back to Niagara Falls Reporter archive
"I am," read the advertisements and billboards, "Buffalo Niagara."
The Buffalo Niagara Partnership, we're told by the wizened likes of Mayor Irene Elia and the Niagara Gazette, holds the answers to the fiscal woes of Niagara Falls. The recently congealed Niagara USA Chamber, headed by the local daily's publisher and the son of a Buffalo Niagara Partnership power broker, hopes to grow up to be just like its civic big brother one day and urges we peasants to look lovingly to both of them for guidance.
You see all this and wonder, "Who is Buffalo Niagara? What is Buffalo Niagara? Where is Buffalo Niagara? Can I find it on a map? How long does it take to drive there?"
All good questions. But the best query remains this: Who started all this Buffalo Niagara stuff, anyway, and why? The answer requires some historical background.
Once upon a time, the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce haplessly watched (as such organizations are wont to do) while massive layoffs and plant closings destroyed what had been, for much of the 20th century, a steady and occasionally booming industrial economy.
As the 1970s became the '80s and the area's bedrock business, Bethlehem Steel, withered away along with its smaller peers, the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce took the sort of bold step in which such bodies specialize. It commissioned a jingle.
"Talking Proud" soon irritated radio listeners and television viewers throughout Western New York. Part march, part show tune, the song rocketed to the top of the wince-inducing ad charts, joining contemporaries like Fantasy Island's mercifully abandoned "Fun? Wow!" kid and the immortal "Everyone Loves Marineland" theme.
Chamber mucky-mucks even got the Buffalo Bills to play the song at the Stadium Formerly Known as Rich after every touchdown by the home team.
But even that public relations coup didn't stop more thousands of jobs from migrating south or disappearing completely. Tens of thousands of recently unemployed workers, their families and the small business owners they could no longer support (and for whom the Chamber did nothing) were more in the mood for a Russian dirge than the wildly inappropriate pep of "Talking Proud."
Meanwhile, in Niagara Falls, the cold realization started to set in that all those millions in Urban Renewal dollars hadn't rebuilt the city's downtown area, but destroyed it. And that no one wanted to visit or occupy most of the buildings that comprised the new concrete landscape.
Back then, a group consisting primarily of corporate honchos and attorneys who referred to themselves as the "Group of 18" called the tune for the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce. They still do. And now, as he has for more than a decade, Andrew Rudnick provides the public dancing.
Rudnick's primary accomplishment during his reign as the ostensible spokesman for businesses in the Buffalo area has been changing the name of the organization he heads. Not once. Not twice. But three times. The Buffalo Chamber of Commerce, apparently too constricting a title, became the Greater Buffalo Partnership. Then the Greater Niagara Partnership. Then, a couple years ago, the Buffalo Niagara Partnership was born.
Whatever the name, the Group of 18 developed a remarkable knack for coming down on the wrong side of just about every civic issue of the past decade, with Rudnick, its president and CEO, shamelessly shilling for them.
They pushed for (and nearly got) a steel twin to the decaying Peace Bridge built, despite overwhelming evidence that a single concrete structure could be built more quickly and cheaply. Not surprisingly, Gibraltar Steel President Brian Lipke not only sat at their table, but chaired the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority. After three years of civic breath-holding, mounting public opposition and a knockout loss in State Supreme Court, the Partnership's Board of Directors (made up on a rotating basis by Group of 18 members) backed down.
At the same time, they pushed for a new convention center in downtown Buffalo. Forget that the old convention center had already plopped one enormous windowless box in the heart of downtown and a new one would take another huge chunk off the beleaguered city's tax rolls -- there were serious public dollars to be made by the Group of 18 and their cronies, regardless of cost or long-term impact for the peasantry. Grass roots opposition, along with an increasingly obvious lack of interest in and funding for such a mind-numbingly dumb undertaking, finally stalled that project, too.
But the most blatant example of the Group of 18's hubris came during the protracted battle over Children's Hospital. Group of 18 founding father Gerald Lippes spent much of the 1990s pushing for the merger of five independent hospitals into the monolithic entity known as Kaleida Health. While the word "Kaleida" didn't exist until Lippes and Co. commissioned a consultant to invent it, a definition soon became clear: Equal parts inefficiency, pomposity and deception.
First, Lippes pushed to abandon Children's present facility on Bryant Street and build anew on High Street, a couple miles away. Why? Because a ton of money, most of it coming from the state and feds in one form or another, might be there for the taking. That pipe dream finally evaporated last fall, but not to fear. Another consultant hired by the Kaleida Board (chaired, as ever, by the reptilian Lippes), decided that squeezing Children's into one of the other existing hospitals was absolutely, positively necessary to save an organization that no one outside the Group of 18 really wanted in the first place.
Why kill off one of Buffalo's few institutions with a national reputation and positive impact on the Western New York community? Former Kaleida Board member and Group of 18 gadabout Bryant Prentice III stood to make a killing on a long-worthless piece of downtown property if a "right-sized" Children's was built adjacent to Buffalo General, for one thing. Lippes hired Larry Quinn, who did such great things while running the Buffalo Sabres, to explore reuses for the prime real estate in one of the city's growing neighborhoods, turf occupied by Children's, for another.
None of which had anything to do with improving health care or anything else but boosting the bank accounts and power of the biggest fish in a weed-choked pond.
As one physician at Children's put it at the height of last winter's war, "The same guys who screwed up the rest of Buffalo's economy have now gotten their hands on health care."
Again, despite Rudnick's efforts to convince the locals that the Partnership's brain trust knew what was best for the common folk, the attack on Children's met the same fate as the Group of 18's Peace Bridge and convention center campaigns -- abject failure.
And as ineffective as Rudnick's Partnership has been with the big projects, it's been even worse for small businesses. Isolated areas of growth, like Chippewa Street, Elmwood Avenue and Hertel Avenue have resulted from individual entrepreneurs making a go of it despite the Partnership's indifference to any venture that doesn't promise hundreds of jobs.
Which isn't to say the 18 and their mouthpiece have been totally ineffective. In each case of a major project mentioned above, they've been able to initially convince the hierarchy at the Buffalo News that they really do know what's best because, well, because they say so.
Under the leadership of publisher Stanford Lipsey, long a neighbor of Rudnick's at the luxurious Admiral's Walk condominiums, the News initially editorialized in favor of the ultimately unsuccessful schemes backed by the Partnership and published stories that regurgitated the Group of 18's party line, until someone else exposed the real ramifications. Then came rapid editorial backpedaling. After the misguided project died, the News patted itself on the back for the "hard-hitting journalism" that saved the public from a really bad idea.
Rudnick did accomplish one lasting goal with the News, though. He met with the newspaper's management a couple years back, insisting that it would be a really good idea to scrap the region's traditional names, Western New York and the Niagara Frontier, for "Buffalo Niagara." Don't believe me? Watch for yourself in any story about the region.
Though the Partnership has few members in Niagara Falls, or anywhere in Niagara County, its leaders have fouled their own lodgings badly enough that they're looking for fresh territory. They desperately want in on the casino business and surrounding development, but know that getting one in Buffalo is increasingly unlikely. The Seneca Nation doesn't want one there, Albany doesn't want one there and an increasing portion of the populace doesn't want one there. Cutting Buffalo in on the deal last year was a superficial way to keep Mayor Tony Masiello quiet and induce the support of the city's contingent in the state Legislature (which didn't work too well).
Niagara Falls, though, is a completely different animal. The presence of the falls themselves and proximity to the already-booming Ontario tourist market make a casino an obvious development anchor, instead of the expansive pit for local dollars that a Buffalo gambling den would create.
And the Group of 18 wants in. They've had Rudnick sniffing around Niagara Falls for the past few years, wowing the easily impressed Gazette hierarchy and presenting Elia with the "Who Spends What?" study, which promised the city millions in municipal savings if only it could break just about every contract it has ever entered into.
Unfortunately, they already have an in. Another Group-controlled body, the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority (which ignored Niagara Falls International Airport for 30 years, then tried to give it away to a foreign company that wasn't going to do much more with it) owns prime real estate in the planned development area.
Who is Buffalo Niagara?
The evidence shows that it's not the people of Buffalo, who don't qualify for membership in the Group of 18. It's certainly not you. And don't let Rudnick, Robert Newman (his counterpart at the Niagara USA), or anyone else tell you any different.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | July 2 2002 |