Masten District Councilmember Demone Smith lights into majority over the mayor’s delayed capital budget

I will not stand for your tyranny!” shouted Masten District Councilmember Demone Smith, while Council President Dave Franczyk pounded his gavel and shouted, “You are out of order! You are out of order!”

“This is the tyranny of the majority,” Smith said, fighting to be heard over the gavel and Franczyk’s objections. “I have a right to be heard.”

“If you don’t know the rules of this chamber, you should read them,” Franczyk returned. “You do not have a right to disrupt these proceedings.”

“Then throw me out,” Smith said. “Throw me out!”

Click the above image to see a larger graphical comparison of the Mayor's recommended budget, the Common Council approved version, and the Mayoral veto version.

On Tuesday, the wrangling for power between Buffalo’s Common Council and the administration of Mayor Byron Brown hit a new and entertaining low: On the agenda were 44 bond resolutions, representing $22.8 million in borrowing related to the mayor’s 2009 capital projects budget, which has been a bone of contention for the past three months.

In short: The mayor offered a capital budgets project in December. The Common Council, home to a five-member majority frequently at odds with the mayor, rewrote that budget, redistributing infrastructure improvement funds in what they believed to be a guaranteed equitable split. The mayor was not pleased and vetoed many of the changes the Council had made, especially those that most benefitted the five members of the majority coalition.

The majority could not find a sixth vote to overturn the mayor’s vetoes, and negotiations with the mayor’s office failed to produce a compromise. So the mayor’s final capital budget went into effect with vetoes intact, pending the Council’s approval of bond sales to finance it.

Which is where Tuesday’s fireworks began: The majority had decided to table the bond resolutions, leaving the fate of the mayor’s capital budget in limbo for another two weeks. Smith tried to jump in and move to have the resolutions sent to the Finance Committee before they could be tabled, thus opening the floor for debate on the bonds and pushing the bonds along the road toward approval. But Franczyk wouldn’t recognize Smith’s motion. He instead recognized Lovejoy’s Rich Fontana, the Majority Leader, as is the Council’s custom. Fontana moved to table, the South’s Mickey Kearns seconded, and all hell broke loose between Franczyk and Smith.

It was a government wonk’s dream. It was Mr. Smith goes to Washington. And it was pathetic: If no one budges, the acrimony could wind up costing the city a year’s worth of infrastructure improvements, just as a gravy train laden with cash for just such projects is rumbling down the tracks from Washington, DC, with a stop in Albany on the way. I laughed at the scene in the elevator down from the 13th floor of City Hall. By the time I got back to the office, I was shaking my head in despair.

The cash at hand

The sum of money at issue is about $5.6 million of that $23 million in proposed bond revenue. That $5.6 million is earmarked for infrastructure improvements and replacements citywide—roadwork, sidewalks, streetlights, etc. The rest goes to specific projects: The Buffalo Public Schools gets $5.1 million for some improvements; the Fire Department gets $1.9 million for new equipment; there’s $200,000 for Delaware Park’s Marcy Casino; there’s about $720,000 for improvements to community cneters around the city; another $2.3 million pays for demolitions, advancing the mayor’s plan to bring down 5,000 derelict structures in the next five years. The list goes on. (You can see the whole list of projects at AV Daily at Artvoice.com.)

In his original capital budget, Brown had kept that entire sum in one pot, for his office to control. That’s the way it’s been done for some time. The new, five-member majority on the Council felt that in his first two capital budgets the mayor had used control of that pot of money to reward political allies and punish political foes. So, they decided to flex their power of the purse, and sent back an amended budget that divided the infrastructure money more or less evenly among the nine districts—$743,150 per district, some of it discretionary and some of it targeted to specific projects. There were a few other changes, too, but the infrastructure money is the heart of it.

The mayor responded quickly, firing off a letter on December 15 vetoing all the infrastructure money the Council had allotted to the Delaware, Fillmore, Lovejoy, and South districts, plus $150,000 of the share allotted to the Niagara District for new lighting along Richmond Avenue. Delaware, Fillmore, Lovejoy, South, and Niagara are, of course, represented by the members of the majority, whom Demone Smith called “tyrants” and “despots” on Tuesday.

In his veto letter, Brown called the infrastructure improvement funds for these five districts “inappropriate pork barrel spending.” Nonetheless, he maintained in full the new, district-specific shares to the Masten, Ellicott, North, and University districts—represented by his allies on the Council—as well as $150,000 for the South District (specifically for the Cazenovia Park casino); $321,680 for roadwork around Franklin, Linwood, and North Pearl (a project that became a key in the subsequent, failed negotiations); and $593,150 in discretionary infrastructure money for the Niagara District.

That is to say, the mayor did just what the majority accused him of doing: He used the infrastructure money to reward his friends on Council and punish his enemies, pouring lye into an already poisoned well.

What Demone said

Franczyk did not throw out Smith. Instead, he sought a motion for a 10-minute recess and got one. Meantime, Smith gave a speech into silenced microphones, addressing the people of Buffalo directly while his fellow councilmemebrs milled about or left the chambers entirely. Here are excerpts of the speech he read, provided in written form by Smith (insert sic where appropriate):

This is a continuation of the Amended Capital Budget when the Majority of 5 deleted the City-wide infrastructure line, unevenly divided the City wide Infrastructure line into individual specific accounts for increased pork barrel spending, presented it on the floor at the time of the vote leaving no time to review or discuss by the other four, recessed and during recess presented another capital budget, and continued to pass a mathematically unbalanced balanced budget five to four. But the bad politics didn’t stop there they dared the Mayor to veto this unbalanced budget or risk having no City-Wide Capital Budget all without a veto proof majority- (government 101).

We now have the Bond Resolutions before us projetcs ready to go many complimented with State funds and others acceptable for Federal Stimulus funding but the Bad politics of the Majority of 5 are jeopardizing your projects people of the city of Buffalo. Instead of being responsible for their Bad Politics the Majority of 5 continues to play politricks by holding the bond resolutions hostage…

What we are witnessing is a travesty of government what Plato, Tocquville, the Fedralist papers and Nietzsche, call the tryanny of the majority in which decisions made by a majority under a political system places the majority’s interests (pork) above the community’s…

He went on to invite citizens of Buffalo to write letters to the five members of the majority expressing their dissatisfaction with this behavior.

On Wednesday, Franczyk rejected the term “pork.” Under the Council’s amended capital budget, he said, the administration still would have determined how the money was spent within each district. The Department of Public Works, not individual councilmembers, would choose the projects. The mayor would only have been prevented from shifting money earmarked for one district into another.

This isn’t the first time the Council’s majority has tried to channel some of that citywide infrastructure money into district-specific accounts. Last year, for example, the Council tried to take $800,000 from the mayor’s pot of about $4.2 million in infrastructure improvement funds, to be distributed evenly among eight of the nine districts. (Masten was left out, which may have fueled the ire Smith displayed on Tuesday.) Those changes failed.

Delaware District’s Mike LoCurto—a frequent target of the administration because of his close relationship with Brown’s rival, Assemblyman Sam Hoyt—says that as a result his district saw stretches of just four roads paved last year, to the tune of maybe $340,000. Lovejoy fared about the same as LoCurto last year, according to Fontana, and even worse the year before.

Diminishing opportunities

Franczyk said on Wednesday that the mayor’s office has told him that the mayor is finished with the capital budget, that he has no interest in further negotiation. The mayor’s office confirms this.

Franczyk said that the Council might well have approved bond sales for all the lines in the budget except the infrastructure money the mayor left in the final budget for specific districts. If all the districts don’t get their own share, Franczyk said, then none should.

After yesterday, however, he’s not sure there remains any will among to approve bonds for any of the mayor’s budget. That could leave the city in the same boat as the county, which undertook no capital projects for a year because of a squabble between the legislature and the control board over who ought to sell bonds to finance them.

As for Smith, Franczyk said, “We tried to be fair, more than fair. The Council’s amended budget gave his district more money on projects than he had under the mayor’s original capital budget. He went from $2.9 million in projects to more than $3.5 million.

“Yet he voted to uphold the mayor’s veto. So he’s on record voting against his own projects. It’s a shame that he’s so blindly devoted to what he’s being told on the second floor.”

In fact, there’s plenty of shame to share in this farce that is veering toward tragedy. Smith is correct that the majority miscalculated and is now holding the bond resolutions hostage; he’s wrong to assert that the Council’s amended budget comprised “pork.” The majority is right that the administration’s disbursal of infrastructure improvements has been less than equitable; they’re wrong to hold the money hostage, now that they’ve been outmaneuvered.

And the mayor is right that his people should have the opportunity to coordinate the use of infrastructure improvement funds citywide, rather than district by district, in the service of larger vision. But he hasn’t offered any vision, any rationale, that would justify centralizing control of that spending. In the absence of that rationale, he’s wrong to be so intransigent, and wrong to join the Council in a petty squabble that put at risk vital, timely improvements to a crumbling city.