Geneseo is not for sale!

The arrival of Rochester public relations firm Public Strategy Group on the scene of our local Big Box battle, as exposed in Corrin’s latest column, is certainly a troubling development. To know that a PR firm is working to create public support, or at least the appearance of support, for Newman’s folly should send shivers through anyone who believes in self-determination.

After all, shouldn’t a truly worthy project sell itself? Shouldn’t organized support for this project have emerged on its own by now if such support was worth giving? (Certainly the opposition to this project emerged spontaneously.) Isn’t a company that sells the service of “forming a local group in support of your development,” as PSG advertises on its website, actually engaged in perpetrating a kind of fraud?

As troubling as it is, though, PSG’s sleazy strategies are business as usual for Newman’s well-heeled team. Indeed, the entire history of this project is one of powerful outside interests trying to impose their will and their Big Box on Geneseo while trying to make it appear as a local initiative.

The Planned Development District (PDD) law itself, the original sin in this long affair, was also created by an outside corporation and imposed on us. We didn’t write the PDD law, Newman did. We didn’t even ask for it. It is and always has been nothing more than a vehicle to drive a Big Box through our home-grown zoning.

That Big Box, dressed up by Newman as the quaintly-named Gateway Town Center, was also imposed on us by Newman and its local allies. There was no public outcry for more Big Boxes, more traffic, and more sprawl. In fact, all the evidence we had from community surveys conducted before anyone had even heard of Newman was that most people thought we already had too much traffic and sprawl.

Beneath all of the arguments for and against retail development, and for and against the Town administration that has worked so hard to advance Newman’s proposal, is the core issue of self-determination. Who decides Geneseo’s future? Though we may not all share the same vision and may not all share the same view of the consequences of embracing retail development, there has been little debate about the importance of self-determination and about how little self-determination is being permitted in this case.

No one bothered to ask Geneseo whether it wanted another Big Box. When we learned we might be getting one, no one listened when we said, politely at that point, that we didn’t think that was a good idea. The master plan committee, John Zmich’s tenure as chair of the planning board, PDDG’s requests to appear on the Town Board’s agenda, the whole by-now familiar list of skirmishes, were all attempted acts of self-determimnation, and all of them were casualties in the battle to deny Geneseo the right to decide its own future.

The end of this increasingly desperate and bankrupt campaign is near. Geneseo gets to decide Geneseo’s future on November 6. Though there are many candidates and the outcome is far from certain, I think the one sign we can all agree to put in our yards is “Geneseo is not for sale.”

Opportunity knocks and the town refuses to answer

After the Town Planning Board’s August 27 meeting, I had the chance to ask Newman Development’s attorney and “team” leader Ken Kamlet whether he would send me copies of the missing documents we have been trying so hard to obtain. His answer surprised me.

You may recall that nearly a year ago, I submitted a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request for several dozen documents related to Newman’s Big Box proposal. Among those were approximately a dozen items of correspondence between Newman and its partners and the Town.

Though we know that the documents existed – they are referred to in the billing records of Underberg & Kessler, the Town’s attorneys – my request, subsequent appeals, and even a Article 78 lawsuit against the Town failed to produce their disclosure.

The problem, the Town said, is that it destroyed the documents, which it characterized as routine and trivial communications that it was allowed to destroy. Since it can’t produce what no longer exists, and since the Town’s claim that it was allowed to destroy the documents can’t be tested without knowing the contents of the documents, the matter reached an impasse. Our effort to break this impasse by asking the Court to order a more thorough search of Town records was rejected by Judge Anne Marie Taddeo.

That would seem to leave only one route to get the documents, which brings us back to August 27. As a private, non-governmental party, Newman is not subject to FOIL. It can’t be required to produce its communications with public officials; only public officials can be so required. However, it may very well still have those communications and it certainly may provide them voluntarily.

So I asked, first in writing and then in person, whether Newman would share its copies of the documents. Doing so would be an enormous act of goodwill on Newman’s part. It would answer questions about the Town’s relationship with Newman (remember that a sworn statement has been made that the Town acknowledged that Newman wrote the PDD law.) It would bring an end to costly and contentious litigation with the Town.

I received no response to my written request, so I didn’t expect much when I posed the question directly to Mr. Kamlet. That’s why I was surprised when he said that he would provide the documents to the Town if they requested them.

Hearing the sound of opportunity knocking, I immediately contacted the Town to encourage them to follow up on Newman’s offer. Weeks have passed. The Town Board has met. I have been told that they discussed the issue at their meeting, with Supervisor Kennison indicating that the matter is being reviewed by counsel. I have received no response from the Town.

At this point in the process, I won’t bother to feign outrage or indignation at the Town’s apparent indifference to this opportunity. I would have to be naïve to believe that the Town has any real interest in the public knowing more about its relationship to Newman.

Three things could happen if Newman did provide the documents; two of them are bad for the Town and the third is by now almost completely implausible. First, the documents could reveal close ties between Newman and the Town in writing the PDD law and reviewing Newman’s proposal.

Short of that, they could contain the type of information that, without presenting evidence of collusion, could prove that the Town’s attorneys destroyed significant documents in violation of state law. Or, perhaps we’ve got this all wrong and the documents contain the type of truly trivial information that would allow them to be destroyed, but if so, why not ask Newman to release them?

So there it is. Newman has the documents. The Town could ask for them. It hasn’t. Go figure.

Perhaps a future Town administration can follow up on Newman’s offer. Despite the Town’s full court press to expedite approval of Newman’s application (most recently by trying to gain acceptance of an obviously incomplete DEIS), it appears likely that Newman’s application will still be pending when the new board takes office on January 1.