Sleeping With the Fishes

Fear Not, Buffalo—Corporate Welfare Will Save You!

By Chris Abbey

What do dying urban centers need to keep them afloat when everything and everyone has long since moved out to the suburbs? A gimmick, of course, like the Arch in St. Louis or, even cooler, a Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of fame like Cleveland has! Too bad those ideas were already taken, and the only thing our leaders could think of is resurrecting the long dead Aud and turning it into a massive Bass Pro outdoor shop, along with a hotel and restaurant.

Sounds insane, but it’s completely true. I only know one person who thinks it’s a good idea, and she’s a complete dingbat. Besides that, everyone else seems to agree something smells extremely fishy, starting with the politicians absconding with $66 million in taxpayer funds and distributing it who knows how without any public debate about the idea. All we’ve been told is how great it will be to get Bass Pro in here, because it’ll solve the city’s problems in one fell swoop.

If you listened to the press conference announcing the culmination of three and half years of ball-sack massaging, you heard all the giddy players pontificating and congratulating each other like the Bills won the Superbowl. They were disturbingly drunk on dollars, knowing their construction and developer friends will make a bundle and, of course, kickback generously at campaign time, and offer great, high-paying jobs to those whose political careers may soon be over. There they were, festering pustules of corruption like Joel Giambra and George Pataki, but only Mayor Masiello was doofus enough to don the Bass Pro baseball cap and camo jacket, helping to cement his image as an unserious goofball and a cheerleader for bad ideas. It was almost as funny as hearing Jack Quinn try to justify spending 12 or 13 million dollars in federal transportation funds on an Erie Canal museum, because the canal was once a form of transportation. I was surprised he didn’t burst out laughing; I certainly did.

Everybody in this circle of connected buffoons wins, while places like Dick’s, Gander Mountain and every mom-and-pop bait and tackle shop along Niagara Street (who certainly weren’t bribed from across the country with vast sums of money to open up in the area) see the writing on the wall. People throw up their arms when Wal-Mart comes calling, they fight that shit tooth and nail and sometimes they win, but this is a completely different situation. We’re begging these mysterious southerners up here to turn downtown Buffalo into some ugly NASCAR tailgate party, complete with RV’s, hillbillies, rednecks, and mild-mannered-yet-psychotic gun and knife freaks. How metropolitan. It’ll go great with our historic architecture.

The Bait

You might be wondering how this nightmare got started. Now that it’s a done deal and every politician even remotely connected to Buffalo got to make a speech about how happy they are to gamble our future on a glorified shopping center, the story is out. Seems local multi-millionaire Bob Rich Jr., an avid sport fisherman, prattled on and on about a Bass Pro Shop he visited down South, where his winter home just happens to be next door to Bass Pro’s owner. In fact, he talked so much about Bass Pro and everyone got so goddamn excited about the place he flew Masiello and a bunch of their mutual friends down on his private jet so they could see it for themselves, a typical backslappers write-off vacation. Introductions were made and Bob Rich faded into the background…apparently. Remember, this is the same guy who got the city to build Pilot Field, now Dunn Tire Park, because he was “very serious” about bringing major league baseball to Buffalo, then walked away after we built it when the price for a team was too high. We’re still paying for that fucking place. It consistently loses money year after year, even when the Bisons win whatever the hell they call the AAA championship trophy.

Here’s why I’m extremely skeptical about this project: it’s a flea flicker. The flea flicker is the most dangerous offensive play in football—brilliant when it works, but a despicable blunder when it fails. Now look at the point men: Tony Masiello is no visionary, neither is Joel Giambra or George Pataki. They’re certifiable greedheads who’ve proven irrefutably that they can’t be trusted with the public trust or public funds. Christ, Pataki was investigated for recommending early parole for prisoners who gave enough cash to his election campaigns. These guys aren’t just going to drop the ball; they’re going to spike it.

How many agreeable, worthy businesses were lost over the last three and a half years it took Bass Pro executives to wrangle all the money and favorable concessions out of our desperate leaders? Countless. Even problem gamblers know it’s better to play ten small bets than one big one, let alone competent investors. That’s what hayseeds who’ve never sat down at a blackjack table do.

Reeling in the Catch

Money, after all, is all any business is interested in. But that’s the thing: if Bass Pro really thought Buffalo was a viable market, they wouldn’t need $66 million in enticements to come. They would have paid rent. And it wouldn’t have taken years for the deal to come this far; the place would have sprung up in months.

Instead, Bass Pro is supposedly kicking in $57 million of their own money, less than half. Even if that turns out to be true, it’s a drop in the bucket for a chain whose estimated sales topped $1.3 billion last year.

Isn’t it amazing how much our politicians love out of town businessmen? They bend over backwards for The Right People, the kind who set up shop, take out publicly sponsored loans, then declare bankruptcy and skip town with all the cash. This time it isn’t Adelphia or some stupid brewpub, this is $66 million plus the untold millions more in “cost overruns” and graft we’ll be forced to cough up. That’s how HSBC went, and it’s in the same boat as Dunn Tire Park, another publicly funded endeavor we still owe money on many years after it was built. Now recall the ever-present horror of the Rapid Transit System and Main Street’s mile-long eyesore that is “Buffalo Place,” and you can see where I’m going. They’re spending money to spend money, so their friends can make money and then give them money.

Bass Pro is being sold to us as some Magic Cure-All, which will simultaneously bring tourists downtown and spur further development along the waterfront, despite the fact that the real problem with the waterfront is that the NFTA owns it all and refuses to give any of it up. The last time a glorified shopping center was THE major tourist destination I was living in Huntsville, Alabama and that’s why this feels culturally wrong. This is Buffalo—we’re just not that outdoorsy. Don’t try and force us to be something we aren’t, because Buffalo natives are nothing if not genuine. They’re also broke: most residents can’t afford to buy RV’s, exotic fishing boats or even a Swiss Army Knife keychain.

Pure Desperation

Calling this a crapshoot is an understatement. The potential loss here could mean the difference between living and dying as a city. Will 10,000 people a day actually flock to downtown Buffalo, New York to go see a gigantic hillbilly gear store? They might, especially in mid-February when bitter winds whistle across frozen Lake Erie and it’s a brisk minus 25 degrees. Buffalo could displace Minnesota as the ice fishing capital of America, especially if we make a deal to sell part of the lake to Bass Pro—or we could just give it to them.

Remember when they tried forcing the Senecas into locating a casino at the Aud last year? The Senecas told them to fuck off and aren’t ever going to build shit in Buffalo. The Senecas and these Southerners are very similar: they’re good businessmen; they know how to turn a profit, and there’s no way in hell either is going to take on refurbishing the Aud without tons of taxpayer money. Whether or not you liked the idea, the Senecas would have been downtown running that casino forever if given the chance, it wouldn’t have cost taxpayers half as much as Bass Pro will, and the odds it might succeed and generate funds for the city were very good. Bass Pro, on the other hand, is a completely unknown quantity. Sure, they’ve got shops in Syracuse and Auburn and all over the country, mostly small, normal-type outlet stores, not bizarre behemoths like they’re envisioning here. Bass Pro has no incentive whatsoever to stay in Buffalo if its profit margins go south, and the only guarantee Buffalo has is that we’ll make almost fifty bucks leasing the Aud for 49 years at a dollar a year. Good deal!

Squirming On The Hook

Sorry, I just can’t get onto this bandwagon, not when Masiello, Giambra, and the rest are whipping the horses and riding off with our money for another dubious project. Those two cash-junkies have already helped ruin our chances more than enough, and I don’t trust either of them to perform any basic functions requiring pure logic. It’s hard not to be negative, knowing our past, and obviously that’s something we need to take into account, but this feels like just another snowjob in a sorry string of stupid scams which have moved hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars into the war chests and personal bank accounts of politicians, bankers, developers, and construction companies. I hope this works. I hope there’s such an insane regional jones for fishing and camping gear that people from all over will come in unending droves to spend their money, see the sights and enjoy the beauty which is Buffalo. But, frankly, something tells me it won’t.

The stakes are high and the odds are long, but our leaders aren’t afraid to wager it all on a single roll of the dice. Then again, it’s not their money on the table.