Kryzan begins congressional race with a low profile
Vying for Congress by ‘talking issues’
While Jon Powers and Jack Davis have generated most of the controversy in the local Democratic congressional primary, the third candidate, Alice J. Kryzan, has managed to avoid much of the attention.
But her defense of Occidental Chemical Corp. in Love Canal litigation, as well as her representation of the state development agency during its initial phase of the Erie Canal Harbor project, might raise some eyebrows among potential constituents.
Nonetheless, the 60-year-old Amherst lawyer said she hopes that an issues-based campaign will cause Democratic voters to look her way next Tuesday.
“I think I’m in a better place,” she said during a recent interview in her Williamsville campaign headquarters. “People are demonstrating that they want a serious candidate with a record of accomplishment who wants to go to Washington and work for them.”
Kryzan seems to have been biding her time. After Davis and Powers beat up each other for weeks, she recently released a campaign ad depicting herself as being above the fray while actors portraying her opponents wrestle in the grass.
She says the ad shows the alternative she wants to offer.
“There’s no question there’s been a lot of mudslinging,” he said. “But I’ve been out there talking issues from Day One, talking to voters,” she said. “That’s where I want to keep my campaign focused.”
Kryzan brings to the campaign a record as an environmental attorney and activist for reproductive rights.
She relocated to Buffalo 30 years ago when her husband, Robert S. Berger, was appointed a professor at the University at Buffalo Law School. Since then, she served as president of the board of Planned Parenthood and on the advisory board of the Western New York Women’s Fund and became active in environmental causes.
She has staked out fairly liberal positions while running in a district where Republicans outnumber Democrats by about 30,000 voters, but she thinks district voters are more than receptive to her kind of politics. She points to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, with similar views, and her 40 percent victory margin in the 26th Congressional District in 2006.
Kryzan says she is the most qualified, most experienced candidate in the race and is sure that people are looking for a change in policies after eight years of the Bush administration.
“Republicans have contributed to my campaign,” she said. “People want to see a change. They want a new and positive way of thinking to take them into the future.”
Environmental stands
Although Kryzan boasts solid backing from several environmental groups, she may encounter opposition because of her past work defending Occidental Chemical in litigation involving Love Canal.
She also represented Empire State Development Corp. and its initial Erie Canal Harbor plan that was considered inferior by preservationists to the historically accurate version unveiled earlier this summer.
She described Buffalo News accounts of experts’ criticism about the state’s stand as “sensationalistic.”
During a panel discussion dissecting the Love Canal story in 1998, Kryzan said Occidental’s waste-disposal policies in 1978 “were entirely legal and well ahead of the industry standards of the times.”
She complained then of the $11.3 billion that Superfund legislation cost private industry in 1995 and contended that scientific studies had yet to prove a link between chemical exposure of people living in the area and health effects. She also labeled as “hysteria” the controversy surrounding the Love Canal situation.
Kryzan says her education and experience as an environmental lawyer began 30 years ago from the industry point of view, adding that it helped her form a broader vision. She recalled the complaints people brought to her father decades ago when Youngstown residents blamed environmental laws on the shutdown of steel plants.
“They all told him that they could see the stars at night now, but nobody had any jobs,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be that way. And if we elect someone who understands both sides of the issue, it won’t be that way.”
Kryzan said she represented Pyramid Co. during construction of the Walden Galleria shopping mall in Cheektowaga, resulting in a project with significant economic contributions that also respected the environment.
“If you are a person of integrity who will listen to the other side and get the best possible resolution for your client in an honorable way, you have people’s respect,” she said.
Lois M. Gibbs, who led the fight for Love Canal residents three decades ago, said she does not remember Kryzan but does not accept that health problems and the pollution there were not related.
She argues that low birth weight, miscarriage and birth defects were all found in that section of Niagara Falls and that this is why the area was evacuated in 1978.
“That was the Oxy line, and as a lawyer, that’s what she had to believe,” said Gibbs, now executive director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice in Washington. D. C. “If she gets elected, will the citizens be her client and all of a sudden she will believe them? Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Backs abortion rights
Despite her past defense of companies such as Occidental, Kryzan has been involved on
both sides of environmental law. She headed environmental law committees for the county and state bar associations, and is supported by environmentalists such as Richard J. Lippes, former lead counsel for the Love Canal residents, and others.
“Alice represented the Town of Clarence to the highest ethical standards and demonstrated her leadership and her ability to bring parties together to reach workable solutions to difficult problems,” said Anne L. Case, who was Clarence supervisor when Kryzan helped the town fight expansion of a hazardous- waste facility.
As a member of Congress, Kryzan said, protecting abortion rights would remain a top priority. She criticizes Republican opponent Christopher J. Lee for refusing to say where he stands on the issue and said Powers’ initial indecision stemming from a desire not to upset his grandmother has no place in the discussion.
“This is not, for me, an issue of political expedience,” she said. “When I go to Congress, I’ll face a lot of tough issues. But I won’t be worried about what my grandmother thinks.”
She also dismisses the considerable support Powers enjoys from the Democratic organization and labor unions.
“People in Western New York want to select their own congressional representative,” she said. “They don’t want Washington selecting that person.”
She also spares no criticism of Davis, who has vowed to spend $3 million of his own money on the race.
“The political graveyard is littered with the bones of candidates who were well funded but whose message did not resonate,” she said. “I don’t have $3 million, so I don’t worry about that.”
She continues to oppose the war in Iraq and endorses a Democratic proposal in Congress that seeks to end the war and bring home the troops as soon as possible.
Earlier in the campaign, Kryzan asked her two primary opponents to sign a “voters first pledge,” committing them to support public financing for qualified candidates who agree to strict spending limits and to take only small donations.
She called on her opponents to sign the pledge and limit their spending to $750,000 but says they have yet done so.
