Stephen King's Men Revisited: Corrections and Clarifications

Our recent post on the lakefront development plan was long and complex, and it has been generating a tremendous amount of buzz. We were trying to connect the dots so our readers could see how, from our fact-based point of view, Senator Nozzolio’s $5 million legislative earmark had impacted the community’s planning process, and even its preliminary results on their way to City Council.

Since the post, we have done some additional fact checking and would like to re-visit the post and offer some corrections, clarifications, and expansions.

First, the corrections. We had a number of anonymous comments challenging our claim that the City of Geneva Industrial Development Agency (IDA) funded Philip Morris’ visit and long overdue consultant’s report. Morris’ visit was touted as an update to the plan he developed with Ernest Hutton several years ago. That report, which you can read here and which we discussed here some weeks ago, was, in fact, funded by the Geneva City IDA. Our source for that is page 8 of the report itself.

But we had it wrong when we said the IDA had paid Morris $10,000 for this year’s visit. The return of Philip Morris in 2008 was paid for by the Geneva Arts Development Council and the Smith Opera House with funds, just under $3,000, provided to them by the Wyckoff Foundation. That is according to information provided by the Foundation’s attorney.

If the comments were from IDA members or Geneva Arts Development Council members, or others ‘in the know’, we can’t be sure, but the only point they took issue with in the entire post was this matter of funding. If they had been signed, we would have posted them (and could have responded more quickly). So, take the plunge. Let us know your reactions-- and sign your name!

In some further fact checking, we found a typo of our own which resulted in our having made contradictory assertions about something said—actually, something not said—in the Fairweather Study. Although no one pointed it out to us, we’d like to correct ourselves.

First, we said that the Fairweather report stated that city taxpayers would likely be on the hook for $100,000/year to cover structural deficits in the annual operating budget for a proposed visitor center. Then we pointed out that the report did not state specifically that city taxpayers would have to cover that amount.

The facts are that Bergmann, not Fairweather, said the taxpayers would have to come up with the money through property taxes. Fairweather said simply that somebody would have to come up with the money, and they envisioned outside fundraising might do it.

When Bergmann presented their draft plan, 8/27/08, at the Ramada, they said that tax dollars from residential would be necessary. When pressed, they cited Fairweather to bolster their case. To repeat, Fairweather never said that. Fairweather did say there would be a deficit, but did not say that the deficit needed to be funded by property tax dollars from city taxpayers, as called for by Bergmann. That’s the critical point we were trying to make and we apologize for our error and any confusion surrounding that portion of the post.

Now for some expansion and clarification of what we said about the Fairweather report, as it evolved over time. According to City Council minutes posted on the City of Geneva website, December 5, 2007, Council approved a resolution for consultant services “for the wine center study.” (Read the full resolution and the discussion of it here, on pages 12 and 13).

During the Council debate on that resolution, Augustine asked what the scope of the study would be. Again, according to the approved minutes, “City Manager Rising said that this is actually a business plan...not a location study.” The initial project, as presented to council, proposed to reuse of the existing Chamber of Commerce building for the wine center. As far as anyone on Council knew, unless they were told something we were not, no other locations were in play.

Despite Rising’s statement that it was not a location study, Councilor D’Amico said, as recorded in approved minutes, that the study should be “looking to see if it is a viable project any place on the lakefront and not just the Chamber building.”

That was December, 2007. Approximately four months later, toward the end of the actual study, when a modest wine center was deemed not feasible, as proposed, Senator Nozzolio announced $5 million to place a visitors’ center some place on the lakefront, not specifically at the Chamber building.

And, as stated in Fairweather’s own introduction to his report (You can read it here. Page 1 of the report is actually page 6 of the downloaded file.):

Nozzolio’s money presented a “significant opportunity” but also “an important challenge,” because, “as a community, Geneva must ensure that it creates a facility that embraces the purposes of Senator Nozzolio’s $5 million funding to create a high-profile, high-impact visitors’ center...while meeting his office’s objective that the operation of such a center be financially sustainable.”

Fairweather then says that “the purpose of this planning study is to move the Finger Lakes Visitors’ Center from conceptual feasibility to operational feasibility.” Because Council did not know about Nozzolio’s money when the Fairweather contract was approved, the study that was expected was the “wine center study” that we voted on. Instead, Council has now received a different study, premised on the New York State funding Nozzolio secured in Albany.

While the Fairweather study is in many ways well reasoned and sound, we object to the fact that it took Nozzolio’s proposal for a lakefront building as a given, apart from the ongoing community decision-making process. We can, however, appreciate the study’s having the courage to assert that the stand alone lakefront facility Nozzolio wanted would not achieve his stated goal of being financially sustainable. But what we mostly wanted to point out is that Council asked for an apple from Fairweather and received a fruit basket. Then Bergmann took the fruit from the basket and turned it into a smoothie.

In our view, in presenting their plan, Bergmann was inconsistent in its application of the Fairweather study in two ways: First, it took a study that was not a location study and used it as an argument for a location. This, it appears, was largely a function of Nozzolio’s initial ‘lakefront location mandate’ that he, or his people, have since changed; then it took a study that was about operational feasibility without assuming taxpayer subsidies and used it as an argument for property tax subsidies, on the grounds of ‘economic sustainability’. That’s nothing different from what we said in the post, but we thought it merited expansion because it was central to our concerns.

In the meantime, the Geneva Area Chamber of Commerce issued a statement on the lakefront plan in their September newsletter. The Chamber accuses anyone who questions the Bergmann plan as being among those “who want to do nothing at all to grow our economy and our community. They don't favor job creation or tax relief, and they don't understand the critical need to attract more traffic for existing downtown businesses.” They then encourage the “silent majority” to attend the meeting on October 1st and speak up. These are typical statements for an advocacy group of this sort, but what is most interesting to us is their description of the way the planning process and the Nozzolio money came together:

“Senator Mike Nozzolio has made funds of $5 million available in the state budget for a Visitor Center for Geneva. That came at a time when a study on the lakefront and downtown was being completed, and when a second study, on the viability of a new visitor center, was also about to be presented to City Council. The confluence of these events makes it possible to avoid the old pattern of developing plans that gather dust, because of lack of funds.”

So the Chamber, too, agrees that the Fairweather plan (which was about to be presented to Council) changed direction as a result of the Nozzolio money. Of course, in their fact-based point of view, that is a good thing. In ours, it was not.