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Primary Day Tomorrow
September 14, 2009

Tomorrow is Primary Day, and while there are a host of county and town primary races throughout Erie and Niagara Counties, the inevitable public focus will be on the Democratic primary for the Mayor of City of Buffalo. With approximately 40% of Partnership members operating in the city, I want to use this week's e-mail to encourage you to vote, and to shed some light on what - from an economic development perspective - should be included in your decision.

As Sunday's Buffalo News' editorial put it, the choice in the mayor's race is between an incumbent who has done a good job in corralling the city's finances but is facing some ethics challenges, and a well-meaning, albeit inexperienced, challenger. From the Partnership's perspective, under Mayor Brown's administration there are economic development issues - some inherited, some self-created - that still need to be addressed, but the Mayor has been accessible and open to working with the city's employer community. Councilman Kearns has not approached the Partnership with his views, and, given his inexperience lacks much of a track record to analyze, his willingness/ability to address development-specific issues is, at this point, a guess.

Unfortunately, like so many races, this one is dominated by rhetoric and not much substantive dialogue. For the Buffalo employer community, however, the mayoral election should entail a focus on the following:

Lowering taxes - The bottom line is that the overall tax burden in the City of Buffalo is still too high. If Buffalo is to thrive once again, the atmosphere for job creation must be much more employer-friendly - and that includes a lower cost of doing business. We do understand, of course, that much of the ability to achieve lower taxes at any municipal level lies with Albany decision-making, but the Mayor of Buffalo must be a champion for change at the state level. Mayor Brown has made some positive progress in this area while also getting the city out of the red (establishment of the city's "rainy day" fund).

Progressive development policies - Private sector jobs and investment don't happen simply because we want them to. Buffalo's Mayor must be supportive of policies that attract private sector investment - including the intelligent use of resources outlined in the Framework for Regional Growth; support for state economic development initiatives that help locally, such as land banking, tax increment financing and brownfield redevelopment reform; and the elimination of costly mandates such as wage and apprenticeship requirements.

Customer-friendly, development-savvy development procedures - In order to make the City of Buffalo an attractive place to do business, City inspections, permitting, zoning and other procedures must follow a predictable process that is significantly streamlined, made clearer and administered publicly and on the up-and-up. The same goes for the City's RFP process. With the business climate in New York already a challenge for growth and private sector investment, it is vital that processes in Buffalo be made more business friendly, development savvy, reliable and transparent. This is a problem that has transcended administrations in Buffalo and must be addressed sooner rather than later.

Work with Control Board - In order to reach the ultimate goal of lowering taxes in Buffalo, fiscal responsibility with taxpayers' money is essential. Currently, there is a mechanism in place for fiscal oversight - the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority - and it is imperative that Buffalo's mayor be able to work with the Authority to hold the line on the city's costs of doing business until the state decides that oversight is no longer necessary. This includes standing up to public employee unions when appropriate, an area in which Mayor Brown has demonstrated his mettle.

Support for regionally transformational projects - The City of Buffalo Mayor must be an active and avid supporter of job-creating, regionally-significant projects such as UB2020, high speed rail and waterfront development.

Beyond the mayor's race, if you need election information, our county boards of elections (Erie County | Niagara County) have implemented a neat little gadget on their respective sites that allows you to enter your street address where you've registered to vote, yielding not only your polling place, but the elections in which you have a vote. It's a good resource to determine if you need to get to the polls tomorrow.

Andrew J. Rudnick