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Esmonde saves county $10 million!
And, a plan for free pandas
By the Guy on the 13th Floor
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Illustration by Jean-Pierre Thimot.
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No wonder Buffalo News columnist Donn Esmonde won our version of American Idol—the Spree Best of WNY media personality of the year. He deserves it. The man single-handedly saved Erie County $10 million.
Think back to the storied days of yesteryear, specifically June 10, 2005, when Esmonde opened fire at State Comptroller Alan Hevesi for not adequately blaming Medicaid for Joel Giambra’s inability to govern. Back then he wrote, “The county’s Medicaid bill inflated $82 million in the six years since Giambra was elected. That’s more than movie money.” Well, by golly, how times have changed. Nearly a year later, on March 31, Donn-mon could be found once again opening fire on Albany; no one so specific as Hevesi this time, just Albany. Why? Because Erie County’s Medicaid bill “rose $72 million the past seven years.” Hey, to quote our columnist, the $10 million difference is more than movie money!
Actually, if you think about it, Esmonde saved us even more than $10 million. His original calculation of $82 million over six years works out to an annual increase of nearly $14 million. But $72 million over seven years is just over $10 million annually. Boy, this guy is good! And he doesn’t even seek credit, offering no explanation of how he accomplished this miracle of public financing, or drawing attention to the fact that he radically reduced the cost of the health program to Erie County in a matter of months. If nothing else, the man is modest. Don’t expect him to take his savings to his favorite Seneca baccarat table and win a solution to the County’s budget crisis, though: Esmonde is opposed to the casino, because it, too, is a creation of Albany. In that same March 31 article, he wrote, “George Pataki signed the Indian casino pact and lawmakers OK’d it.”
Actually, that’s not how it happened.
George Pataki loves gambling. We don’t know if that was him we saw at the slots in Fort Erie the other day, but we do know he has presided over the largest expansion of gambling in New York history. Back in the nineties he tried to legalize casinos by amending the State Constitution. The State Legislature didn’t go along, so then he started talking with Indian nations. But that pesky State Constitution got in the way again. This time it turned out the governor could not negotiate an agreement with Indians without getting approval from the Legislature. Esmonde’s sequence of Gov’-signs, Leg’-approves is the way it was supposed to work. But that was then.
What the Legislature ultimately did was remarkable. Gulf-of-Tonkin-Resolution-like, lawmakers gave Pataki eternal preemptive approval for any compact negotiated between any governor and any Indian nation for all time. So Esmonde reversed the sequence of events—lawmakers OK’d the Indian casino pact before the Governor signed it and before it even existed. In the process, they OK’d all future Indian casino pacts negotiated by all future governors, too.
Which brings us back to Spree. A few issues ago, one of the legislators who voted for that arrangement, Byron Brown, was quoted in these pages saying, “I’m not a major advocate for casino gaming at all. This was something that the governor brought to this state using a loophole in the state constitution that some would argue is not a loophole, that it is an illegality, but this was the governor’s initiative.” That wasn’t what the Mayor was saying when he appeared at Pataki’s 2001 ceremonial bill signing in Niagara Falls, when Brown appeared smiling over Pataki’s shoulder for the photo op. Actually, before Brown and his friends passed their pre-emptive approval, there was no loophole. Brown helped create it.
Why did he do this, if he isn’t a casino advocate? What he said in these very pages is this: “The majority of the residents of my district that I heard from, who wrote letters, made phone calls, and e-mailed, said that they were more in favor of a casino than against a casino.” This is a fascinating rationale for supporting a casino, especially since he had just said he wasn’t a casino advocate and blamed the casino on the governor’s sneaky loophole. It’s all the more fascinating since the vote he cast was not to establish a casino at all, but rather to turn that responsibility totally over to the governor. Did a majority of his constituents write to him favoring that? Did any?
But the real insight Spree readers can glean from this has to do with how the new mayor thinks. If he gets six letters in favor of something and five against, he’ll support it because a majority of his constituents who wrote told him to. So here’s my plan: let’s start writing to the mayor asking for free pandas. Everybody loves pandas. They’re cute and probably very cuddly. (I’ve never actually cuddled a panda, so I don’t know for sure.) Nobody is actually against pandas. So if a few of us fire off some letters, hizzoner will have no choice.
And if he can’t find it in the city budget to pay for the pandas? Call Donn Esmonde.
The Guy on the 13th Floor is currently cuddling his koala. He’s dead serious about the panda plan. In fact, he’s already opened several e-mail accounts under false names and has begun e-mailing various elected officials about all sorts of things he wants to happen … under different names. He gets away with that on the Buffalo News’ letters to the editor page, too. Once last year he actually authored six of the page’s eight letters. The lady who called from the News to check if Mr. Phil A. Delphia actually lived at the number in the e-mail never noticed she called the same number six times. But at least the letters weren’t anonymous.
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