Roch-a-Cha Rant: July 2007

Saturday, July 28, 2007

John Lightfoot for County Executive!

What? Too soon?

Oh well, if they can't find anyone with the cojones to run for County Exec, let's hope that the Dems can find someone suitable to fill Lightfoot's soon-to-be-open seat on City Council. Not that his replacement would have large shoes to fill; the guy never deserved to be elected in the first place. Isn't it amazing what name recognition can do? Two prior DWI convictions weren't even brought up during his campaign? Is there anyone in our local media who even bothers to try to do their job? His brother Willie Jr., on the other hand, is a brilliant and well-dressed man whose talents are better suited for City Council than the County Leg. Maybe he's interested???

So all of you Democratic insiders, feel free to voice your opinions on the matter. Even better, if you have any privileged information, feel free to post it here. Allow me to suggest a few names: Wade Norwood, Saul Maneiro, and Dennis O'Brien. I know all three of these individuals in various capacities and all would make (or in Wade's case, have made) excellent candidates. First, it would be great to have Wade back in the public eye. He was a strong voice of reason on the Council in years past and I'm sure he's learned valuable information as a member of the Buffalo Control Board. Besides, who doesn't enjoy hearing the guy speak? Maneiro was the best candidate not to get elected a couple years ago when Lightfoot was able to steal a seat using his last name as his only selling point. Given the increasing influence of Latinos in Rochester today, having a second Puerto Rican on the Council is a good thing. Finally, Dennis O'Brien is a name you're seeing more and more these days. He's young, he's Irish, he's liberal, and he's helped keep Dave Koon in power in the Republican eastern suburbs for years now. All three of these gentlemen are quality choices for Council. I'm sure Minarik has someone willing to run for the Dark Side, let's be sure that the Council remains our local bastion of liberal sensibilities. What are your thoughts?

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Reader Feedback Wanted

It's time for some personal interaction with you wacky people... So I added a poll feature yesterday evening and thus far, I have received only one response. The worst part is that the response wasn't even mine. Is it not working properly? The last thing I want is to look like a hick who can't figure out the whiz-bangs and doo-dads of this intarnet thing. I am not a tech geek; it took me nearly an hour to figure out how to get the poll roughly where I wanted it to go. It's still not perfect; I wanted it placed in the sidebar underneath "About Me" but when I did that it pushed the sidebar all the way to the bottom of the page. WTF! Also, I haven't switched to the new-fangled Blogger template because I couldn't figure out how to keep my hit counter when I made the switch. It really is quite embarrassing that I can't figure this stuff out. Regardless, if you have any suggestions for the site, or know how to make the whiz-bangs and doo-dads do what I want them to, please let me know. In the meantime, I'll do my best to issue at least semi-regular rants to anger up the blood.

UPDATE: I fixed the poll problem, so have at it people!

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Dairy-Based Baked Goods Mill: Enough is Enough Already!

Clearly there is not enough going on in the Rochester area. No exciting discoveries at our research institutions. No titillating controversies in our local political arenas. No economic development advances improving our regional standard of living. Nothing of any real importance to the general populace is occuring around these parts. There must not be. Why else would the opening of an all-but ubiquitous chain restaurant be the most heavily covered story in town?

Every pre-programmed mass-consumer in the area is ever so excited about the grand opening of our first Cheesecake Factory restaurant. The way the media is treating it, this is the most exciting event in our area since PF Chang's opened at Eastview a couple of years ago. As we all well know, you're not a real city until you have your very own big-name chain restaurant where you can dine like other mindless wannabe bigshots in every other large city in the country. This begs the question, why does the opening of a chain restaurant get so much free local media coverage while many locally-owned restaurants have to beg the media to mention them or pay for advertising out of their pockets? It's utterly ridiculous and completely unfair. These guys even used illegal immigrants to build the restaurant. How's that for giving the local community a big middle finger?

I don't care how good their jalapeno poppers or extreme nachos are, they're no better than anything you can find in any number of locally-owned restaurants. You status-obsessed brainiacs just don't get it. Didn't the recent purchase of Applebee's by IHOP turn on the lightbulb in those thick skulls of yours? All this chain food is garbage, no matter how much avocado they use. Frozen ingredients, focus group tested food items, waiters reciting scripts written by marketing executives, etc. It's nonsense! There are 125 other locations for the damn company, you are not special for having eaten there nor are we special for having one!

This is a company more than it is a restaurant; it's traded on the goddamned NASDAQ under CAKE. When you eat there, you line the pockets of some rich corporate asshole in California rather than helping your neighbor. These chains do nothing to help our economy or our quality of life. Just look at the rotting former Bahama Breese, er, Breeze on Jefferson Road in Henrietta. That got a lot of media attention too, but it took about a year for that once next big thing to shut down. The same godless corporation that owns the Bahama Breeze concept (yes, they're called concepts, not restaurants) also owns Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and Smokey Bones BBQ. Do you see the trend here? It's pathetic!

I suppose that Cheesecake Factory is in the upper echelon of national chain restaurants but that does not excuse our local media for hyping their arrival. You've got to wonder how much loot The Cheesecake Factory Corporation paid for all of this exposure. It's a shame that we've lowered ourselves to this. That we're supposed to be excited when a restaurant with lookalike locations from Boston to Birmingham to Beverly Hills arrives with their grossly oversized entrees and overrated desserts. We're supposed to be thrilled that our suburbs look even more like everywhere else in this increasingly-godforsaken suburban nation. Enjoy it while it's still "cool" to eat there, you brainless sheep. Will we get this excited when Hard Rock Cafe, California Pizza Kitchen, and Waffle House come to town too?

Friday, July 13, 2007

Missing Girls Alert! Please Read!!!!

There are two fifteen year old girls missing in our community. They ran away from their homes in Chili on June 12 and were last seen in the Monroe Village area (on both Meigs Street and Averill Avenue) of the City of Rochester. If you have seen these girls, or have any information on their whereabouts, please contact the authorities.

UPDATE: The girls were found late last week safe and sound. Their parents can now sleep at night and hopefully their girls learned a valuable lesson.

Maggie's Lies Getting Bolder and Bolder

Before this election year, I actually had the foolish notion that Maggie Brooks was doing a decent job as County Executive. There were a series of job announcements, the airport was drawing record passengers, and the relationship with the City was its best in recent memory. What happened? Maybe I'm just a weak-minded liberal who has fallen prey to the evil Democrats' sniping at her record, or maybe I'm a free-thinker who sees through all the bullshit that the GOP shovels at us, but regardless, I am no longer of the mindset that Ms. Brooks is deserving of her powerful position. Among the many issues that the local GOP has bungled, twisted, and lied about over the past year, the latest is the County's precarious financial position.

Monroe County's bond rating has been downgraded once again and is now only two levels above junk status. Beyond the fact that the City of Rochester has maintained a far-superior bond rating, there are third-world nations with better bond ratings than our wonderful County. A poor bond rating leads to higher interest rates on County projects. As logic would have it, the higher the interest rate, the more money County taxpayers must ante up every year. As the Republicans have it, taxpayers have nothing to worry about. As the illustrious John Durso put it on Tuesday, "We are concerned about the interests of property taxpayers on Main Street, and unfortunately that does not sometimes coincide with the interests of Wall Street ... This news is not unexpected, but it will not stop us from continuing to move forward to protect property taxpayers in the future." As if maintaining a positive fiscal outlook is comparatively harmful to taxpayers.

Today however, Maggie Brooks ratcheted up the debate by defending her record against her Democratic assailants with outright lies. Said Ms. Brooks, "We've balanced our budget every year ... We've reduced discretionary funding this year by $400,000. We've cut the cost of government. We have more jobs in our community than when I took office ... I don't think that to me signals a community that is on the verge of bankruptcy." She then added, "The Democratic caucus should be directing their ire at Albany and instead of saying, 'Maggie Brooks, when are you going to solve our budget crisis, (ask) Albany when are going to give us control over more than 20 percent of our budget?." Fair enough. Except that balancing the budget based on one-shot revenues such as tobacco settlement money is a band-aid, not a solution. Likewise, the proposal to take sales tax money from the City, towns, and villages is just shifting the burden, again not a solution. The County has indeed cut the cost of government, but they've done so by cutting services from those most in need. Who cares about them though, they don't vote and they certainly don't vote Republican. I agree with Maggie that we should be directing our ire at Albany and demanding more from them. However, in the absence of improvements at the state level, the County must do what is necessary to ensure its own fiscal stability; and so far, it has not.

But it is the fourth of those claims where Maggie makes herself look absolutely foolish. "We have more jobs in our community than when I took office." Really? I'm not sure where Maggie is getting her numbers, but from the numbers that I've seen, she's way off. Ms. Brooks took office on January 1, 2004. According to the Department of Labor's Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Monroe County was home to 388,027 jobs in December 2003, the month prior to her taking office. By December 2006, the most recent QCEW data available, there were 384,879 jobs in Monroe County. By my math, that's a drop of 3,148 jobs or nearly 1 percent. Fuzzy math indeed. It is true that the Rochester Metropolitan Statistical Area has added jobs since Maggie took office. But I don't think she should be taking credit for the hard work of Livingston and Ontario counties. In fact, she should be ashamed at how many businesses are moving to our neighboring counties to avoid the inept leadership she and her party have provided us since Jack Doyle took office.

The Democrats have put together a solid package of reforms that would cut the County's deficit and lead to long-term benefits. The Republicans claim that "everything is on the table" but scoff at Democratic suggestions like abolishing the Water Authority or Kent Gardner's proposal in the Rochester Business Journal to slice funding from the school districts. This leads to the obvious question, which party has your best interests in mind? The choice is clear which way you should vote come November, if only the Democrats would put a name in their column.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Finally, Brilliance on the D&C Forums!

If you're like me, you're growing very tired of reading the incessant anti-Rochester babble on the Democrat & Chronicle's web boards. It's sad that our public forums are used almost exclusively as pulpits for preachers of negativity. Not that this is unique to Rochester nor is it unique to the internet/blogosphere. The venomous nonsense spewed forth in the online forums of the Buffalo News and Syracuse Post-Standard is equally ridiculous and for that, we should all feel shame. The state of public discourse in America today has declined to the point at which honest debate can no longer take place between regular citizens.

Despite all of this, there are a handful of hardy Rochester-backers out there carrying the torch of enlightenment to the ill-informed masses. This post is dedicated to the brilliant words written by loyal Rant reader Itchy in a forum discussing the Broad Street Tunnel project. Thanks to Itch for taking the time to pen such a scathing commentary on the wretched swine out there that never miss an opportunity to try and bring us down.

"Naddering nabobs of negativism. They mean nothing. They would complain about the downtown of any city they lived in. They'll never spend a dime there, or walk the streets and enjoy our city's beauty and history and vibrancy. They cheer any setback or decline, and purposefully ignore any progress. This has become a matter of dogma with them. They hate and fear our city; they hate and fear our people. They care nothing for art, for culture. They are barbarians. They contribute nothing to Rochester, and are of no consequence. Pay them no mind. They are nothing more than a mosquito, buzzing in your ear. Away, mosquito."

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Revisiting the Downtown Casino Question

A surprisingly large percentage of the region's populace is convinced that there is only one sure way to revitalize Downtown Rochester. This project would bring thousands of visitors downtown on a regular basis. It would guarantee hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and would provide an answer for the question of what to do with Midtown. However, an equally large cohort is convinced that this "one sure way" is a nail in the coffin of a vibrant downtown. It would increase crime, lead to serious mental health problems, and would provide little to no economic spin-off effect to the rest of downtown. This incredibly divisive concept is, of course, casino gambling.

Back in 2004, local developer Wilmorite revealed plans for a $500 million casino hotel complex spread over 35 acres of Downtown Rochester (see rendering below). Both the Sibley Building and Midtown Plaza would have been incorporated into the project. Wilmorite, who had been active in courting Indian casino development business elsewhere, was working with the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma on the Rochester project. Local business and political leaders, and the general population, were split on the issue. Democrats, led by then-Mayor Johnson, were adamantly opposed to the concept. Most social service agencies and small business owners joined the Democrats in opposition. Republicans and big business, led by the Greater Rochester Visitors Association and Rochester Business Alliance, were generally in favor of the plan. Ultimately, without support from the City of Rochester, New York State chose not to pursue an Indian casino in Rochester.

Like the rest of you, I too have been torn by this issue. I see both the positives and negatives of having a large casino hotel complex at the heart of our "Central Business District." As I see it, the positives are many: increased activity, improved appearance and perception, thousands of new jobs, more entertainment options, and a real solution to the Midtown question. On the other hand, the negatives are painfully clear: gambling addiction, opportunity crime, maxed-out entertainment dollars, and the undesirable situation of having a sovereign nation controlling prime real estate at the heart of the city. In the end, I came to the conclusion that although the positives outweighed most of the negatives, the thought of ceding a large chunk of downtown to a sovereign and non-taxable nation was simply too much to accept.

After a three year hiatus, the issue is back in the public eye once again. State Senator Joe Robach has introduced legislation to bring the issue of casino gambling to referendum by New York voters. He feels that Indian nations should not be given exclusive access to developing casinos in the State. Under his plan, New Yorkers would vote on whether to give individual counties the power to allow privately-developed, and taxable, casinos. I am in complete support of this proposal. The idea of allowing a sovereign nation to control land at the heart of our cities is obscene. What would Niagara Falls and/or Buffalo do if the Senecas decided to do something other than operate a casino on their land that would otherwise be illegal in those respective cities? Did the treaties New York State signed with the Senecas control for that? If we are going to have casino gaming in our cities, the economic benefits of that gaming should accrue to the city which hosts it, not to a sovereign nation with little stake in the community.

Past studies have shown that there would be tangible economic benefit to having a casino in Downtown Rochester. Despite the ill effects a casino can have on a community, if done properly, a casino can indeed be a positive addition to a city's entertainment repertoire. With all of the attention being placed on the growing tourist trade in the Rochester area, this certainly wouldn't hurt. I would be hestitant to accept a downtown casino if it did not meet the following conditions: make full use of the Midtown Plaza site, redevelop the Midtown Tower as the casino's primary hotel, build the mid-sized theatre that would be home to Garth Fagan Dance with little to no public dollars, pay full taxes for the casino property, and give the majority of the 1,300 or more jobs to city residents. If Wilmorite, or some other developer, was able to meet these conditions, how could we possibly turn it down? Then again, what if they fail?

Monday, July 09, 2007

The Broad Street Question, Part 2

In a John Kerry-esque manner, I recently questioned my own support for the Broad Street canal re-watering proposal. According to this weekend's Democrat & Chronicle article on the issue, the City of Rochester may also be rethinking their initial interest in the project. I do not want to reiterate my concerns about the canal, but have faith dear friends, I will not flip-flop again on this topic. This short post is meant to piggy-back on my earlier post by providing a visual if not contextual reference to what I envision for a new Broad Street. This vision incorporates a water element (though not a navigable canal) that pays homage to the former canal's alignment and significantly beautifies the corridor while also maintaining vehicular traffic and avoiding construction of costly liftbridges.

The following images are of the new neighborhood of Hammarby Sjostad in Stockholm, Sweden. The water element in these pictures is quite reminiscent of the water feature I envision for Broad Street. As a note, Hammarby Sjostad is an eco-village and as such, this particular canal is actually a rainwater collection channel. Rather than the beautiful landscaped parks that abut this canal, my vision has one traffic lane in each direction, with a center turn lane, and parking lanes on either side abutting the "canal." There would be sidewalks on both sides of the water feature, as well as a sidewalk on the other side of the street. The water could be channeled through inexpensive culverts underneath the various cross-streets. The "canal" could be illuminated at night and during the day, interpretive features would tell the tale of our former downtown canal. In my humble opinion, this achieves the best of all worlds. It preserves a portion of the tunnel for future transit use, it maintains necessary vehicular movement on Broad Street, and it provides a unique feature that can bring investment to the corridor.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

4th of July: The Best of America on Display

I was among the estimated 200,000 or so folks who packed Downtown Rochester last night to witness the City's Red, White, & Boom fireworks display. As always, it was a very impressive show; my ears are still ringing from the loud booms in the humid night sky. I must give a thumbs-up to Mayor Duffy and his crew for assembling a great event. Fireworks are our way of remembering our National Anthem's verse, "And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air," and it seems that Americans more than any other nationality, love their fireworks. But maybe we love them a bit too much.

Lost in the frenzy of getting a great spot from which to watch the display was the fact that we were supposed to celebrating our nation's 231st birthday. Love for our nation should include respect for its laws, at least on this one day of the year. Instead what I saw were incredibly rude drivers, foul-mouthed suburban teenagers, and brazen disregard for a city neighborhood and its laws. The way my fellow Americans treated my beloved Corn Hill neighborhood was despicable. Everywhere, cars were parked illegally blocking streets and causing interminable traffic jams. Wealthy suburban white teens with their collars popped were hollering swears at each other from their nice cars while families with young children walked along the sidewalks of Atkinson Street on their way to watch the fireworks. Litter, public drunkenness, illegal fireworks; you name it, it was on display last night.

At some point yesterday evening, I remarked on how nervous I felt knowing that drunk morons and/or their children were setting off powerful fireworks that could touch off a fire destroying one of the neighborhood's many historic homes. Sure enough, the news this morning noted one incident in the city, on Wilkins Street, that nearly destroyed a home. What's worse is that firefighters arrived to find fireworks stuffed in the fire hydrants. The blaze was maximized, and a family's possessions significantly damaged, by this utter lack of respect for community. Firefighters also noted that they had a number of people with fingers blown off due to ignorance on how to handle fireworks.

As a nation, our priorities are all out of whack. We are a nation more concerned with Paris Hilton's jail time than with the thousands of soldiers, rebels, and innocent civilians dying in Iraq. We are a nation of have-nots ruled by a handful of haves. The newest generation of Americans will be the first in our nation's history to have a shorter life expectancy than its parents. We complain about gun violence, but do nothing to control guns. We complain about gas prices, but do nothing to control consumption. We complain about health care costs, but do nothing to control HMOs. All of this makes me wonder, is this a nation worth celebrating any more?

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