COMMENTARY
Donn Esmonde: Ready to take another step backward
I feel sorry for her. I feel sorry for all of us. But I feel especially sorry for Maria Whyte. She thought she could change something. Not a big thing. A little thing that, 12 years after we were warned about sprawl, we still have not done.
Unless something changes by Thursday, the 0- for-progress batting average will persist.
Whyte wants us to take the same baby step most other upstate counties have. She wants us to have a regional planning board, made up of informed folks who recommend where a new or relocating business should go. We want it where it will do us the most good, and cost us the least tax dollars in new, sprawl-feeding roads, sewers, bridges and buildings. Especially when we already have plenty of underused roads and empty buildings.
The planning board is more about principles than politics with Whyte, an Erie County legislator. You can hear her getting wound up, like a locomotive gaining steam, every time she talks about it. She gave the pitch to dozens of civic groups. She tried to talk sense to her cohorts. And, unless she finds one more vote by Thursday, it fails.
A planning board would help us. That is, if our multitude of 44 village, town and city governments, or our handful of local industrial-development agencies, or our supposedly business-savvy county executive, are interested in seeing a bigger picture.
Chris Collins, who vowed to run county government like a business, already rejected the planning board. To leapfrog the veto, Whyte needs 10 of 15 legislators. She has nine. The vote is Thursday.
The world changes; Western New York stays the same. Despite relentless decline, we ignore the outside world, we keep tight focus on our own backyard.
The nation’s best minds gathered at Chautauqua Institution in 1997 and told us that sprawl burns tax dollars and sucks the life out of a region. They told us that unneeded layers of government add boulders to our tax load and cement the small-picture thinking that locks us years behind the times.
Chautauqua Conference founder Kevin Gaughan embarrassed most of our local public officials into showing up. Gaughan was naive enough to believe that, if they heard the word, the politicians would come back and change laws and stop sprawl and cut our balkanized government down to size.
Instead, we stayed in our time capsule, engaging in intramural town vs. town warfare for crumbs of business. We remain oblivious to the fact that we are competing against every other region in America for jobs, business and growth in a global economy. The days of regional prosperity just because we have a GM plant are long gone, for anyone who had not noticed.
Former Indianapolis mayor—and metro government guru—Bill Hudnut last week told a local audience that Western New York remains “oblivious” to the global economy and tethered to the past. Twelve years ago, Hudnut said the same thing at Chautauqua.
“In more than 40 years in Buffalo, I do not think I have ever been more frustrated,” civic planner George Grasser said. “A planning board should not even be controversial.”
True. In the big picture, a regional planning board is a small step. It is a small step that, unless another legislator changes his mind, we will not take.
Targeted holdouts are three of Whyte’s fellow Democrats—Bob Reynolds of Hamburg (office number 649-2640), Dan Kozub of Lackawanna (822-0462) and Tim Wroblewski of West Seneca (675-8817). All oppose it, Whyte and others believe, out of political self-interest.
I am not sure, at this point, what it takes to wise people up. Twelve years after the lesson of Chautauqua, we still refuse to learn.
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