Seneca casino deal not right for City of Buffalo
Another voice / Another project that won't deliver
By ROBERT E. WHELAN
8/31/2006
I have a long history of public service in New York, having been elected city comptroller four times and serving 14 years as a justice of the State Supreme Court. As the city's CFO, I was twice named to the list of the nation's best financial managers as a result of my ability to produce 14 years of budget surpluses.
During my tenure, I've watched various attempts at economic development. As a citizen, I've wanted each of them to succeed. But instead, we have seen project after project, each promising a panacea for the city, fail to deliver.
City Comptroller Andrew SanFilippo, who served as a member of my staff for years, correctly identifies some of those failures, including the location of the University at Buffalo campus in Amherst, the location of the stadium in Orchard Park and the Metro Rail expansion project. But he fails to realize that we are on track to repeat the same mistake with the proposed Buffalo casino.
The Seneca Gaming Corp. boasts that it will spend $1.7 million on advertising to bring tourism to Buffalo. In a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, however, the SGC was forced to admit that it expects the majority of the casino's business to come from local residents.
Despite this ambiguity, SanFilippo, the city's fiscal watchdog, apparently doesn't question whether $1.7 million would even be sufficient for a national ad campaign. It is in fact only 4 thousandths of 1 percent (.004 percent) of the $372.4 million in revenues that the Senecas generated during the first nine months of their 2006 fiscal year.
Council Majority Leader Dominic J. Bonifacio announced this week that if the casino was not completed, the city would be forced to cut jobs. He blames the city's inability to balance its budget on our failure to build a casino. He misses the fact that strong fiscal discipline raised Buffalo out of previous economic hardship and set us on a path to improvement - a path that will likely be destroyed by this easy-fix mentality concerning the casino.
Local studies have found that for every casino job created, two to 2.75 jobs would be lost in the community if a Buffalo casino were built. It would be foolish to knowingly enter into a deal that would create 1,000 casino jobs, only to cost us 2,000 jobs we already have.
Those eager to enter blindly into this agreement with millionaire Barry Snyder Sr. love to trumpet the potential for $6 million in revenues; but they apparently failed basic accounting, or have simply ignored the scientific research showing that every dollar that legalized gambling contributes costs the taxpayers $3 to address the increased socioeconomic costs.
SanFilippo finds it "incomprehensible that the city wouldn't execute this . . . agreement that the Seneca Nation wants to sign." I believe he is wrong.
We must recognize that this is the wrong deal, at the wrong time, and for the wrong reasons. |
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