One other observation is there seem to be a lot of overlapping jurisdictions and agencies all dealing with the same things. (laughter, applause) This is not an easy thing to sort out because everybody likes to be in charge. Unfortunately, when everybody thinks that, nobody’s in charge. And we start stepping all over each other and becoming, in fact, counter-productive. (laughter)

One of the things I think is very unfortunate about the overlapping jurisdictions is that, it appears to me as an outsider, and I am an outsider here, that it has polarized public opinion on the bridge, on the convention center, on the slip site, on teacher salaries, education, run down the list. People in Buffalo are not afraid to stake out an opinion and stand behind it. (laughter).

The trouble is, it sometimes has paralyzed everything to get things done and that is truly and unfortunately counter-productive. You cannot paralyze activity and action on a repeated basis and have credibility with the outside. I don’t think there’s a single answer. I think this conversation is a great step toward it and the idea that you have here, a public forum or airing ideas together and trying to come to a confluence, is very important.

(Inaudible question from the audience)

Well, you hit the nail on the head there. If everybody does go home and turns their back and says, “wasn’t that a nice conference?” then this has wasted all your time. And I certainly hope you won’t do that. I don’t claim to have the answer for how to sort this out here. It has come in other locations that I know of through months and years of hard effort, of disagreement, of law suits, of people — in the town where I live — people stopped talking to each other for several years because of a local preservation issue that eventually rolled over. People still talk about it. We have very long memories when it comes to grudges. I’m not speaking of Buffalo, in particular, of course. (laughter)

But, I don’t think there’s any other solution than continuing to work together and continuing to make this an open process. I don’t see any other way that somebody isn’t excluded. So, there’s a difference between leadership and leadership that occurs in a vacuum. And I think these conversations are a very, very strong base for getting differing opinions aired again. I don’t know who’s right in the issues here. I don’t claim to have that opinion. But I do know that a lot of you care a lot about this and I hope there’s some middle ground that can be found to work this out because — when we got in yesterday and I saw the lubricants conferencing — you know, we need to lubricate the process here. (laughter). We need to get this moving again. It’s like it’s frozen up with all this disagreement and we now need to lubricate it and keep it rolling, even if it isn’t all smooth. I don’t expect it’ll all be smooth or that everybody’s ever going to agree about something. But we have to find some middle ground. Because paralyzed is not doing anybody any good.

I believe your visitor product here, in Buffalo, is potentially very good. But, it needs to be repackaged. You know, when Coca-Cola had its sales drop after — remember New Coke? Was that a fiasco or what? When New Coke came out and it bombed, they had to go back to the original packaging but then the sales trailed off again and they had to find a new way to get the same product out. The Coca-Cola — old Coke hadn’t changed — but suddenly there was a 20 oz. bottle in plastic in the shape of the old bottle. That tapped on their corporate identity, their heritage and higher price for basically sugar water. It’s repackaging what they already had.

I think that’s a place where Buffalo is now. I think you already have great things here, but they need to be repackaged and presented to the public to say, “you need this. Come here and see it. Come here and have some of it.”

I would like to comment on a couple of observations. I know that a new casino in Niagara Falls was approved last night and the contract was signed. I’d like to echo what Tom said. In our experience, casino visitors are very rarely cultural or heritage visitors. (laughter) Their motive is different and the casinos don’t want them to leave. The casinos want to get them in the door, they want them to stay at the machines or at the roulette tables or in the restaurants that are inside or at the stores that are inside. They don’t want them to leave because every time their body leaves their wallets go with them. (laughter) Assuming there’s something left.

So, the behavior and the incentive to go to a casino is fundamentally not the same as somebody going to a heritage site or a cultural experience. We talk a lot about all the casino traffic over in Canada. Frankly, I wouldn’t count on that as a base for your travel experience here. You may get some of it on the margins for the non-gambling spouse, but I don’t think it’s going to be big numbers. So I’d like to, if anybody is carrying that mythological pail, I’d like to dump it out now. (laughter) I don’t think that’s real for the long run.

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