FOCUS: POVERTY
Brown unveils anti-poverty ‘road map’ for Buffalo
Task force charged with addressing city’s needs in 4 specific areas
Anyone who expected a radical reinvention of the way the nation’s third poorest city responds to poverty would be hard-pressed to find it in Mayor Byron W. Brown’s long-awaited “road map” for addressing the problem.
The centerpiece of the “Buffalo Poverty Reduction Blueprint” unveiled Wednesday in City Hall by Brown and Deputy Mayor Donna M. Brown is the establishment of a task force with four work groups, each charged with developing a five-year strategy for reducing poverty in the areas of jobs, education, neighborhoods and social environment.
Rather than laying out a policy agenda, the 77-page plan largely focuses on expanding or improving many of the 129 programs the city runs to help low-income residents, with “collaboration” and “partnerships” the buzzwords to improve coordination between groups.
Henry Louis Taylor Jr. of the University at Buffalo’s urban and regional planning department, who was introduced as the coordinator of the new task force, said models of collaboration would be a significant step forward if accomplished.
“What’s radical is getting people to work together — to come out of their silos and form real collaborations,” Taylor said after Brown unveiled his plan, noting a fragmented program-delivery system demands a more coordinated game plan. It’s the same theme the mayor emphasized before an invited audience of more than 40 community advocates and service providers.
“We will look to do new creative and dynamic things through partnerships with all of the agencies,” Brown said.
The coordinated game plan Brown envisions would focus on such issues as boosting literacy rates, expanding job training, reducing neighborhood blight and promoting affordable housing.
Diane Bessel, director of the Income Investments and Initiatives program for United Way of Buffalo and Erie County, said she welcomed the plan's emphasis on greater collaboration.
"We have a number of organizations in our community already engaged in addressing poverty, and we need greater coordination among them in order to better utilize the resources that are available."
Brenda McDuffie, president of the Buffalo Urban League, called the plan "a good starting point," welcoming its intent to "bring resources together in a strategic way to really have an impact."
Allison Duwe of the Coalition for Economic Justice had mixed praise for the mayor’s initiative.
“It really is laudable that we have a mayor in the city who is admitting we have a serious poverty crisis in this community and is looking to take that on,” Duwe said.
“The plan does a good job laying out programs currently in place and identifying the need to strengthen those programs. However, the plan fails to lay out a clear policy agenda for addressing poverty, such as reforming a broken economic development system that isn’t creating good jobs for low-income people.”
The mayor has drawn heat for not having a poverty plan more than three years into his administration, 1 1/2 years since the city was named by the Census Bureau the second poorest (it’s now No. 3) and 15 months since Donna Brown was appointed deputy mayor and charged with making an antipoverty plan a top priority.
But on Tuesday, Mayor Brown stressed poverty has been a sustained problem in the city before he was mayor, and that neither of his two predecessors, Anthony Masiello or Jimmy Griffin, had put into action a plan to combat poverty as he was now doing.
Brown also stressed that poverty is a countywide problem, pointing out Erie County’s poverty rate –not including city residents — has also been on the rise. He said there are currently more than 123,800 Erie County residents living outside Buffalo below the poverty limit.
Two of the four task force recommendations call for county participation, but notably no county government representatives participated in the plan’s unveiling.
L. Nathan Hare, executive director of the Community Action Organization of Erie County, said any anti-poverty plan hatched by the city must take into consideration the broader challenges facing the region. Hare is co-chairman of the new task force with Sister Denise A. Roche, president of D’Youville College.
Education is a major component of the plan, which was drafted in consultation with dozens of community groups, institutions and localities. Enhanced efforts to prepare young people for school and increase high school graduation rates are among the goals.
The poverty plan, however, does not offer measurable timetables for reaching any of its goals. The mayor said such measurements are being left up to the task forces.
Not discussed in the plan was a revitalization effort for neighborhoods marked for heavy demolition or already pockmarked by empty and often weed-strewn lots. The mayor said that it was a formidable problem, and one the neighborhood task force could be expected to address.
The mayor also said he was going to be speaking with East Side activist Darnell Jackson about a plan to revive a specific Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood as a kind of demonstration project for what could be accomplished by concentrated effort.
While the poverty plan does not attach cost estimates to any of the initiatives, it mentions federal stimulus aid through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a potential funding source for some antipoverty efforts.
Brown also noted with a hint of envy how in New York City the private sector matches one-third of the municipality’s investment in anti-poverty programs.
Donna Brown, who was hired in January 2008 to become the mayor’s point person on fighting poverty, said she believes major strides can be made through better collaboration and the forging of new partnerships.
msommer@buffnews.com and bmeyer@buffnews.com
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