First Pataki, now Cuomo take care of Glynn, shaft public
By James Hufnagel
Pity the poor city of Niagara Falls - fated to be a lowly pawn on the great New York State political chessboard.
While the queens, bishops and knights of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and New York City command the squares, battling over scarce state resources, the Niagara Falls pawn plods forward a space at a time, dutifully serving as a sacrifice to strengthen the positions of other more powerful pieces. Think hydropower and tourism.
Carrying the analogy further illustrates the point: Two of eight pawns per side in chess are rook pawns. Rook pawns are the wieniest of the pawns. Far from the action at the center, they languish at the edge of the board (like Niagara Falls), rarely in a position to play a meaningful role in the contest.
In fact, the major and almost sole function of the rook pawn in the strategy of a chess match is to move one space forward to provide an escape route for the king.
Real life imitated chess last month when Grandmaster Andrew Cuomo visited this city for the first time since taking office and gave the Niagara Falls rook pawn a nudge forward to provide an escape route for King James Glynn.
Now if chess utilized a playbook like football does, it would be obvious to all how James Glynn borrowed a page from ten years ago, when his Observation Tower in Niagara Falls State Park, the base of operations for the Maid of the Mist on the American side, was renovated and expanded at taxpayer ($10 million from State Parks) and ratepayer ($5 million from the New York Power Authority) expense, enhancing the profitability of the Maid corporation, a multinational business privately held by the Glynn family.
The Observation Tower reconstruction of 2001 doubled the number of elevators to Maid boats in the gorge, increased tourist throughout from approximately 800 to 2400 every hour, and resulted in new ticket booths and restrooms, a new observation deck with railings and an expanded gift shop with storage and office space.
Not a penny of revenue from this expansion accrued to the city of Niagara Falls. Glynn 's business model of a monopolistic hold on a world-famous tourist attraction, isolating the surrounding city with an expressway conveying millions of tourists a year directly into his domain, where they park, dine, sightsee, purchase souvenirs and then leave on the same expressway, greatly contributed to the crime and poverty that skyrocketed over the years in Niagara Falls. All with the hot and eager help of politicians who betrayed their public in return for campaign donations from the Glynn empire.
The Observation Tower renovation of a decade ago and the present-day proposed construction of new Maid facilities at the Schoellkopf site are both characterized by a complete 180-degree about-face by a governor of New York, first by George Pataki on the Observation Tower and then more recently by Andrew Cuomo’s rescue of the Maid concern, each totally reversing a stated policy position that had been threatening Maid business interests.
In 1997, the "Feasibility Study of the Dismantling of the Observation Tower and Construction of a New Elevator System within the Gorge Base" was released and became the "initial preferred alternative" for the subsequent Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), part of the standard governmental process required for such projects under state and federal law. It called for demolishing the tower and replacing it with Cave of the Winds-style elevators.
On February 18, 1999, a public input meeting was conducted at the Orin Lehman Visitors Center in the Niagara Falls State Park on the tower demolition/elevator shaft DEIS. Numerous local citizens contributed meaningful comments, both at the microphone and in writing, in support of the project. Incidentally, this was the last time New York State Parks has held a meeting in the Niagara Falls State Park towards the end of soliciting public input regarding the international tourist destination. It 's been more than ten years since they've made even a show of wanting to know what we think, even though less than a year ago they released the comprehensive "Niagara Falls State Park Landscape Improvements Plan," a 92-page plan detailing massive changes to the park that they are busy implementing as you read this, without a formal scoping process.
Gov. George Pataki visited Niagara Falls back then, and pronounced the Observation Tower an "eyesore", implied that it violated the Olmsted plan, and vowed that it had to go.
Things had to percolate for a little while, quiet meetings were held here and in Albany behind closed doors where promises may or may not have been made and money may or may not have changed hands, but the Final EIS released on April 23, 2001 referenced a new "Niagara Gorge Access Project Reassessment Study" that had miraculously surfaced, fortuitously for Maid of the Mist, revealing previously unforeseen engineering challenges to the Cave of the Winds-style elevator access idea. Pataki 's original thumbs down changed into a resounding endorsement of tower rehab virtually overnight.
Similarly, on April 16, 2012, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation Western Regional Director Mark Thomas, speaking on behalf of the Cuomo administration, told the Niagara Parks Commission that expansion of Maid operations into the Schoellkopf site was "not a viable alternative." He also declared that an extensive environmental review of the proposal may be warranted, and that due to the loss of the Canadian lease, the current state contract with Maid may prove invalid. After much fanfare last month, and with zero public comment, Gov. Cuomo came through for his new buddy James Glynn.
So far, the public response to the Cuomo/Glynn deal has been that which might be expected from the audience at a chess tournament, but that too may change.