Honoring Excellence

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HONORING EXCELLENCE AND ANNUAL REPORT TO MEMBERS – NEXT WEEK

In addition to probably being the best opportunity of the year to network with Partnership board members and executives from Buffalo Niagara businesses, our Honoring Excellence and Annual Report to Members event will provide an important "year in review" of what private sector volunteers and Partnership staff have done together to make the region a better place to do business for all of us.  We will also honor the contributions of local businesspeople who've lived out our tagline "Businesses United for Growth" with their actions, and get an early look at plans for the "Niagara Experience Center," an exciting development project planned for Niagara Falls, NY.

If you’ve ever asked yourself “what has the Partnership done for me lately?” you should join us next week to find out .  The breakfast event will be held Thursday, June 15 at 8:30 a.m. at the Conference Center Niagara Falls.  I hope you can join us.  Please RSVP with Charlene Janiga at cjaniga@thepartnership.org

Thank you to presenting sponsor First Niagara Bank.

IN OTHER NEWS:

1). Kudos to members of the Western New York State Delegation for working together to introduce legislation that would permanently return 70 megawatts of low-cost hydropower to Western New York – a critical piece of the local economic development puzzle.  The legislation was sponsored by Senator George Maziarz and Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, and co-sponsored by Senators Mary Lou Rath and Catherine Young and Assemblymembers Paul Tokasz, Francine DelMonte, Crystal Peoples and Mark Schroeder.

With these bills, the delegation has taken an important, immediate step toward eventually achieving the maximum amount of low cost hydropower, and associated proceeds, in our region for timely and flexible allocations.  The Partnership continues to work with the Delegation on other aspects of the hydropower issue, and has drafted legislation which we are pursing with them (see our priorities in our 2006 Regional Agenda:  http://www.thepartnership.org/files/pdfs/3.20.06%20FINAL%202006%20regional%20agenda.pdf).

This is critical to our region’s future.  It’s an asset we must have to attract companies here, and help existing companies become stronger, in an economic climate that often makes it tough to do both.

2). Staying on the theme of “kudos” for a moment, the Partnership and our volunteers got plenty at last week’s grand opening of UB's New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences and the Center for Genetics and Pharmacology of Roswell Park Cancer Institute.  Senator Charles Schumer, Governor George Pataki and UB President John Simpson all acknowledged the role the Partnership had in creating the Center of Excellence (the institution, before there was a physical building) and for facilitating a regional commitment to funding the building project. 

3). News of the terrorist plot in Toronto is extremely troubling, to say the very least.  That said, I was asked yesterday by a member of the press if it’s changed the Partnership’s staunch opposition to requiring passports at the U.S. and Canadian border.  My answer:  Absolutely not!

The break-up of the terrorist conspiracy in Toronto makes the need for thorough and careful communication between law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the US and Canada critical. The people arrested are Canadian citizens, and thus, under any of the  systems of identification proposed for border crossing they would have passed. The best way to secure our border is to have competent and well trained border security personnel on both sides of the border who communicate well with each other. When there are so many places to cross the 4,000-mile border between our countries without customs inspection, our best defense is good intelligence.

Therefore, the Partnership continues to believe that any new identification system should use existing identification documents, be very inexpensive or free, and be attainable in a short time period. As Howard Zemsky, the volunteer leader of our NOW Campaign border issue initiative, says: “we do not want to turn the war on terrorism into a war on tourism.”

Andrew J. Rudnick
President & CEO