I don’t want the Mayor and County Executive teaming up with the Buffalo Niagara Partnership to devise a wish list of remarkably expensive silver-bullet projects to help Buffalo remain essentially the same as it is now, only with shinier buildings. Frankly, I can’t think of three people I’d less like to have plotting the future of Buffalo and Erie County than the Collins-Brown-Rudnick troika.
Instead, what should really be on the wish list is for New York State to lower the barriers to doing business in this region. Whether we’re talking about regulatory reform, a reduction or simplification of the tax structure, or just giving WNY some autonomy to make the changes needed to enable us better to compete with other places. As we’ve been saying for a week or so now, there is a cognitive dissonance when you bitch and moan about big government spending in one breath, and then demand half a billion dollars’ worth of big government spending in the next.
I don’t trust Albany any more than I trust WNY’s disingenuous troika, but I do trust that easing the cost of doing business in this part of the state would help this part of the state.
I spent a great deal of time driving through rural central New York yesterday, passing through dilapidated-but-holding-on town after dilapidated-but-holding-on town. With rare exception (Ithaca), many of these places are all but dead. They, like the industries that brought them to life, are anachronisms. I don’t know, frankly, what hope there is for places like that. But there is hope for places like Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and the like. We just need government and big business to grow up and stop pretending like every silver bullet idea is just what Buffalo needs to turn the corner.
The Buffalo Record 