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Weekend
Edition
August 10, 2002
Buffalo in Black and White
by Bruce Jackson
The Buffalo News is owned by Warren Buffett, one
of the richest men in America, revered by investors the world
over. On the front page of the Buffalo News for July 30, 2002,
what did the people of Buffalo see? They saw large above-the-fold
color photographs of Erie County Executive Joel Giambra, whom
the paper supports, and Buffalo Common Council President James
Pitts, whom the paper does not support.
Giambra is full-frontal: you can see
both ears and white on either side of both pupils. He is wearing
reading glasses, looking slightly upward, like a college professor
addressing a large class. He has a thoughtful smile on his face,
as if he's just had an interesting idea he knows you'll like.
His lips are slightly pursed, as if he's about to say something
witty, or perhaps he's hoping for a kiss.
Pitts is photographed at an angle, perhaps
in bright sun. He squints, one eye more closed than the other,
deep in shadow, hard to see. The pupil you can see is shifted
all the way to the side. The very bright light on his forehead
burns out all the detail. His teeth are slightly separated, like
he's speaking angrily or about to bite.
Accurate photos of what they two men
really look like? What story are the pictures telling? Someone
who has never met Pitts looked at the photo and said, "He
looks satanic." Why  would
the Buffalo News juxtapose an almost-academic straight-on image
of Joel Giambra with an oblique image of a satanic James Pitts?
Everything in a newspaper is instrumental.
Newspapers aren't just facts; they're also strategies. Show a
politician scowling all the time and people begin to think he's
an angry, scowly guy. Show him smiling and people think he's
pleasant. Photographs are codes we know so well we don't even
stop to think about them.
The photographs of Giambra and Pitts
are part of a three-column-wide piece by Patrick Lakamp titled
"Regionalism rears its head in redistricting debate."
Lakamp's first two paragraphs are: "To those watching from
the suburbs who thought that cutting the size of the Buffalo
Common Council was a quarrel pitting city leaders against each
other, common Council James W. Pitts-and many of his supporters-are
sending a different message: The debate is coming your way."
Read that closely: the argument isn't over the best model for
city government or a better way to serve the city's residents.
It's about James Pitts and his supporters (who the Buffalo News
has painted relentlessly as black and racist) and folks in the
suburbs. And something is coming your way. Your way. Oh boy:
why did you move to the suburbs, anyway?
The rest of the article doesn't get much
better: it's basically about Giambra and his point of view. Giambra
is quoted directly several times, as are several people who agree
with him.The few Pitts quotations seem to have been cherrypicked
out of various public events. Lakamp says Pitts declined being
interviewed for this piece. Pitts says Lakamp only contacted
him at the last minute and he didn't want to get sandbagged by
Lakamp once again. He got sandbagged anyway.
There's a terrific political fight going
on in Buffalo now that is cast in terms of saving the city $600,000
but which is really about limiting the black presence in city
government and, in particular, getting rid of Jim Pitts, the
city's only really powerful black elected official. The city's
one daily newspaper has taken to calling racist anyone who opposes
the plan, which the city's 7 white councilpersons voted for unanimously
and 6 nonwhite councilpersons voted against unanimously. The
area chamber of commerce, which spent a lot of money last election
trying to defeat Pitts, sent messages to the 7 whites on the
council to "hold firm." The mayor won't come out of
his office to pour a bit of oil on the waters because someone
told him that Pitts is involved in the current recall petition
campaign against him.
White Flight
in Short Hops
Buffalo's population was 580,000 in 1950;
it was down to 292,000 in 2000. In that half-century, the steel
mills went to Japan, the grain industry disappeared, the lake
ships now make their Atlantic ocean ports via the Welland Canal
to the west of here, and the massive rail operations that supported
all those operations shrank or died with them. Buffalo has been
hard hit by the decline of rustbelt industries, as have many
other cities, and its downtown has suffered as middle class white
folks moved to suburbs where they could shop in malls and not
have to look at people who didn't look like them.
New York State law prevents Buffalo from
doing the kind of incorporation of contiguous population centers
that was done by Houston, Los Angeles, Louisville and many other
cities, so the decline in heavy industry and the shift in population
has been accompanied by a decline in the city's tax base: there
is hardly any downtown shopping, hundreds of commercial and residential
buildings are vacant and decaying. A simple vote in Albany about
fixed borders could remedy that, but the real estate and political
interests are too rich and powerful ever to permit that.
Comparing the number of people who lived
in Buffalo at some glorious time in the past and the number who
live here now tells you the number of people listing their home
addresses within Buffalo's city limits has decreased, but you
need to know more to make sense of this.
Buffalo's population did indeed decline-but
in an amount nearly equal to the increase in population in surrounding
white bedroom communities. Buffalo is now about fifty percent
nonwhite. I recently heard the city described as a dark core
surrounded by a huge white donut. The contiguous towns of Amherst
and Cheektowaga, for example, tripled and doubled their populations
in that same 50-year period. Amherst, which is 88.3% white, went
from 33,700 in 1950 to 116,500 in 2000. Cheektowaga, which is
97.5% white, went from 45,354 in 1950 to 94,109 in 2000. Much
of Cheektowaga's expansion consisted of Polish-Americans who
moved out of Buffalo's Fillmore district.
The white flight has gradually made itself
felt in city government. The first African-American councilman
at-large was Delmore Mitchell 1965. In 1975, Mitchell became
the first African-American Common Council president. It is very
likely that the city will have its first African-American mayor
before the end of the decade. And that is another reason many
people think the exercise in raw power by the white majority
on the current Common Council and the city's white power structure
is stupid: what happens when nonwhites again control the Council
and they also control the mayor's office? Are they supposed to
forget how the whites took the Common Council presidency away
from them in 2002?
White Power
On Tuesday, July 23, 2002, the seven
white members of Buffalo's Common Council voted unanimously to
reduce the number of seats on the Council from thirteen to nine.
All six African-Americans on the Council voted against the reduction.
The plan removes four at-large seats,
including the position of Council president, which is also an
at-large seat. Two of the at-large seats and the Council presidency
are held by African-Americans. With the city's present demographics,
the new district lines are expected to produce a Council of four
representatives from white districts, three from black districts,
one from a mostly Hispanic district, and one that could go either
way.
Proponents of the plan, all of whom seem
to be white, say it produces a leaner, more efficient Common
Council, and that it will be fair because the new districts should
produce a council that represents the ethnic balance of the city.
Opponents, mostly non-white, say that
removing all the at-large seats and especially the Common Council
president, not only reduces the number of blacks on the Council
by three, but, more importantly, creates a council easily manipulable
by the mayor's office. The mayor can say to a councilperson representing
a district,"You want that school, you vote with me on...."
He has to work a lot harder to influence someone who is elected
by a citywide vote. That, they say, is what the plan is really
about. A 1926 reform commission created Buffalo's strong mayor/strong
council system in order to reduce corruption in city government.
This plan, they say, would destroy that check on executive power.
The nine-member plan was strongly endorsed
by the Buffalo Niagara Partnership (formerly the Chamber of Commerce),
a business organization that often involves itself in local political
affairs. Three years ago, it contributed heavily to the campaign
of David Franczyk, who was trying to unseat the incumbent Common
Council president, James Pitts. The plan was also backed by-some
say it originated with-the Buffalo News, the city's only
daily newspaper, and the only newspaper wholly owned and controlled
by Warren Buffett. Lately, the News has been mounting
an editorial war on Pitts and it is difficult to tell if its
articles and editorials about the plan are about streamlining
city government or merely getting rid of a powerful African-American
politician who doesn't follow orders to roll over and play nice.
The African-American community is in
a rage over the whole thing. Both of its weekly newspapers wrote
strong editorials opposing the plan, and the hundreds of citizens
who crowded the Council chambers the night before the 7-6 vote
argued strongly against it.
The Partnership, the News, and
the city's mayor, Anthony Masiello, all say the reduction in
Council size is necessary because the city is in terrible shape
financially and the reduction would save $600,000. They say it
has nothing to do with race or controlling political power; it's
just about economic efficiency.
No one who knows much about the way public
money is passed around in this town takes that seriously. The
whole city government is fat and bloated and hardly anybody seems
willing to give anything up. Summer programs for kids have been
cut, funding for arts organizations has been slashed, but the
police department refuses to consider one-person patrol cars
in safe neighborhoods at safe times of day, the fire department
refuses to consider smaller and more efficient fire engines,
and the mayor's office hasn't reduced its own payroll at all.
Another Option
I don't know anyone who says the Council
should remain with thirteen members. The question is how many
and which seats are to be cut. There is another plan on the table,
one that is acceptable to the non-white community and which differs
from the plan the Council passed in only two small regards. The
differences are small if the intention of the cut really is merely
economic. If the intention of the whites is instead to cripple
black political power, then the two differences are very large.
Deal-breakers.
The plan was drafted by the 13-person
Citizen's Reapportionment Commission, whose members were jointly
appointed by Masiello and Pitts and approved by the entire Common
Council. The Commission spent most of a year studying the question.
It recommended cutting one at-large position and one district
created by gerrymander 10 years ago. That district didn't make
much sense then and it makes much less sense now, since it has
grown thinner than any other district in the city because of
white flight.
The councilperson representing that district
is David Franczyk, the man the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, a
developer named Carl Paladino and some lawyers ran against Pitts
in 1999. It was Franczyk who introduced the nine-person all-district
plan. Franczyk and his backers, who had been trounced at the
polls by James Pitts three years ago, seem now trying to force
him out by a massive restructuring of city government.
Most people expected the Council to adopt
the Citizen's Reapportionment Commission recommendation because
all six African-Americans and one white, Rose LoTempio (who had
previously announced her intention to retire at the end of her
present term), were on record as favoring it. And it was, after
all, a plan produced by an independent commission appointed by
the mayor and the Council president.
Then, at the last minute, LoTempio switched
her vote. One of the weekly newspapers in town reported that
she has 19 relatives on the city payroll, and nearly all of those
jobs were controlled by the mayor's office. "Tony Masiello
reached in there and touched Rose LoTempio," Pitts said.
You can never prove things like that, unless the parties to the
deal tell all, which they would be crazy to do, but nobody, LoTempio
included, has come up with a better reason for her sudden and
total reversal.
Neutralizing
Black Power
Pitts, and nearly all African-American
and Hispanic leaders in Buffalo, argue that this isn't an economic
move at all, that the economic talk is simply cover for the mayor,
Buffalo Niagara Partnership, Paladino and a few others to rid
the city of the only city-wide positions of power nonwhites have.
Pitts says that the Reapportionment Commission's plan would have
maintained a strong Council president, while the plan the seven
whites passed would have a rotating president selected from the
district representatives, which would mean they could be easily
controlled by the mayor.
Anthony Masiello is a sweet guy whom
almost everyone finds a likeable fellow. He is also feckless
and inconsistent. He has a reputation for agreeing to almost
any plan anyone proposes to him, until another plan comes along
offered by someone else, whereupon he agrees with that. When
it comes to spending public money he tends to favor a small group
of developers. Carl Paladino, for example, wanted to buy a city-owned
former department store in the heart of town but he didn't like
the building's roof. Masiello used $800,000 of city funds to
put a new roof on the building, then sold it to Paladino for
one dollar. He recently committed over a million dollars in federal
discretionary money to a developer who wants to take another
downtown building, this one presently occupied and doing pretty
well, and convert it into upscale condos. He is currently working
with a group of investors who want convert the former Statler
hotel and the present convention center into a gambling casino-directly
across the street from city hall and the proposed new federal
courthouse.
People on the East Side look at those
numbers and say they have a hard time believing that the reason
for getting rid of all four at-large positions is simply to save
$300,000 more than the Reapportionment Commission's eleven-member
Council plan would have saved.
African-Americans say they're getting
screwed by whites who want to keep them in their place; whites
say those people just don't understand economic necessity and
this is all for their own good. It doesn't go down very well.
The Buffalo News focuses most of its anger on Pitts,
basically painting him as self-serving and rabble-rousing.
Several of Masiello's associates have
asked him to use the power of his office to calm things down.
He refuses. In addition to his close alliance with a county executive
working to shift many public functions from the ethnically mixed
city to the predominantly white county, he just doesn't like
Jim Pitts. He's convinced that Pitts is one of the people behind
a current recall petition campaign, which he isn't. He'd rather
let the city blow up than calm things down, if calming things
down means urging the Council to reconsider and go back to the
eleven-person Common Council the Citizen's Commission recommended.
Taking It to the Streets
The Council vote isn't final. Three further
steps are required: the mayor has to hold public hearings on
it, he has to decide whether to accept or veto it, and then,
if he accepts it, it has to go on the November ballot as a referendum.
Masiello has announced a date for the public hearing. It will
be in a space far smaller than almost everyone expects will be
needed. Masiello said it doesn't matter because he's already
decided to sign the resolution and send it to referendum. The
public can come and talk to him, but he's got no intention of
listening to anybody.
The proponents of the nine-person plan
are counting on the usual pattern of there being a larger voter
turnout in white than black and Hispanic neighborhoods. They
may be in for a surprise. The night of the Council reorganization
vote, with its perfect racial split, Pitts said,"We're going
to take this to the streets."
Some of his opponents took that to mean
he was urging racial violence, which gives you an idea of how
little in touch they are with current political language. Nobody
in the city's African-American neighborhoods thought Pitts meant
anything other than, "We're going to campaign very hard
on this issue and we're going to kick your ass at the polls in
November."
Bruce Jackson
is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P.
Capen Professor of American Culture at University of Buffalo.
He edits Buffalo Report.
His email address is bjackson@buffalo.edu.
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August 10/11,
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