, they flattened. People think that the reason we’re doing this bridge is for trucks. We’re really not. It’s not about the trucks, and it’s not about revenue for the Peace Bridge. Remember what I said: 80 percent of the traffic is cars and 20 percent of it is trucks.

BJ: But trucks pay a lot more, don’t they?

RR: Trucks do pay more, but they only pay going into Canada. So if this were about money, about maximizing return to the Peace Bridge, we wouldn’t do anything on the plaza on the US side. We don’t collect any money here. The US plaza, building this plaza, will only cost us money. It actually creates some financial risks for us. There’s no reward for it. We took care of our Peace Bridge reward, if you want to call it that, by redoing our Canadian plaza to facilitate the easy movement of trucks from the US into Canada.

People refer to our tolls as the cash register. Our cash register is going into Canada, not coming into the US. We don’t collect dime one from any car, we don’t collect dime one from any truck that’s coming into the US. We have an obligation to do this plaza for the general economic well-being of Western New York. What I mean by that is, when the bridge is congested because of trucks not being able to be processed efficiently and get on their way, it impacts everything else in Western New York. It impacts the Buffalo Bills, it impacts the Sabres, it impacts the retailers. Everyone see the positive impact that Canadian shoppers have had on Western New York retail. It basically bailed Erie County out of its financial crisis with the sales tax—there was an article [in December], $15 million allows the county to balance its budget, or actually have a surplus.

But the number one reason why more Canadians don’t come across the border is that it’s difficult to come across the border. There are delays coming across the border. If we didn’t have those delays, we would have more Canadians over in Western New York. The Bills would have more season ticket holders. The Sabres—they’re doing well now because they had a great season last year, so their games are sold out. The telling time for the Sabres is when they have a lousy season and they need to access Canadians to put bums in seats. That’s what they need. Shea’s and other culturals in Western New York need that large Canadian market. The bridge is about making the economics work for all of those entities. Trucks certainly are a part of it.

For a company like Rich Products, the bridge is certainly important. They have a plant in Canada; they have a plant in the US. They move people and goods back and forth on a daily basis. One of the reasons they’re here is access to the Canadian markets, and a number of Buffalo companies as well, they export to Canada.

But I’m not going to say to you that every truck has a benefit to Buffalo. In many cases, having a truck on the bridge impedes traffic for others. So what we’re about is getting those trucks out of the way so that other people that do stay in the hotels, go to the Buffalo Niagara Airport—you know one of the reasons why the airlines are where they are is that 35 percent of them are Canadian—Jet Blue might not be here if 35 percent of their market suddenly evaporated. I think that has to be explained a little better by the Peace Bridge, that it’s not about the trucks. The trucks are in the way. We need to get them out of the way.

People have said, why not move it all to Lewiston-Queenston, all the trucks. They have a five-lane bridge there already. And that makes some sense, and we actually do that sometimes, direct traffic over there. But remember what I said earlier: The 190 north of the Peace Bridge is already at capacity. The Grand Island bridges are in trouble. There are four bridges there. You’re going to put another 1.3 million trucks across the Grand Island bridges? All the wide loads, all the special loads, come across the Peace Bridge. They don’t go on the Grand Island bridges because they’re too wide sometimes; they would tie up the lanes. Where are they going to go?

It’s very easy and simplistic for people to say, “Let’s move everything to Lewiston-Queenston.” But it doesn’t work. What about the people with a company in Port Colborne that exports to the US? There are a lot of trucks that come from Caskill, a starch plant. You’re going to put them on a 30-, 40-mile detour, put them all the way to Lewiston-Queenston? It simply doesn’t make sense.

Then you have the whole issue of redundancy. If something happens to one bridge, you always have an alternative. When we had the big storm, the October storm, for that one day, we directed stuff to Lewiston-Queenston, and Lewiston-Queenston was a mess because they couldn’t handle that volume. Our EIS actually studied that—we studied what we could do if everything was at the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge. The 190 doesn’t work, the Grand Island bridges don’t work, it causes problems in Canada like I alluded to in terms of traffic, so it’s not the simplistic argument like people want to make.

It’s really a regional system. We work very closely with the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission to balance traffic, to do variable message signing, to keep people moving and goods moving as efficiently as possible across the bridge. The Peace Bridge is an integral part of the regional, national and international transportation system.

A HOMELAND SECURITY PROJECT

RR: We should talk about the process of selecting the bridge. We learned from our last process. We opened the process up because we knew it was a big issue. We had a bridge design jury with 15 people from the US and 15 people from Canada, selected by their respective mayors. Half of them were technicians and the other half were lay people. It was chaired by Bob Shibley on the US side and Ted Ogilvie on the Canadian side. The consensus of that jury panel was a Christian Menn-designed bridge. Christian Menn favored keeping the existing bridge. I think that the new bridge certainly fulfills the wishes of the community. It went through a very public, open process.

Likewise, going through the scoping process, we had many meetings getting the plazas designed. Unlike the bridge, there is less flexibility with the plazas because of Department of Homeland Security requirements. It is important that people realize that this isn’t so much a Peace Bridge project. The Peace Bridge piece of it is the bridge, which is what we’re doing in accordance with the wishes of the design jury. The plaza is more of a Department of Homeland Security project that we need to do for the Department of Homeland Security and the General Services Administration.

BJ: Who’s paying for the plazas?

RR: We pay for it, but what we do is lease it to GSA. GSA in turn leases to Customs and Border Protection. The way it works is that we would be entering into a lease with GSA for this plaza. Our view is that the lion’s share of this plaza is the responsibility of GSA. The reason that is, is because if we weren’t doing a plaza, this would be real simple. We would just do the bridge and connecting road. It would be like a bridge over the Mississippi. So, everything besides that, including property acquisitions, is the responsibility of, or we have to have cost recovered from, GSA. We would enter into a lease with GSA. It would be a 20-year lease with a couple of 10-year options. That lease forms the security for us to go to the bond market, to get the bonds for the plaza.

BJ: This plaza isn’t being paid with toll money? It’s being paid with GSA money?

RR: Right. We don’t have any functions here anymore. When we had the tolls on it and we had our administration, you could make the argument. Everything within this side, and including a parking structure here for CBP, is the responsibility of GSA. We have a connecting road and we’re in the process right now of doing the analysis as to “What’s ours” and “What’s theirs.” Clearly, the lion’s share of it is GSA.

DUTY FREE

RR: The Duty Free is ours. You didn’t ask about that. I’m surprised.

We don’t run the Duty Free; we lease it. Duty Free, as you know, is a function at all of the international borders and all of the international airports. They’re an important part of our business. If we were to lose the Duty Free, we would have to double the car tolls.

We’re a public authority. Our objective is to serve the two communities on both sides. When I talk about communities, I mean the larger communities. Having tolls that are as low as possible, we believe, is important to the binational community. We do not want tolls to be a disincentive for people to cross. We look at all the discussion about tolls on the New York State Thruway and the Grand Island Bridges. Our tolls are structured in such a way to be as low as possible and the Duty Frees are an integral part of keeping our tolls low. The other thing that has to be remembered is that on the West Side, employment opportunities are fairly scarce. They employ about 60 employees. They’re a 24/7, 365-days-a-year operation. Losing the Duty Free would mean that those people would lose their jobs.

The bigger impact is on the greater community. Instead of paying $3, it would be $6. That’s combined, if we lose the Duty Free stored on both sides. Instead of doubling, it would be a 50 percent increase. It is still significant, and it adds up.

We don’t operate it, and it runs as a private business. We get a lease based on the percentage of gross sales. That is the way it is structured. So, it is an important piece of the plaza, but it is not part of the DHS operation. It’s distinct and separate from it. I would note that it’s located in an area that is not taking any of the homes that people want to preserve. It’s in an area outside of that.

BJ: And were it not there, it wouldn’t make any difference to the plaza?

RR: Correct. It would make absolutely no difference to the rest of the plaza. The widest part of the plaza actually occurs right at the point between Rhode Island and Vermont, where the band is, the customs and primary inspection band.

FRONT PARK AND FORT PORTER

RR: People have said that we need to get out of Front Park. We were never in Front Park. When the park was designed originally in 1880—we have maps from when Frederic Law Olmsted designed it, and they show Fort Porter. Fort Porter was distinct and separate from the design of Front Park by Frederic Law Olmstead. The park was operational for a number of years before Fort Porter was actually vacated. Fort Porter was a functioning fort right up until 1925.

BJ: Until just before the Bridge was opened?

RR: Right. We actually have a picture in our book of the bridge being built in the background at a turn-over ceremony where the soldiers marched out of the fort and it was turned over to the Peace Bridge. It’s important that people understand why Fort Porter was conveyed from the War Department to the Peace Bridge. The original plans for the bridge had a low-level bridge coming across the river; I think it was at Massachusetts or Hampshire. It was north of the existing bridge.

The predecessor to the Department of Defense, the War Department, required a hundred-foot clearance over the Black Rock Canal. What that would have done back in the 1920s was have a bridge end up in the middle of the community, which was very vibrant in the 1920s. It was agreed with the War Department that the War Department would convey land from Fort Porter to the bridge because it was actually a War Department requirement that raised the level of the bridge and would have had a hugely negative impact on the community if it would have crossed at the original chosen location. So that’s why Fort Porter was actually conveyed to the bridge. It was never part of Front Park.

I understand the wishes of the Olmsted Conservancy to try and get closer to the water. The fact is that the Thruway is still there. The Thruway’s not going anywhere anytime soon. I really think that there are much greater opportunities to the north of the bridge to take advantage of the river views because of the tremendous elevation difference between the Thruway and the land that’s there.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

BJ: Why do you continually mispronounce the name of the organization for which you work?

RR: Our legal name is Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority. It’s reflected on our letterhead, it’s reflected on all of our business cards, but “Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority” doesn’t identify the bridge. The name of the bridge is Peace Bridge. So, for many decades, unbeknownst to media, probably, it was just convenient to refer to it as the Peace Bridge Authority because it actually identified the bridge.

You may be aware, there actually is a New York State Bridge Authority, which has a number of bridges. The Peace Bridge Authority isn’t one of them. So it was a way of distinguishing it. I often refer to it as the PBA, because that way, I’m safe: the Peace Bridge Authority or the Public Bridge Authority.

I like to say this: There are 860 bridge authorities in New York State. You know how many have the name “public” in it? One. This one is the only one with the name “Public” in it. Does that make the Peace Bridge more public than the other ones? Or are the other ones less public than the Peace Bridge?