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In the Media » "Renaissance
Square Should Be Open Book to Local Citizens"
Follow the Money on Renaissance Center
By Benjamin Wachs, Messenger Post Columnist
From "Perspectives", Brighton-Pittsford Post, April
28th, 2004
Reprinted with permission
I can't get two things out of my mind.
And they're both disasters if we don't get them right.
I can't stop thinking about a recent series of reports on
the Public Radio International program "Marketplace" showing
that massive amounts of our spending to rebuild Iraq is lost
to bribes, kickbacks, and outright embezzlement. And why?
Because congress started spending the money a year ago, and
just started performing oversight in the last few months.
Human beings have a capacity for great nobility, but large
amounts of unsupervised money tends to bring out the worst
in us. We need oversight—by elected officials.
And then there's the Renaissance Center, the combination
transit center, arts center and college campus proposed for
downtown Rochester We started planning it half a year ago,
and have just starting talking about who's accountable.
Theoretically, three government bodies are working in partnership
to make it happen: the county, the city, and the Rochester
Genesee Regional Transportation Authority. But only two of
them are run by elected officials. The RGRTA is run by commissioners
who go through a Byzantine appointment process—and
are directly answerable to no one.
And the RGRTA, the unelected body, has been the driving
force behind this project, in one form or another, for years,
and repeatedly refused to offer any detailed plans. Even
when it was just a transit center, information from its budget
to its boundaries and designs were shrouded in mystery.
So who's in charge? Will the public have to play a game
of high stakes "Clue" to find out who's building
what, where?
I called Mark Aesch, the executive director of both the
RGRTA and of the Renaissance Square Corp., to ask where he
thinks accountability should be. And he refused to talk with
me on the record. At all. To find out the details of the
project, he said, I'd have to go to the mayor or the county
executive, since they're the ones running the show.
Nice try, Mark, but when I spoke to Mayor Johnson, he told
me that as of last week, he was still trying to get those
details from you, too.
"After meeting with him yesterday, I still don't know
(what the answers are)," Johnson told me. "He kept
saying, 'oh, yeah, we've got to get this going' and I said,
'Mark, we have to know what we're selling here!'"
And where exactly does the head of the RGRTA, which spent
taxpayer money buying TV ads to promote the transit center,
get off saying that he shouldn't be asked questions about
it? The RGRTA is responsible for at least a third of the
full funding for the Renaissance Center project—not
the city and not the county.
At least not yet.
If Aesch is uncomfortable with public scrutiny, then I suggest
he resign as head of the Renaissance Square Corp. and sign
legal authority for the transit authority's share of Renaissance
Center funding over to the city and county.
Otherwise, stop passing the buck and give us some real answers.
If he won't, the county shouldn't do business with him.
It's hard to trust any public servant who refuses to answer
to the public.
I do, however, trust Maggie Brooks. She has a real gift
for finding consensus and she assured me that a joint committee
of the principle stakeholders will be formed and that it
will be in charge and accountable.
"We're trying to move this to another level where the
city and county are the drivers of this process," she
said. Darn right.
"Right now Mark has been something of a lone wolf in
this process—but now is the time to move those responsibilities
and activity from Renaissance Square Corporation." Exactly.
But there are no specific details about how that gets done,
and after questioning Brooks, Johnson and Aesch I still don't
know how the shots on this project are going to be called—and
this is months after we've already pitched it to Albany and
Washington.
If the Renaissance Center project is going to move forward,
a governing body with the power to make decisions needs to
be appointed immediately—and two-thirds of its members
need to be elected officials of the city and county. People
whose only job description is to respond to the voters.
It's the only way we can get real oversight. And bad things
happen when you don't have oversight.
Large amounts of public money, unsupervised, brings out
the worst in people.
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