September 30, 2002
The Buffalo Report Interview
Joel Rose: "You can fight city hall"
by Bruce Jackson
Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton has yet to rule on the acceptability of George Pataki's attempt to fastrack Department of Interior approval of the Seneca gambling compact and to sidestep the New York State constitution, but Seneca Nation and Niagara Falls officials are pushing forward with Niagara Falls casino construction anyhow. I assume they're working under master/monster-builder Robert Moses' principle that once you get that shovel in the ground it becomes exponentially more difficult for anyone to stop you, no matter how lousy your project and how legitimate the opposition.
Buffalo area politicians have been all over the spectrum on this. The pols blowing hottest are those most closely tied to Governor Pataki's apron strings or most directly influenced by Buffalo developers. Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello, for example, signed on at the beginning and seems never to have paused to think or reflect on the consequences of a huge gambling joint directly across the street from city hall that would remove a large block of downtown business property from the tax rolls.
Some pols who have to deal with lust for a casino on one side and serious questioning of it on the other (like State Senator Byron Brown, whose district encompassed both Niagara Falls and Buffalo) have gone into deep hiding: everything they say about it comes out waffled.
Some (like Erie County Executive Joel Giambra) were smiling supporters at the press conferences when the governor first blew into the area promising that casinos in downtown Niagara Falls and Buffalo would renew this sorely crippled region economically but then, as they did the arithmetic and began to smell the growing public opposition, they moved back into the shadows.
And then there's the Buffalo Common Council, which has been too busy with its own civil war to do anything but have kneejerk responses to this issue.
The three notable exceptions have been retiring Assemblyman Arthur O. Eve, Assemblyman Sam Hoyt and retiring Congressman John Lafalce. Hoyt and Lafalce have both written Interior Secretary Norton detailed letters saying why she should turn down the fast-track gambit and force Pataki and the Senecas to submit this deal to public inspection. (Click on their names for the texts of their letters.)
Perhaps the one thing Seneca Nation President Cyrus Schindler, New York Governor George Pataki, Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello, Statler owner Gerald A. Bucheit, and Carl Paladino and the other local developers hoping to make a big buck out of building a downtown casino in Buffalo fear only a soupçon less than a negative decision from the Department of the Interior on the whole grubby deal, is giving the Buffalo community a chance to look at this in detail, consider it in depth, and then involve themselves in the process. Paladino says Get out of the way, Masiello says Trust me and Pataki doesn't bother talking to folks in Buffalo at all.
Little surprise: look what happened when the public got involved in the plan to build an anachronistic high-maintenance steel Peace Bridge twin, the attempt to absorb Children's Hospital into Buffalo General Hospital, the plan to move the Buffalo Zoo down to the waterfront, and the plan to erect a duplicate of the Erie Canal terminus and then encase the real thing in cement. In each instance, the public forced the politicians to be responsible and the profit-takers to back off.
And now, it's gambling in the heart of town.
Enter Joel Rose, a software developer at UB's computing center, an oldtime liberal with an invigorating and infectious sense of public responsibility. Rose tasted blood in the Buffalo Zoo fight when he was one of the principal organizers of the citizens' movement that stopped dead a move that all the pols in town insisted was a done deal.
I think Joel Rose and the people he works with in Citizens Against Casino Gambling in Erie County (of which he is chairman) have to be the worst nightmare for all those people lusting to plop a gambling casino across the street from Buffalo's city hall. Rose has no interest in power, money or position. He really cares about the city and the issues. The bad guys just hate people like that.
A few weeks ago, we spent a few hours talking about the Buffalo Casino War. Here's part of that conversation:
Citizens against casino gambling
We have this group that has been formed. It's frequently confused with the old Western New York Coalition Against Gambling. But it's not a coalition; it's a membership organization. It's modeled in my head after the Committee to Keep the Zoo in Delaware Park, which I was involved in also.
We're using the same kinds of techniques to try to stimulate public debate and discussion and to get some of our public officials to rethink some of the stands that I think they've taken casually, without much thought.
It's Citizens Against Casino Gambling in Erie County. An awful name. The acronym is unpronounceable.
In terms of public sentiment I think that we start off with a situation in which the people in Erie County are about evenly divided, maybe a little bit more against than for the kind of casino that's been proposed, a casino run by Native Americans. I think that if we can engage in a public debate, so that this is something that is really on people's minds, that we will end up after some discussion, more like 70-30 or 80-20, and I think at that point, we will have public officials who have suddenly decided that they don't think it's such a hot idea.
There is really no formal role for local government officials to say aye or nay to this thing, but I cannot conceive that if Mayor Masiello decides it's a bad idea and County Executive Giambra decides it's a bad idea that this will happen. I don't think that Governor Pataki would allow it to happen under those circumstances.
This is going to devastate our city
Pataki is doing this, I assume, because he thinks it will help him politically. That and the fact that he's got a big hole in the state budget. This is a moral outrage because holes in state budgets should be faced honestly by cutting spending or by raising revenue in an honest, straightforward manner.
What this amounts to is a regressive tax levied only in the areas of the state that can least afford it. Western New York is probably the poorest urban area in New York State. Possibly Utica might edge us out.
This is going to drain money out of households in Western New York. That's where the money is coming from. We're not going to be having tourists who come, I don't think, even to Niagara Falls, New York. They've got dynamite competition right across the border. I think it's too late for them.
In terms of Buffalo, certainly we're not going to be having tourists. We're going to be generating revenue for the State of New York and the Seneca Nation and the developers. That revenue will come from the pockets of people who live here in Erie county, and possibly to a limited extent in some of the surrounding counties. People will not be coming in any great numbers from any significant distance. We won't be bringing outside money into Erie County.
I think that's really so obvious when you think about it that it amazes me that people like the mayor and the county executive have been willing to touch this with a ten-foot pole. This is going to devastate our city if it happens.
Fixing Buffalo
How do you explain their unquestioning embracing of this?
In the mayor's case I really think that it's a lazy way of thinking that he has. He has demonstrated time and time again a proclivity for looking for some big project, a quick fix that is going to solve our problems.
Which are serious. There's no question that we have serious problems. So he's looking for some dramatic single step that he can take that's going to fix the problems. I think he's searching for something that's nonexistent when he does that.
There is a way to fix Buffalo. But it involves a lot of work at the margins: fixing up neighborhoods, making sure police protection is adequate, taking care of all these little things that make an area which is basically nice a good place to live and raise families.
If you do that—and there's a great deal of evidence that cities that concentrate on that sort of thing are in fact successful—the big projects take care of themselves because private developers will undertake big projects in cities where people want to live anyway.
Buffalo has a lot of unique attributes that could be developed for a modest tourist draw. Things like our unique architecture here. Our unique history, with not only the terminus of the Erie Canal but the last stop on the Underground Railroad. There's no other city that can lay claim to those things.
A historical cultural development along those lines could hardly do anything but succeed. It won't solve Buffalo's economic problems, but it won't hurt us and it will help a little. But if we do those things, along with taking care of neighborhoods and making sure schools are good, our streets are paved and plowed and if somebody calls 911 they get a response—
—You're talking about Quality of Life 101.
Yes. Those are the things that will turn the city around. And I think it will happen eventually. I tend to be an optimist.
There is something in the mayor, there is a side of him that recognizes that. When he first came into office he established neighborhood impact teams. It was a dynamite idea and they were successful. I'm not sure what's become of that program. They did exactly the kind of thing that needs to be done. They would descend on a neighborhood and do everything at once. They would fix things that were broken. They'd issue citations for code violations. They'd fix the cracks in the sidewalks and god knows what else. So that when they left they had made a difference. That's exactly the kind of thing they should be doing.
I think that there's a constructive side to this mayor but he lets himself be taken in by these poorly thought-out development schemes. Moving the zoo I think was a classic example. So is the casino. I think that the idea of a new convention center is also in that league. I'm not really sure what his stance on that was. But it's the same sort of thing. It's the quick-fix mentality.
Joel Giambra, on the other hand, I think is a more thoughtful guy who sometimes reacts to things quickly without much thought but is not above changing his mind after more consideration. That's exactly what happened on the zoo issue. He told me that he had initially reacted at an emotional level—"Wouldn't it be nice for the animals to have more space?" —and then he talked with me and he talked with some other people and eventually he did a one-eighty on that.
So I do have to respect Giambra's thought process, but I think sometimes he reacts to things too quickly without thinking them through. I think that's what he's done again with regard to the casino. Some of the things that he's said lately suggest that he's had some second thoughts about the casino. One of our members questioned him during a radio call-in show and as that conversation was reported to me, he was sort of hedging on the degree of his support on the casino.
A lousy deal
The deal Buffalo and Erie County get is a lousy deal. It's really all about the money. You have to do the math. We don't take the position as an organization that gambling is inherently evil. Some of us as individuals feel that way, but we just look at what will happen to our community.
We look at maybe a couple of hundred fairly low-wage jobs, and then you have the multiplier effect from those jobs.
On the negative side you have the jobs that would be lost because that money is coming from discretionary spending from local people who won't be spending it on other recreational venues. You might have failures of restaurants and bars. Cultural attractions like the zoo or the Historical Society might fail or might have greater subsidy needs. That sort of thing comes out of public funds.
Those jobs that would be lost also have their multiplier effect.
Then you add to that the fact that Native American-run enterprises don't pay property taxes or sales taxes, so the county does not get its cut of sales taxes, the city does not get its property taxes, the county doesn't get its property taxes, and all the other taxpayers in the city and county will have to make up the difference.
Addicts and basket cases
Then you add to that the fact that there is a social cost. A friend of mine who works at the Research Institute on Addictions is the author of a national study the extent to which people have a problem with gambling. He was basically measuring people's level of addiction to gambling as a function of their proximity to various gambling venues. They geocoded the addresses of the respondents.
What they found was, if you look at level of addiction as a function of the number of gambling casinos within a ten-mile radius, as you increase the number of casinos—not just going from zero to one, but also going from one to two, et cetera—you get a consistent increase in the level of addiction. The relationship is strong enough that there's no question that it's significant, that it's not a fluke.
It's not just chronic gamblers who move to where the casinos are?
One can't rule that out. That's the one criticism one might make of the study. But if you look nationally, the only place that people would really have a motivation to do that is Las Vegas. But this study holds up all over the country. I don't think that people move to Detroit so they'll be close to the casinos, for example.
In fact the level of gambling addiction nationally has skyrocketed as gambling has proliferated and state after state has relaxed its prohibitions against casino gambling. It isn't that the old gamblers have got new places to go. There's new gambling going on. People who were gambling are gambling more and people who weren't gambling at all begin to gamble. That's what happens when you build a casino.
You can look at this from the survey data, you can look at it from the aggregate statistics. Any way you cut it, it's quite clear that we are going to be creating new gamblers.
This is the answer to the people who say, "Well, they're gambling anyway. They're going across the river to Casino Niagara." Well, some of them are. But they're not going as often as they would be. And some of them aren't going at all.
When we have a casino in Buffalo, if we have a casino in Buffalo, it's not like the money is going to stay here and help the community. The amount that will be turned over to the city and county governments is minuscule compared to the magnitude of the costs associated with it.
So you have these social costs and we tend to say "Yeah, there's that, but we can't put a dollar value on it," so we dismiss it. In fact, you can put a dollar figure on it. If somebody commits suicide they've lost their lifetime earnings. If a marriage is dissolved because of the financial stress of gambling debts, that has a measurable financial impact too. You can put a dollar cost on some of it. And it's huge.
We're talking about probably thousands of new compulsive gamblers in Erie County alone if we build a casino here, based on this study. It looks to me like we're talking about several thousand new people who have a compulsive gambling problem.
If you look at that in terms of bankruptcies, suicides, broken homes, the impact is staggering. I think it's staggering even if it didn't cost us a penny, but I think it will cost a lot of pennies.
The cost isn't just borne by one generation, either.
If you have a broken home or a suicide or alcoholism, it will sometimes rebound down through the generations, absolutely.
And, by the way, there is no plan in place, no proposal for any kind of expenditures on the part of the state to compensate any locality for the cost it incurs with respect to these social problems.
Which are certain to come.
Certain to come, and we'll bear that cost locally. It will be borne primarily by the individuals directly affected, but all of the residents the county will pay a price.
So you've got this scheme that is going to impoverish a community, or go a long way toward impoverishing it. And it's not speculative: if you look at the cities that have tried this, they have in fact been impoverished. Atlantic City lost hundreds and hundreds of small businesses after the casinos went in. People who've been to Atlantic City come back and report that you've got this glitzy area where the casinos are and devastation everywhere else.
Detroit has experimented with casinos. These are not Native American-run casinos, so Detroit gets a much bigger, better cut that Buffalo would get. But it hasn't helped Detroit. Detroit was a basket case before; it's still a basket case. It hasn't had an impact, in spite of the fact that they were given a much better deal than we would get.
Politicians
It's very difficult to understand how anybody who looks closely at this can believe that it's going to help the community. So it is a bit of a mystery why the public officials have either been silent or embraced it. It's a littler easier to understand in Niagara Falls, because they are so desperate. Although I think a lot of these arguments apply to Niagara Falls as they do to Buffalo, but perhaps not always with the same force.
But for a Buffalo politician to endorse this is almost incomprehensible.
A state senator told me that when they had voted on the authorizing legislation they were given the document about five minutes before the vote and nobody really had a chance to read it. I have to say that I find that to be kind of an unsatisfying explanation. I don't understand why you can't vote no on something that you haven't had an adequate chance to look at.
That's not the way Albany works. The legislators in Albany are pretty much told how to vote on bills of this type by two people.
Makes you wonder why anybody wants the job.
Evaporating done deals
You compared this to the zoo. There's one major difference: the zoo seemed to be totally a domestic issue, whereas this has some very powerful outsiders who are interested in it. Not just the developers, but the governor himself. The local politicians have little they can do to intersect it. If they take a strong position, they antagonize the governor from whom they hope to get bounty.
There's a number of things that might happen. I guess underlying your observation is a question: Why do you think you can win in view of that?
Yes, you can put it that way.
One of the reasons I think we can win is that I have seen these so-called 'done deals' evaporate when people get angry enough. People find a way to express their will.
With Children's Hospital, you had all the formal power in the hands of the board of Kaleida, but you had some number between a couple of thousand and twenty thousand, depending on whom you believe, of people standing in front of City Hall, and some people knew they didn't have much future here in Buffalo if they went ahead and ignored a crowd that was that angry. I think that it could be that way here as well. No governor needs this kind of headache.
And I'm not sure at the end of the day if the tribal council of the Seneca Nation would really want to impose something on a city that is dead set against it. We have to demonstrate that the city is dead set against it. We have yet to do that. We've got a poll that shows it's more disliked than liked, but we have to get the intensity of feeling up to where we can have a big demonstration as they did with Children's.
This issue doesn't have the same kind of sex appeal that Children's did. I have two children, one of whom was born in Children's, and on one occasion they saved her life, and I don't think that's unusual. So people had that connection to Children's Hospital. We don't have anything like that. On the other hand, I think we have a case that is overwhelming in terms of "do the math and look at the bottom line and see what's going to happen to this community if they go ahead with this." So much so that normal big project supporters like the Buffalo News have been at least neutralized and some of the reporters have been downright hostile to the idea of a casino. The News has actually been helpful on this issue. You have talk radio people on both sides of the issue. We didn't really have this going for us with the zoo. There are important forces in the community that are dead set against this project and I think that's helpful. The churches almost without exception are opposed to this.
The religious people, there's a reason that they're so consistently opposed to it, and that is, casinos are not family friendly. You have the spectacle of people going up to Casino Niagara and leaving their children in the car and forgetting about them. That's the kind of thing that casino gambling does to people. You go into a casino where there are no windows, there are no clocks, there's absolutely nothing to signal the passage of time except the occasional hunger pang, and they take care of that with cheap or free food and free drinks. This is not a process that is conducive to making rational decisions and indeed people don't.
Have you been in Casino Niagara?
I haven't been in Casino Niagara. I have been in the casinos in Las Vegas. I'm no exception to the process that goes on. When I went to a casino in Las Vegas I told myself how much I could lose and then I promptly proceeded to lose twice that much.
I think that most of us can talk ourselves into anything under the right circumstances. Certainly I'm not above that.
The more light you shine on this particular object, the uglier it gets.
There's a number of things we're doing. First of all, just to become visible, we're getting these lawn signs out. That does a couple of things. It demonstrates the strength we already have. Those signs go up as fast as we can get them. The other thing it does is, we have a vehicle for letting people know how they can get in touch with us. We have a web site address and a phone number on the signs. People are using that to contact us, so our membership grows that way.
What are they?
The phone number is 440-8126. And the website address is http://nocasinoerie.org.
In addition to that we're starting to get public speaking engagements. If we have an unfriendly audience, that's the best situation because that's where you have an opportunity to change people's thinking. If you have a friendly audience we ask them to do something about it. Help us out. We'll continue to do that.
As we move along and as we have a sense that public opinion is more and more with us, we'll begin to do some lobbying. Actually, we've already begun to do some lobbying. But it's always better to go and speak with a public official when they already know that if they blow you off they've lost a significant source of potential support.
Someone told me that the mayor wanted to talk with us. We'll talk with the mayor, but we'll do that when it's clear to the mayor that our side is the popular side. And it will be, I have no doubt of that. I have yet to hear somebody report to me that somebody that was opposed to it was convinced to support it as a result of the debate. It always works the other way. The more light you shine on this particular object, the uglier it gets. So I think that the more we're able to focus discussion on it, the better shape we'll be in.
The question is whether we have time. We don't necessarily have the luxury of two years to make this case. This could just happen.
So much of it depends on legal things that I have only a passing understanding of. I don't know, for example, whether there's a separate federal approval process for the compact as a whole and for each acquisition of land, or if it's just one process. And not knowing those kinds of things makes it very difficult to say what sort of time frame we're operating in. I think that it could be as fast as a couple of months, which scares me. I think time is on our side. The more time we have the better.
At the other extreme I think it could be a matter of a couple of years if the fight drags on.
I think of the Peace Bridge. It was supposed be a fait-accompli when we got involved in it, then it turned out not to be a fait accompli. I also think of Robert Moses's favorite phrase, "If I can get that first shovel in the ground I got them."
I think that's exactly right. We're not defeated until something happens physically on the ground. It's conceivable even then that we could get something rolled back, but it's difficult.
A lot of it depends on money, I think. If we can raise some significant money and can buy some airtime, we can cut through. That's the equivalent of going to a lot of block club meetings.
Niagara Falls
What about Niagara Falls? A lot of people who say gambling would kill Buffalo say it's the only thing that might save Niagara Falls.
I'll tell you what I think about that but you have to be clear that it's just me talking, it's not me talking as a representative of our group. Our group has no position on Niagara Falls. We take that view not because we don't have opinions about it, but because we think it would be presumptuous of us to tell people in Niagara Falls what to do in their town. Just as we think as a matter of process we ought to have something to say about our town, we ought to extend them the same courtesy. That's why as a group we don't take a position.
However, just as a human being looking at that situation it's hard not to have an opinion. And my opinion is that it's almost as big a mistake for them as it is for us.
Why?
First of all, the major argument for it is, 'We're losing all this business to people going across the border.' Well, what exactly is different if you have a casino in Niagara Falls? Does it mean that people are going to businesses in Niagara Falls and spending money there? I don't think so. That hasn't been the experience any place else. Does it mean that the coffers of the city of Niagara Falls are going to be enriched? No. The city and county together get an amount that will be no more than 6 1/4% of the slots. We have to be talking a million or two. It's just a drop in their bucket, and the bucket will be bigger as a result of having the casino. They'll have additional costs and crime and so forth. And they'll have some social things.
It's not the case that it will be the same people going to this casino who would be going otherwise to Casino Niagara. There will be new gambling from local people. They may draw in some tourists that will spend some time on the American side that they wouldn't have spent otherwise. That's probably true. There are tourists in the area and one thing about people who like to gamble is they tend to go to all the casinos that are available.
But I'm not sure what that does for Niagara Falls, other than clog up the streets with traffic of people who aren't going to spend any money anywhere but the damned casino.
The profits from which all go elsewhere.
Right. So I guess it's a tradeoff. There may be a marginal increase in auxiliary spending by tourists in Niagara Falls, New York, that otherwise would have been in Ontario.
I'll tell you an anecdote. About two weeks ago, my wife and I decided to take a little time and drive up to Niagara Falls and take a walk with the dog. The dog tends to be very aggressive when we walk in areas she's familiar with because she thinks she owns them, so it's nice to get off someplace she's not familiar with. It's a real Jekyll and Hyde thing.
We thought we'd drive up the Canadian side because it's a nice parkway rather than the industrial road on this side. So we're driving to Niagara Falls and it's bumper to bumper. I don't know if people are spending any money there but they sure are driving around. There was no place to just park the car and walk. It was just unpleasant, so we decided to go to the American side. We took advantage of the bridge that few locals know about and nobody who's a tourist knows about, the Whirlpool Bridge, where we went right across with no waiting, and no security inspection either, I might add.
I wanted to take a walk on Goat Island. I thought that would be a nice place to walk. As familiar as I am with the area after living here since 1969, I had a hard time finding Goat Island after having crossed the Whirlpool Bridge. I couldn't just go right to it. I had to kind of back and fill a bit because the signage is so poor.
It's terrible.
It's just about nonexistent. You just have to know where things are.
But then I'm walking on Goat Island and I'm thinking, "This is marvelous. This is a beautiful place." And the creations of humans on the island have actually enhanced it. There are nice asphalt pathways that are lit so you can walk at night and not trip over the roots and so forth, and yet they're not allowing any sort of ticky-tacky. I don't know how you turn that into a tourist attraction. It's an undiscovered secret, really. This is like the Smokies before Gatlinburg made it big.
It's too late for Ontario because they've developed the hell out of every square inch of territory there. In Niagara Falls, New York, you have two things. You have nice natural areas, like Goat Island, and then you have buildings that are probably not worth saving, that you could turn back into green space. You could have a wonderful place to live there, and then have a tourist industry that would draw. You wouldn't try to out-waxmuseum Ontario, but you could do something that takes advantage of the natural beauty there.
You can fight city hall
In the last five or six years in Buffalo, there have been several times where citizens have gotten involved and stopped some real bullshit here.
Yes. I like to think, with the keep-the-zoo group, that we inspired people to realize that you really can fight city hall.
I have to walk this big dog, say, and I'd take advantage of that to just start conversations with total strangers, particularly people who were interested in the dog. That gave an opening because it's an unusual-looking dog. I don't know how many times I would talk with somebody and they would totally agree with me on the substance of the issue, and then they'd say, "Ah, what are you going to do? They won't listen anyway." That used to really anger me because it's a copout. People really believe it. I don't mean to say they don't believe it. They do. But it really isn't true.
The politicians really do listen if people take the trouble to call them and write. It makes all the difference in the world.
We never had a referendum about the zoo, did we? But we got kind of a rough democracy just through individual acts of lobbying. People got their views across.
When people said, "They won't listen anyway," I would say, "It's not true. Call your councilman. Write a letter to the mayor. Do something." And a lot of them did. Obviously not all of them did.
Al Coppola was strictly on the fence on the zoo issue until he started getting overwhelming mail and phonecalls that ran 80/20 in favor of keeping the zoo where it was, and then he became a believer. He was actually fairly effective, but he had to be convinced first. He's a great believer in serving his constituency. When it became clear that his constituency really had an opinion, then he served it. I think there are a lot of public officials who are like that, either for philosophic reasons or because that's how they protect their hide. Whatever, there is just no reason to think they won't listen to public opinion. That would be foolish of them. And most of them are not foolish about the kinds of things that get them elected. That they're very savvy about. They may be not deep thinkers about public policy, which we would prefer that they be, but they certainly know where their bread is buttered.
So, when people say "you can't fight city hall," I think it's a rationalization for pursuing one's own private interests and not getting involved. You are serving your own self-interest when you get involved in public policy. But maybe not to the extent that justifies the use of your time. You have to care a little bit about your fellow man to do that. And people also like to be guaranteed results. People don't like to put a lot of effort into something that they don't know for sure will get them something. Writing a letter to a public official is obviously speculative. It may or may not produce fruit.
But we certainly know that you can fight city hall and in fact when people get really fired up about something it's pretty hard to stand against them. We have seen that now with the zoo, the Peace Bridge, the Erie Canal, consolidation of the libraries, and Children's Hospital.
And we will add to that the casino.
click here for more Buffalo Report articles on casino gambling in Erie County and gambling issue links