REN SQUARE IS MAGGIE'S FAST FERRY
Maggie Brooks should savor her re-election as county executive in November. It will be the last election she ever wins.
She can chalk that up to Renaissance Square.
The largest defrauding of the taxpayer in Rochester history, Renaissance Square is about to help Maggie Brooks make Bill Johnson look like a piker.
When the dust settles on this monstrosity, Rochesterians are going to long for the days when government waste was limited to the tens of millions of dollars thrown at High Falls and the fast ferry. In the new world, Maggie Brooks is going to preside over an insane project that will throw more than a quarter of a billion dollars into a monument to stupidity with no explainable purpose and virtually no community support.
It is government at its worst, and it may signal not just the eventual end of Maggie Brooks, but of Republican control of Monroe County government. This is one of those sea change events that pushes people past the simmering resentment toward politicians that is the status quo, into a flat-out rebellion against a morally corrupt political culture.
Here’s the background.
A guy who makes a lot of money doing advertising business with Republicans came up with the idea many years ago to build a Broadway theater in Rochester. Never mind that there are already two or three of them, and that Rochester is also home to the world-class Eastman Theater. This was to be a monument to boosterism and hyperventilated cheerleading.
But, of course, it was a flop.
As time passed and the implausibility of the idea became apparent, a very small group of self-appointed community elites worked all the harder to make it a reality. It became a Zig Ziggler exercise in positive mental attitude, a salesman’s challenge to sell the biggest pig in a poke there ever was.
But, again, it was a flop.
Because no private money would touch it, and even the drunken sailors in Albany and Washington thought it stunk.
So the insidious mischief that passes for creativity in this darkened age came into play, and political hacks began cobbling together unrelated projects not because they made sense, but because they came with federal dollars attached.
And so it is that happily conceived on the drawing board was the mismatched Frankenstein of a Broadway theater, an inner-city transit-bus terminal and an urban junior college. All in one mass. There is some education money in there and some transportation money in there and various servings of pork thrown in there and as this summer seems to be the kickoff of actual construction the community is slowly coming to the realization that this massive fraud may actually happen.
Which would be real progress.
With its downtown core riddled with old, empty buildings, Rochester is going to wiz away as much as $300 million to have a new, empty building.
And this is called progress.
Which is preposterous. Rochester doesn’t need a new theater, a new bus terminal or more classroom space for people in the 13th and 14th grades.
Claims that this will bring life and vitality to downtown evoke nothing but derisive laughter from real people with real lives. The theater will sit empty and unused the overwhelming majority of the time, the bus terminal will add nothing to downtown except public restrooms, and the junior college already has essentially the same number of students in the city center easily accommodated in what, before Rochester died, was a department store.
This is an example of the ego- and money-driven world politicians and their hangers on live in. Ego because a whole passel of elected leeches – and behind-the-scenes “opinion leaders” – want to build a monument to their civic vision. Money because the contractors and the trade unions will pocket money like crazy on this deal.
And that money, of course, gets recycled to the politicians. The contractors give to the Republicans and the trade unions give to the Democrats.
It’s one big cozy pig sty.
And it’s going to hang around Maggie Brooks’ neck. She is the next Bill Johnson. And, just like him, she’s so impressed with herself right now that she can’t see how viscerally and completely the community has turned against an idea she has come to represent.
Ironically, the Republicans believe unfolding announcements about the Renaissance Center will curry favor for Maggie Brooks as Election Day approaches. Nothing could be further from the truth, and if the Democrats could produce a suburban moderate who pledged to stop the project, they’d put this race back into contention.
Yes, the project will produce about two years worth of construction jobs. But then it will produce the embarrassing letdown High Falls and the fast ferry have taught this community to know so well. The parrots in the press will herald the beginning of the project, just the way they championed the fast ferry, but when this thing busts open, prospects for another Maggie Brooks term, or a chance at a new congressional seat, will evaporate.
Rochester-area government can’t do economic development. It has proven that time and time again. Government-originated projects have all failed, and government’s impact on other projects – Frontier Field, Paetec Park – has all been bad. One was built on the cheap and will suffer all its useful life, and the other was located in a bad neighborhood – to satisfy a powerful assemblyman – and suffers from potentially bankrupting bad attendance as a result.
Renaissance Square is a travesty, and right now it has Maggie Brooks’ fingerprints all over it. When it fails, so will she.
And it certainly will fail.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2007
