Peace Bridge Chronicles #40
Robert E. Knoer:
Making a Federal Case Out of Itby Bruce Jackson
The lawsuit brought in United States District Court on July 28 by the Buffalo West Side Environmental Defense Fund, the Peace Bridge Columbus Park Association and several individuals was drafted by Robert E. Knoer, a Buffalo attorney who specializes in environmental law. He’s taught an undergraduate course in law and the environment for the past decade at UB and has long been active in several professional and community groups engaged in environmental issues.
Knoer is the author of a key document in the current legal discussions about the PBA’s attempts to avoid state and federal environmental law, the March 1998 “Report on Environmental Assessment for the Peace Bridge Capacity Expansion Project” The “Knoer Report”, as it is usually known, was undertaken at the request of businessman Jack Cullen and architect Clint Brown and their SuperSpan Niagara group. It is tough, specific, and scholarly, a first-rate piece of legal analysis and social commentary. Among other things, the report confronts one of the PBA’s key avoidance strategies: insisting that the bridge and plaza construction projects were separate from one another and so did not have to be evaluated by the same environmental impact standards at the same time. The Knoer’s Report’s preface is as relevant now as it was when it was first released 30 months ago:
Much of Jack Cullen’s cover letter to the report (sent to Robert W. Bloom Jr, chief of the Bridge Branch in the Coast Guard’s 9th District) now reads as prescient, for example this warning about liability:A review of the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority’s Environmental Assessment shows a systematic attempt by the Authority to avoid proper environmental review.The Public Bridge Authority attempted to, in their own words, “pursue the lowest path allowable.” Although such a stated philosophy by a private entity might be understandable, it cannot be condoned from a public Authority. The Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority is a public authority. It is not a private developer who has the luxury of complying with the bare minimum letter of the law. As a public agency, the Authority’s responsibility to the public is to comply with the letter and the spirit of the environmental review process.
This systematic avoidance of the legal requirements under Federal and State law began with the Authority’s decision to eliminate certain reasonable alternatives from review altogether. ...Exploration of alternatives and their environmental impact is at the very heart of the purpose behind environmental review. From the beginning, the Authority made a determination that it would do an assessment which resulted in a “Finding Of No Significant Impact.” It is improper, and in contradiction to Federal and State environmental review laws, to make a decision on whether or not there will be environmental impacts prior to conducting the investigation.
The PBA at every turn attempted to evade its duty under State and Federal laws. The PBA attempted to ram through a project based on a faulty environmental review. The Authority does not even attempt to hide this disrespect for its legitimate responsibility. In meetings as early as August 1995, the Authority declared that its policy will be to “follow the lowest path legally allowable” in conducting its environmental review.
The United States Coast Guard has been instructed by the Secretary of Transportation, who has authority over the United States Coast Guard, to be an ‘environmental leader.’ Instead, the Coast Guard appears to have agreed here with the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority to look the other way while the Authority attempted to force through a flawed environmental review.
The Public Bridge Authority made a determination early on in the process to improperly segment the Plaza and Bridge projects. Even though this issue was repeatedly brought to their attention by numerous public and private voices, the Authority continues forward on its improperly segmented environmental review.
The attempt by the PBA to avoid legitimate environmental review, to improperly segment the Plaza and Bridge projects, and to improperly dismiss alternatives to the project without the requisite public input leaves the Authority’s Environmental Assessment, and thus the entire Bridge/Plaza Project, open to significant costly and time consuming challenge under the National Environmental Policy Act, State Environmental Quality Review Act and Department of Transportation Act.
Who would want to be involved in this project when six or seven years from now a court lambastes the entire project as an example of narrow-minded and arrogant bureaucrats purposely avoiding the environmental responsibilities with which they have been charged? This would not just be an embarrassment to those involved but it will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of litigation to get to that point.Wouldn’t that time and money be better spent doing the review right the first time and building the bridge and plaza which is acceptable to an entire community, in a place acceptable to the entire community, such that it will serve the entire community?
Cullen was wrong about only two things: it took two, not six or seven, years for a court to find against the PBA and, by the time this second case is done, the legal costs will be in the millions, not hundreds of thousands of dollars.The Coast Guard, like the PBA, ignored Cullen’s letter and the report. But now the cat comes back: much of the substance of Knoer’s July 28 brief in Federal court comes from that 1998 report for SuperSpan.
Since Bob Knoer identified and analyzed these key issues so early, we asked him to talk about the current Federal case and the PBA’s continuing reluctance to take seriously any of the community’s concerns.
Could you outline the main issues in the current federal lawsuit, and how it’s different from the state lawsuit?
I think the main difference, and the main issue that this suit raises—it hasn’t really been raised by anybody in the past—is the basic assumption: do we want the trucks? The prior suits don’t deal with that. The prior suits deal with, “Give us a choice between infrastructures to bring all these trucks here. Give us a nice-looking bridge—depending how you define ‘nice-looking’—give us a plaza a little bit this way, give us a plaza a little bit that way.” But they never really ask, “Do we want the trucks at all?” This suit raises that issue very squarely by saying that the environmental impact of the traffic has not been looked at in enough depth. Forget about what is crossing, forget about exactly geographically what it’s coming across. What is the impact of pulling that much traffic into a concentrated area? I think that’s the biggest difference between these suits.
It basically attacks the Authority and what the problem has been all along, which is not the individuals at the Authority. I don’t attribute nefarious motives to these people. It’s the corporate culture. I use that word “corporate” specifically because they act like a corporation. Although they are a public authority, they act like they have profit motive and they have a need to get bigger. They forget what the product is—the product is benefit, and that’s economic, and it’s environmental and it’s social.
The PBA is in competition with bridges down the river, which creates a gotta-get-better, gotta-do-more attitude internally. They just took without question the assumption, “There’s trucks out there; bring ’em here.” That is something that I think needs to be examined. Nothing there allows anybody to step in and say, “Well, you know what, what you’re doing doesn’t benefit the region in general, or New York State, or the United States.” I think it’s a product of the way the Authority is now designed, which is “You are in charge of the bridge, you have responsibilities from one plaza to another. Have at it.” The Authority believes that themselves. They’ve rebuffed our requests for FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] information. They say, “We’re above it.”
Because they’re bi-national?
Because they’re bi-national. That’s what they believe. I don’t think they’re right. That is actually part of the suit, whether or not they are subject to the same New York statutes that any other public benefit corporation is.
That’s how they’ve also avoided all the sunshine information laws.
The Public Bridge Authority was created to operate this bridge, but it was created as a New York State municipal corporate body—that’s the language that’s used. And then there was a companion body created on the other side of the river, and the two joined to form a board which runs this bridge. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that there is a New York body that has all this information, that goes to all these meetings. That body, I think, is subject to FOIA, and hopefully we’ll find that to be the case.
And to other New York State laws.
And to all New York State laws. I think if it’s not, it should be. That will help alleviate not only this immediate problem but help us into the future, because it really has to be addressed. The bridge is supposed to be a vehicle to benefit the region. It is not a money-making mint, that’s just not the purpose of government, that shouldn’t be the purpose of government. It should be to employ our money, our taxes, our resources that the government holds in trust for us, to employ them to benefit our lives.
We all have different opinions as to what that means. To some people it means making more money, to some people it means “give me more free time,” to some people it means—whatever. The government should be, however, making that their point and not handing over a very expensive piece of infrastructure to a group whose mission is defined as “Make as much money as you can.”
That money doesn’t come back to the community anyway. It’s totally internalized.
Right, not a bit. And that’s a big problem, that’s a major problem, because it is a lot of money, by any estimates. I can’t say I have any inside information on how much money it is, but from the outside analysis that I’ve seen and the people I’ve spoken to who have looked at it, it’s a serious amount of money, an amount of money that could do a lot of good in a lot of ways. And it’s being internalized, and it doesn’t make sense. A lot of the money is from trucks crossing, which do not in and of themselves benefit the immediate area. There’s no economic benefit that I’ve seen or that anybody else has been able to point out to me—and I’ve asked the people who I think have the most at stake in telling me why I’m wrong, and I haven’t heard the answer yet.
Andrew Rudnick of the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership and the people at the bridge keep yelling, “This brings us jobs, jobs, jobs.” I haven’t found them.
I haven’t located those jobs myself. There are legitimate, good, blue collar jobs that are associated with maintenance of the bridge. I don’t think those jobs justify the idea that we should increase the bridge capacity just to make jobs to maintain the bridge. I mean, it’s kind of like the lady that ate the fly. It just keeps going. At some point you have to say, “Well, what’s the premise and why do we believe it?”
Can you talk to me about the segmentation issue and how that applies to your lawsuit?
“Segmentation” is a dirty word in environmental law.
We have to step back to why we have a National Environmental Policy Act. Prior to the National Environmental Policy Act, the government agencies said, “We can’t look at the environment because we looked at the legislation that created us, and the legislation that created us says nothing about our obligation or responsibility for environmental issues. We have to do what we were told to do because we are a government of limited, delegated authority and we only have the authority given to us.”
So the National Environmental Policy Act came around and said, “Okay, we are going to bless all of these government agencies with not only the authority but the resopnsibility to at least consider what their actions are going to do to the physical and social environment. The idea in these statutes is, create a process. It’s a fifth-grade math, “Show your work” kind of a thing: “Don’t just give me the answer, that’s not going to get you full credit. You’ve got to show your work.”
That’s really what this process is: “I want to see that you have the scoping and that you looked at what this proposal was, I want to see that you held public hearings, I want to see you produce a document. All these steps.” And then at the end it doesn’t matter what your answer is, it truly doesn’t under these statutes. If you do this process right, no one is going to overturn the answer, even if everybody else around you thinks the answer is wrong. The process is not meant to produce a particular answer elevating the environment above the economy or anything else, that’s not the idea, The idea is to integrate thinking about the environment into the process.
“Segmentation” is a dirty word because segmentation says, “Well, here’s my project, but I’m going to look at just a little bit of it right now because I think I can swallow a little bit of it, and justify it to everybody because it’s not going to be that bad. Then I’m going to go back and take a little bit more of it, and then I’ll take a little bit more of it.” Well, that perverts the process because you're not looking at the whole process.
When I teach my students about it, the example I give them is a roadway. The classic example is a roadway. You want to go from X to Y, but there’s a wetlands or other preserve area in the middle. So instead of going from X to Y you say, “Okay, I’m going to go from X to X1,” which ends just before this little piece of preserve land, and I’m going to build myself a nice, big road. Then I’m going to go from Y1 to Y on the other side of this thing and build myself a nice little road. And then I’m going to go and say, “Look, we’ve got these two beautiful pieces of infrastructure. We just have to cross this little bit.” And then it’s much easier to justify. Instead of saying, “Okay, this is my project,” and people say, “Well, you could go up and around” or “Do you really need it?” or whatever.
In real life you see segmentation all the time in sprawl situations, because in real life you see someone come to a town and say, “I want to build a golf course.” Golf courses are not objectionable to people, in fact they’re included in the greenspace acreage counts in a lot of towns. When they say, “We have this much greenspace,” they’re including golf courses. You got to a community and say, “I want to build a golf course in your backyard,” and people say, “Gee, that’s better than some great big box store or something, so sure, that’s fine.” But what they really have somewhere in some back room is a drawing of a golf course with high-priced homes around it, and then strip malls around that. They really have this whole community concept, but they’re going to get in with this golf course. Then they’re going to say, “Well, you know, we’d like to build low-density homes,” and for the most part the town thinks, “That’s a nice tax base.” Then “We need roads to service these homes, and, gee, these people need dry-cleaning and drugstores and things.” Whereas if they had gone to the town and said originally, “We want to increase your population, we want to increase retail acreage, and so forth.”
So segmentation is the idea that, you have to look at the whole project, you can’t just look at part of it. Unless you look at the whole project, you don’t get the whole environmental impact. So it’s a dirty word. You can’t segment.
Divide and conquer.
Divide and conquer, that’s a good way to put it.
There’s a sister concept to segmentation which comes into play here, and that’s the idea of cumulative impact. Cumulative impact says, “Okay, you have a single project, but other people also have other projects going on,” and in order for the government agency to assess the environmental impact you have to look at all of them cumulatively.
Both of those apply to the bridge. Even if they got by this—what I believe to be—tortured legal argument that the bridge has separate utility from the plaza--and that’s where they claim they can segment because they claim the law provides that if you have separate utility, you can do them separately—-even if they get by that, they can’t get by the fact that they have cumulative impact. Those are two different concepts but related.
They’ve been insisting on segmentation, saying the bridge and plaza construction projects were independent of one another, for a long time now. They had to have known that as soon as someone filed a lawsuit they’d have to really deal with it. Do you have any sense of why they thought they could just breeze through with this?
Number one, I think that traditionally we don’t have very good record in Buffalo of getting enough public opinion rolling to stop an agency as powerful as the Public Bridge Authority. I think they felt going into this process, and in their own notes they readily admit—and I have to give them that much, they’re very up-front about what they’re doing—they readily admit, “We are going to make as a corporate policy, an Authority policy, to follow the lowest path legally allowable.” The shocking nature of that coming from a public benefit corporation! That goes to the reason why they thought they could segment. They sat down and they said, “Okay, where’s the bar? What do we have to do to get over? We’re going to just barely scrape the top of it.”
Unfortunately they underestimated where the bar was, and the bar was up a little higher. I think that going into this they truly thought that they could do what they wanted, and they thought that they could segment because they didn’t believe that there would be sufficient opposition, and they felt that they had at least a legal argument—they did get an opinion that said that, provided the bridge and the plaza have separate utility, you can segment. There are cases where that is true in the law, but in this particular project, it was a misguided legal position for them to take. I think they’re paying for it now.
You have to remember why they segment, why they felt it was important. If you think about it, they’re doing an EIS [environmental impact statement] for the plaza now, so it’s not like they thought they could minimize their paperwork—if anything, they doubled their paperwork, because they’re doing a whole EIS process for the plaza anyway. Why not just go ahead and do it for the bridge? What happens is, if they get the bridge through, and they get the permit, the bridge has to be there. That takes away any alternative of moving the plaza. You’re locked in. The plaza has to be where the bridge lands. So by segmenting it, they narrowed the choices, the alternatives, which is a key issue in environmental review. They narrowed the alternatives automatically. That was the only benefit segmentation, that I can see, would have for them. Because it certainly didn’t speed up the process. From a practical standpoint, what they’re trying to do is get trucks across the complex. It doesn’t do them any good to get them across the bridge if they’re stuck at the plaza, or vice versa; the idea is to get them from Fort Erie to Buffalo and beyond.
You have to get them from the QEW to the Thruway.
That’s an even better way to look at it. So to say, “Look, we gotta move the bridge, we gotta move the bridge, we gotta move the bridge along” doesn’t make sense, because that doesn’t address what their own studies going back to the 70s say. It’s not the bridge, it’s not the lane capacities; it’s the plaza. So why do they focus on the bridge, and why do they push the bridge first? I think the reason was, they figured there was less environmental impact, because if you look at just the physical bridge, it’s in the water. It’s really not going to change much, and as long as they could deal with the navigational issues, they figured the bridge was easy. It’s hard to say with a straight face that the plaza is not going to have an environmental impact, so they didn’t even try it there. Plus the plaza is in parkland, or impacts parkland directly and is contiguous to parkland, so the Department of Transportation act comes into play, and they can’t get around it. But if they force the bridge and focus on the bridge and make the bridge a rush that needed to be done, once that was in place, the plaza is a lock. Once you have all that infrastructure going into the bridge, who can argue “Gee, maybe we ought to send these trucks elsewhere.”
This is like your metaphor of the small bit of wetland.
Yeah, it is, and it’s a classic example of segmentation.
*So you think they entered this without expecting any real opposition. They just figured they’d get through on the bridge and the rest would naturally follow.
They expected opposition, because they refer to the opposition, and they refer to why they had to separate these projects, because if they looked beyond the bridge to the plaza, they expected significant neighborhood opposition. I mean, they refer to it in their papers. So they expected opposition, but they felt that they could overcome it. I can’t speak for them, these are my assumptions, and I don’t want to attribute thoughts and motives to them that I can’t necessarily prove. But in looking back on it, that’s my assumption, that they were moving forward, that they felt that, yeah, there’s going to be opposition, there is to pretty much any project anywhere, that’s just the nature of the beast. People should speak up when they have opposition. I think that was it, I think they felt they could overcome the opposition. They didn’t expect people like the New Millennium Group, people like the Buffalo West Side Environmental Defense Fund, people like SuperSpan—which was a group of businesspeople, to a great extent—they didn’t expect them to rise up in opposition.
You mention SuperSpan. Can you tell me how and when your report for them came about?
That was submitted to the Coast Guard prior to the end of their hearing process in March 1998. What happened was, I got involved in SuperSpan and went to some of their meetings, and was intrigued by the fact that the Authority was moving forward in the light of a significant amount of what I think is respectable and important opposition, opposition you wouldn’t expect. It wasn’t a bunch of people running around and complaining about small issues. It was people who were really trying to make a point, people who were trying to work within the process.
It got to the point where the Authority clearly was not listening and clearly was going to move forward with its project the way they envisioned it, and I was asked, “What can we do? From a legal standpoint, what can we do?” So I said, “Let’s review what they’ve done to date and see whether they’ve complied.”
I acquired as many of the records as I could, including the draft environmental assessment, and the FONSI [Finding of No Significant Impact], and I reviewed all the minutes that I could of the Authority, and came up with this report. The purpose of the report was to submit it to the Authority to tell them “Here’s why we think you really need to step back and do it right. Because we think that if you don’t, you’re putting yourself in line for a lawsuit which is probably going to set you back.” We wanted to make that clear to them. We did make that argument back then. Then, in order to protect the ability to go to court in the future—SuperSpan was never interested in actually litigating, in actually going to court—but in order to preserve the public record, this was submitted to the Coast Guard, so that the Coast Guard had this whole document when they made their final determination that there wasn’t going to be an environmental impact, that their segmentation was not a problem, and that the Authority could move forward.
That’s important to us now, because when I go to Judge Arcara in federal court and say, “Judge Arcara, I think we’re entitled to relief,” one of the judge’s standards, one of the things he’s going to look at, is “What did this agency or these agencies know at the time they made the decision?” And “Did you participate in the public process to let them know this?” Because it’s not fair to the agency or the project sponsor to come in later with new ideas and new concepts that they weren’t even asked to address. It was very important that this be filed and be made part of the record. That’s the genesis of that report.
This document, in essence, put you into the process. It legitimized your entry now.
Legally? Yes. In environmental law a lot of times what you have is an administrative agency taking some action, or failing to take some action, and you’re going to the judicial branch as the check on that agency. But when you do that, the judicial branch does not want to step into the shoes of that agency and say, “Well, I think this is right or that’s right.” They’re looking at whether the agency fulfilled its duties under the law and under the Constitution. The court does not want to hear new arguments when you’re looking at the review of an agency. The court wants to hear “This is what the agency saw, this is what the agency heard.” The court is looking at the record of decision, the record that was before the agency. This document is part of that record. This document lets us say to the court, “Your Honor, they did not do it right even though they were advised what the problem was.”
Did you get any response from them at all?
No.
How could they read this and not know there was a huge chance of finding themselves in court based on exactly these issues? Your report isn’t just opinion, you keep referring to specific law, you show how the PBA at every turn attempted to evade its duties under state and federal laws, how the PBA attempted to ram through a project based on a faulty environmental review.
I attempted through most of that document to use their words, not mine. I think that that was important, because it was not a matter of a rant about why they’re wrong, it was more a matter of asking them to reflect on what they've done, what they've said, and the information they've had. It is my opinion that they didn’t do what the law requires. I don’t think they could have read it and not known they were facing the challenge.
The first day that they met with the Coast Guard and Nick Mpras said, “Can you separate the bridge and plaza?” The Coast Guard had just done the Blue Water Bridge, a U.S.-Canada bridge and plaza. It’s not like this was a brand new concept they were inventing. And his first statement to them was, “Can you separate the bridge and plaza?” So I think it was pretty clear from the beginning. But they decided as a calculated decision that they were going to follow the lowest path legally allowable, and if they could get away with segmentation, and if they felt it was going to advance their interests, that’s what they were going to do.
That gets back to the first thing I said when we sat down here: it is a culture of benefit the authority, not benefit the public. That’s unfortunate, because it’s a major piece of infrastructure that we need to advance, if it’s used right. I don’t think they could have read that document. I certainly gave it to them. Whether or not they took the time to read it, I don’t know, but I never did get a direct response to it.
Could you just briefly say what this report addresses and what it finds?
The report first of all reviews what’s happened. It goes back and asks, Why are we here? What are we trying to accomplish? What is the Authority trying to accomplish? What is the problem that was identified? How have they handled it? Then the report looks at what the law says needs to be done in this scenario. Then finally the report says why what they did didn’t meet with what the law requires
I reviewed the traffic studies that were done by New York State Thruway, Department of Transportation, Canadian Ministries, the capacity expansion studies the Authority did, the minutes of their meetings, and so forth. I then identified what they did in this process. One of the first things they missed, in my opinion, was a failure to provide all alternatives to the people. The idea of environmental review, the concept is the same as our free speech concept: lay it out there. The best way to combat bad speech is to allow more speech that’s better. But what you have to do is lay it out there. In the environmental review arena what you do is you lay out the alternatives.
You and I drive across the bridge perhaps but we certainly don’t spend our time and don’t have people experienced in what traffic is around us. We needed them to lay out the alternatives, including the alternative of doing nothing. What if we don’t do anything? They didn’t lay out the alternatives because they determined that their world is limited to that short corridor between Fort Erie and Buffalo, and in their world, in the universe of alternatives, you could tweak the bridge to the left, you could tweak the bridge to the right, you could put more lanes on that bridge or you could build two bridges. Their alternative never included the real problem, which is getting traffic from Canada to the U.S., and maybe we can do it downstream, and maybe we can do it way downstream. That alternative was never addressed in their process.
I’m sure what they’re going to respond is “We don’t have the authority. We couldn’t put a bridge downstream. We couldn’t put a bridge there.” But that doesn’t cut it. They’re a public benefit corporation, and even though they might not have been able to do it, they had to lay out to the public “You ought to think about this.”
Even if they didn’t have the authority to actually build these alternatives, they had the obligation to at least advise people and put it out on the public kitchen table, so to speak, and let the public address it, let the public say, “That’s a good idea” or “That’s a bad idea” in an open way.
That was the first mistake they made, not giving the alternatives.
Secondly, they then decided “We’re going to cut this in half and we’re going to do the bridge separate from the plaza.” That created a false picture of what the project was. The project is not to expand the bridge itself. I’ve been somewhat—I won’t say amused because it’s a serious issue, but it’s struck me that as we went through the process in the beginning, when opposition began to fester, the Authority said, “We’ve got to do this! We’ve got to do this now! The bridge is falling down, it’s got to be done now!” And as we get through this process and the idea of a twin, they’re trying to say, “You can’t take down this beautiful bridge! Why waste this beautiful bridge?” When the study came out that supported their original idea that the bridge was falling down, they said, “No, no, no, those studies don’t know what they’re talking about, they’re statistical anomalies.”
So, if it truly is not the bridge—and I think that’s the position they’re taking now, that the bridge isn’t falling down—then why are they pushing the bridge instead of doing the plaza first? Do the plaza first. It’s still segmentation, but I think it gets you more to the heart of the impact.
In the report, I identified those issues, I identified where in the process various people in legitimate government agencies pointed out to them, “This doesn’t seem right. Can you do this?” They did it enough times, it was mentioned enough times, that it’s difficult for me to believe that the Authority did not expect that they would have opposition. I think that their hope was that it wouldn’t gel enough to rise to the level of legal opposition and somebody actually pursuing them.
They’re very powerful. The Authority is very powerful, the people who support the Authority are very powerful. Some less powerful than they believe, but still very powerful. I really think that they believe, “We can do it.” And they moved forward.
I conclude with the fact that they did it wrong, and I point out where I think the flaws are in the process. Not to berate them, and not in any way to denigrate their jobs and their efforts, but to point out to them that they can do better. And I hope the litigation is going to result in something better.
When this report was delivered two years ago, there was still time to fix it.
There’s still time now.
They knew about the problem in 1995; that’s the first time somebody said, “Light bulb go on; you can’t separate bridge and plaza.” That’s five years ago. Five years from now, if we’re sitting here, or you’re sitting here interviewing my son at that point, we’re going to be saying the same thing. So there’s always time to fix it. Certainly when that report came out I would have hoped they stepped back and said, “Okay, let’s open up the process, let’s combine the EIS for the bridge and the plaza since we’re doing an EIS anyways. Let’s go back and utilize the information that we have, the air studies that we’ve done to date, and the other things that we’ve done to date, and expand on it, and take care of it and do it right.
A lot of people were drawn into this by the aesthetics question: which bridge shall we have? But that’s not where the most important part of the argument seems to be now.
Not for my clients certainly, and I think not for me. It’s not aesthetics. I think the bridge became a symbol for where we are. A hundred years ago, the Pan-American Exposition was here, and we were the fifth largest city in the country. We were at a great point in our history, and now we’re at a very low point in our history. We’re losing population, the region in general has not been seeing economic benefits. I think the bridge and what we do with the bridge became a symbol to young people here asking, “Do I want to stay here? Is this a place I want to live? Does this place exhibit to me values and things that I want to experience, that I want my kids to experience?”
It became a gauntlet: is this region going to be satisfied and just take care of a mechanical problem, or is this region going to soar above and say, “We’re better. We can do better”? The bridge became a symbol of that. We don’t want to just drive trucks across, we want to make a statement to the rest of the region and the world: we are moving forward, we are progressive, we are trying to get back to our heights. I think to a lot of people that is what it became: a question of whether we wanted to live with mediocrity, or say to our young people, “Look, we are progressive and we’re moving forward.”
People then became more interested in and more knowledgeable about the parks. I think Olmsted’s name has been used, if you ran some sort of database over the past few years—people who’d never heard of him, people who never understood the great work that he did, not only locally but everywhere—are now aware of him. So if nothing else, that came out. As people began to see these drawings, and as people started to identify the geography around these drawings—Fort Porter and Front Park and LaSalle Park—they all of a sudden started to realize, “There’s more here,” and they start to look at it in greater detail.
The suit that the West Side Environmental Defense Fund has brought in Federal court deals with an issue which has become more and more prevalent nationally, and that is the issue of these diesel fumes concentrating and their impact on neighborhoods and their impact on citizens. The information on it, I think, wasn’t as readily available as the project was going along. Nonetheless it is an important issue, important to the people who are experiencing it.
So in a way it’s been a wonderful issue, in the sense that it’s drawn a lot of people into a lot of questions and involvement in the community.
Wonderful in the sense of after a hurricane you feel good about the work the citizens are doing.
It has energized people, and I think one of the things that’s wrong in the PBA’s and Buffalo Niagara Partnership’s opposition to this is that they keep trying to say that everybody’s coming to this from the wrong point of view. But there’s a real spectrum of interests now.
When I first started getting involved in this thing, when it was signature bridge versus twin span, the Partnership came out—and people think of the Partnership as this unified voice of business—and it said in the paper that “the Partnership supports…,” “the Partnership does this,” “the Partnership does that.” Well, there’s a lot of people who were members of the Partnership that I had been talking to that I would ask, “Did anybody ever ask you which bridge you support?” No. So when you say “the Partnership,” you’re talking about the people that run the Partnership and their positions and opinions. I’m not a member of the Partnership and I’ve never attended any of their meetings and I can’t speak to the democratic process that they have or don’t have, but it seem to me that there was a large number of people who were at least nominal Partnership members, who paid their dues, whose opinion was never solicited. So when you say that there is a unified voice of any group, you have to look beyond that, you have to look at where that comes from: Is it legitimate, and does it really express what the members of that group believe?
Tell me how to characterize this. Is it narrowly fitting within what they think are the boundaries of the law or is it is deliberate avoidance of legal requirements? Is it like a taxpayer disagreeing with the IRS about the legitimacy of a claimed deduction—which is perfectly legal—or a taxpayer lying about deductions he didn’t really have—which isn’t at all legal.
I believe in my heart that they felt they had a legally justifiable position. Going back to the quote that I referred to earlier— “We’re going to follow the lowest path legally allowable”— you’ve got to remember the “legally allowable” part of that quote. I think they did try to comply with the law as they read it. The problem is they were looking at the words and not the spirit of the law, and they were forgetting that they are not a private entity. But I don’t attribute any criminal or similar motives of any type.
These PBA board members are are, to a great extent, businessmen, whose job is to maximize revenues. I think that these people have come together, and they came to this bridge, and they’re volunteering their time, to a great extent—I don’t think they’re making a lot of money off of being there—and they said, “Okay, what’s the project? We’re going to roll up or sleeves and we’re going to do it.” And they did. They did it in a business-like way, trying to minimize costs, maximize revenues and do it in the shortest time possible.
The element that was missing was the public nature of what they were doing. That, I think, is what happened. I don’t think anyone set out to break the law, I think they set out to comply, as they had to, minimally with the law, but they forgot that they were not acting as a private entity. I guess, to finish off the corporate analogy, they should have looked to their shareholders and asked what they wanted: that’s you and me and everybody else. The PBA was created by men and women that you and I and our forefathers put into office, and they were given the right to do that by us. So members of the PBA do have a responsibility to us as the shareholders to open up the process to the public and truly get public input on the whole issue, to they let the public know all of the alternatives.
copyright 2000 Bruce Jackson