Community Members

Re: 'It's not too late to change': Duffy on Ren Square

Published on 05/28/09 - 0 Comments

It is very interesting to watch how Mayor Duffy has come around to our campaign's call to stop ren square. For months, we have been calling for the city not to give up Mortimer St garage & parcels. After 3 days of robo calls from our campaign asking voters to call Mayor Duffy at 428-7045, Mayor Duffy's office received about 40 calls from supporters of our campaign to not give up Mortimer. On the third day, April 22, the day our campaign held a demonstration in front of the Hyatt Hotel where the RGRTA was holding condemnation hearings for the buildings on Main St, on the third day, Mayor Duffy said Rochester will not give up Mortimer! He also said in that same letter, "Please do not think we are trying to stop ren square" !

Now, the Mayor is calling for "CHANGE". This is good. If you go to our web site, www.Harry2009.com, you will see CHANGE.

If you go back to this letter, BUS STOP BIG MISTAKE, published in City Newspaper way back in 2005, you will read of our call to stop ren square. Please ask Mayor Duffy to support, endorse Harry Davis for the Rochester City Council, the one candidate in this election who can say his position has been consistent for CHANGE since 2003, 6 years ago!

Mayor Duffy's office 428-7045.

BUS STATION? BIG MISTAKE
In the 1950s and '60s, ripping up historic Corn Hill to build the Rt. 490 expressway was considered a boon because it allegedly opened up the city to faster-flowing traffic. Consider what has happened since. Calls are being heard today for ripping out most of the Inner Loop.

The current push to open up the city with a bus garage is part of the same counterproductive thinking, for two reasons:
One: The garage is proposed for the wrong place and has the wrong design. A single, intermodal facility should be located near the New York Central terminal north of downtown. By intermodal, I mean that the entire bus system should be revamped. The hub-and-spoke system currently used must catch up with the 21st century. There must be six or seven satellite stations around the entire bus-system service area. Downtown Rochester must not be the focus of the system.

Two: Its proposed configuration generates significant health and traffic questions. Having a bus turning the Main Street corner at Clinton Avenue every 20 seconds does not make for pedestrian hospitality. Not only that, but at tremendous costs the facility will quickly become a homeless shelter that will need constant police attention --- which, by the way, will not be provided by Rochester Police but by rent-a-cops such as we have seen in Midtown Plaza.

The inclusion of the proposed bus garage as part of Renaissance Square, as Mark Hare once observed in the Democrat and Chronicle, "opens the lids on several pots of state and federal money."

Yes, it does. But I choose to listen to the advice of both former New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi and Rep. Louise Slaughter and look back into history before compounding the city's already-acute downtown problems with this mis-located and ill-considered project. While the concept of the Renaissance Square has some merits, it should be open up to full citizen participation. Criticisms of the bus garage must be addressed.

Just because there are "several pots of state and federal money" available does not make this bus garage the right decision. We took that road in the 1960's, and we know where it got us.

Harry Davis, 2005