Read more in our Cover Story section about downtown development, here
Bill
Nojay is a Disturbed man.
This may come as a surprise to those
who’ve seen the chairman of the Rochester-Genesee Regional Transportation Authority’s
board in television ads, pitching a downtown bus terminal (and combined
office-retail-residential complex) with a benevolent smile and a confident,
hopeful demeanor: Nojay is a big fan of Disturbed, the ferocious, ultra-violent
heavy-metal band that recently brought its “Music as a Weapon” tour to town. He
considers the group this decade’s equivalent to AC/DC, a band he admired in his
younger days.
But Nojay is also disturbed that the
RGRTA’s efforts to build the facility, dubbed Rochester Central Station, have
been a “Highway to Hell,” so to speak. And the latest complication, a new plan
to build a much cheaper bus terminal in the Sibley’s Building that’s gaining
political support, has Nojay seeing red.
Nojay accuses Congresswoman Louise
Slaughter, in whose district the terminal complex would be built, of blocking
federal funds slated for Rochester Central Station.
“This was one of the worst winters,
one of the coldest winters in the last 40 years,” Nojay says, “and we had
people standing out on the street corner because Mrs. Slaughter blocked the
funds.”
Asked why he thinks the nine-term
Democratic congresswoman would be indifferent to bus riders’ comfort, Nojay
riffs on a vitriolic theme he’s launched against Slaughter many times before.
She’s “a very angry, negative person.” She “has failed to get a leadership
position in Washington in her own party, because no one cares if she shows up
for work in the morning.” She’ll “do everything possible to block any proposal
that doesn’t come out of her office.”
A spokeswoman told City Slaughter was not available to
comment on this issue.
Nojay says he is also disturbed
about the depressed condition of downtown Rochester. The massive
office-retail-residential complex proposed in conjunction with the bus terminal
at the intersection of East Main Street and South Clinton Avenue is intended to
revitalize that long-blighted section of the city. Of course, the complex also
adds tens of millions of dollars to the total cost of the terminal project,
which Nojay estimates at about $59 million, most of it to be financed using
federal transportation funds.
The project’s proponents hope
revenue from leases and parking fees will cover the complex’s yearly operating
expenses, which are estimated to be about $750,000. But demand for downtown
office and retail real estate is low, and Rochester has a glut of vacant
commercial space — including Class A office space, the high-end space
Rochester Central Station would offer.
Asked last summer how Rochester
Central Station would succeed in attracting tenants where others have failed,
Nojay said, “As long as people like the whole crowd… at City believe everything about Rochester is negative, negative,
negative, nothing good will happen in Rochester.” He then hung up in anger. (City editor-publisher Mary Anna Towler
has written editorials criticizing the project.)
Asked the same question in mid-March
of this year, Nojay was willing to elaborate, if not explain.
“The big problem with real estate in
the city is that everyone in City Hall seems determined to block business
development downtown,” he says. “That’s why downtown has been in decline for
the past 30 years. It would certainly be helpful if City Hall would get out of
the way of private business, stop making doing business downtown a miserable
experience for everyone.”
Asked how city officials were
actively discouraging business development, Nojay cited parking problems and
other quality-of-life issues that he says the city has failed to address.
“The city has failed to answer
concerns about crime, appearance, cleanliness, lighting,” he says. “City Hall
has done nothing to assure people that downtown Rochester is safe and
attractive.”
Whether you share Nojay’s opinions
or not — and municipal officials, like City Council President Lois Giess,
certainly do not — they constitute a disturbing view of Rochester. It’s a
vision of a deteriorating downtown, run by willfully indifferent and
ineffectual municipal officials, and represented by a bitter congresswoman who
sends our hard-earned federal tax dollars to other states, while our poor
citizens shiver in the freezing drizzle, victims of her petty political
ambitions and seemingly sadistic self-interest.
It’s not hard to understand how
someone struggling against that vision would find some sort of satisfaction
listening to lyrics like “Need to get psycho / Wanna hear you scream / Tell me
to take you, scare you, fuck you / After we finish the show / It’s not enough,
you listening whore? / You’re one twisted little fuck / And now you wanna get
psycho with me” (from Disturbed’s “Meaning of Life”).
Though Nojay
complains that politics has impeded the progress of Rochester Central Station, he
rejects any consideration of a new, alternative proposal — on purely
political grounds.
That plan, dubbed Sibleys Station,
would create a transit center for RTS buses on the first floor of the Sibley
Building — located across Clinton Avenue from the proposed site of Rochester
Central Station. It was designed by volunteer architects and engineers from the
Urban Design Committee of the American Institute of Architects’ Rochester
chapter. Its proponents say Sibleys Station could be built for only a fraction
of Rochester Central Station’s cost, while still giving bus riders shelter and
helping to revitalize downtown.
Sibleys Station has the support of
David Gantt, the Rochester Democrat who chairs the State Assembly’s
Transportation Committee. Slaughter has also seen plans for Sibleys Station,
and she supports them, says John Lovenheim, a retired Rochester businessman and
member of the Urban Design Committee, who’s promoting the alternative proposal.
And during his State of the City address in early March, Mayor Bill Johnson
expressed interest in locating thebus transit center in the Sibley
Building.
Nojay has not seen the plans for
Sibleys Station, but neither does he intend to lay eyes on them.
Why?
“We don’t think that any so-called
plan, produced by a lackey of Louise Slaughter, has any chance of integrity,”
he says.
Slaughter and other critics of
Rochester Central Station “have come up with a dozen different objections, at
least a dozen different excuses for opposing the transit center,” Nojay says.
“This [Sibleys Station plan] has nothing to do with serving public transit, it
has nothing to do with improving downtown, it has everything to do with delay,
delay, delay.”
“Bill Nojay has no integrity,”
Lovenheim says in response.
Lovenheim, who also chairs the
Sector 5 neighborhood group (which includes downtown), denies that the Sibleys
Station plan is politically motivated.
“I have no idea what [Nojay] means
by that, and what [an alleged Slaughter connection] has to do with anything,”
he says. Slaughter, Gantt, and Johnson only saw the plans after they were
completed, Lovenheim says. “Nobody asked us to do this; nobody has financed us;
and no political group or party or person has been involved with this in any
way, shape, or form.”
The designers
of Sibleys Station estimate thattheir project would cost, at most, about $7 million. The plans
involve providing seating and limited amenities (such as a coffee shop and a
newsstand) inside the Sibley Building’s ground floor, where bus passengers
could watch screens and listen to announcements of bus arrivals and departures.
A smaller, more scaled-down facility, called Lincoln Station, might also be
built diagonally across the intersection of Main and Clinton (near Chase Tower)
to serve passengers taking eastbound and southbound buses.
The designers of Sibleys Station say
the project would require fairly minor traffic modifications, such as making
Clinton Avenue a two-way street for buses along some parts of its length, and
adjusting the stoplight at the intersection of Main and Clinton to facilitate
pedestrian crossing between the two stations.
Lovenheim says transferring buses in
a subterranean facility, which the authority’s plan calls for, will be
unpleasant for riders, some of whom will stay in the underground area to catch
their next bus if that bus is arriving soon after they’re dropped off. No
matter how extensive (and expensive) Rochester Central Station’s ventilation
system may be, he says, riders would still be breathing diesel fumes.
Nojay didn’t seem concerned about
the possibility the underground transfer area would be unpleasant, or
unhealthy, for passengers. But he also distanced himself from the idea of
creating a subterranean transfer point.
“The below-grade approach was
identified and required by the mayor and the president of City Council” as a
condition of their support for the project, Nojay says. If Giess and Johnson no
longer support Rochester Central Station, Nojay says he won’t feel compelled to
make an underground transfer area a part of the design. The underground
component adds about $17 million to the project’s cost, he says, and the
authority could still explore other design options.
Johnson could not be reached for
comment. Giess says plans for the underground component were part of a
memorandum of understanding she, Johnson, and Nojay signed several years ago,
and that the subterranean element satisfied her desire to open the above-ground
area for further development.
However, she adds: “We didn’t create
the design, [RGTRA] did…. I always envisioned people would be waiting
upstairs.” Giess says the possibility some passengers would either not take the
time or have the time to go upstairs between buses never occurred to her. “I
don’t remember how it would all work,” she says.
When City described the plans for Sibleys
Station to
Nojay, he criticized almost every aspect. He questioned the feasibility of
having buses stop outside the Sibley Building, saying there wouldn’t be enough
room for all the buses along the street, particularly during peak pick-up and
drop-off times. He said the traffic and commotion at such a street-level
station would dissuade businesses and prospective tenants from occupying the
floors directly above Sibleys Station. And he said the Sibley Building is
structurally unsuitable for the kind of redesign a bus terminal would require.
Not surprisingly, Lovenheim disputes
all of those objections. He says the architects and engineers who crafted the
Sibleys Station plans studied the bus schedules and the Sibley Building’s
blueprints before completing the proposal.
Told of Nojay’s comment that the
presence of the station would dissuade development on the upper floors of the
Sibley Building, Lovenheim says, “I think it’s absolute bullshit. If having bus
riders precludes having office space, how in God’s name is he going to build an
office tower on his bus station?”
Technical considerations aside,
Nojay has one objection to using the Sibley Building that, in his mind, makes
the idea moot. And, again, politics comes into play.
The Sibley Building is owned by
Rochwil Associates, a partnership associated with Wilmorite Inc. Members of the
Wilmot family, such as Wilmorite Chairman Tom Wilmot, are significant donors to
Democrats. And Rochwil owes the city $6.9 million in taxes, delinquent loan
balances, and interest on the building.
“Now, I’m not going to cast motives
to people, because I don’t know,” Nojay says. “But if I wanted to raise a
question about why [Democratic politicians] have… come out of nowhere
supporting the Sibley’s Building, which also doesn’t make any sense whatsoever
as a transit facility, I might question whether or not a bailout of $6 million
in back taxes is a motive. These people are all Democrats, they’ve got some
tough races coming up, and I can think of no better way to please the largest
Democrat fundraiser in the Rochester area than to give him a $6 million gift.”
In reality, it’s not quite that
simple. Tom Wilmot has contributed to both Democrats and Republicans — for
example, Tom and Colleen Wilmot are listed on the invitation for the 2003
Monroe County Ball (a Republican fundraiser) as “major sponsors.” And Lovenheim
says plans for Sibleys Station do not involve buying the Sibley Building, but
merely renting the first floor. Though the station’s presence could, in theory,
help bring tenants to the building and, thus, generate more revenue for
Rochwil, it would not necessarily erase the company’s outstanding financial
obligations to the city.
Meanwhile,
efforts to finance Rochester Central Station continue with renewed intensity.
In early March, the planning committee of the Genesee Transportation Council
— the regional organization that administers federal highway and
transportation funds — voted to allocate $30 million to the Rochester Central
Station project. The GTC board is scheduled to vote on the five-year funding
plan that includes the allocation in June.
Rochester Central Station’s
proponents hope the additional $30 million, combined with $12 million the
authority has already secured for the project, will make it easier to attract
the remaining $17 million from the federal government. Nojay says the authority
won’t break ground on the complex until all the funding is secured.
Nonetheless, the process of picking a private developer is moving along —
RGRTA Chief Executive Officer Donald Riley says seven qualified developers,
from here and elsewhere, are now under consideration.
Congress will likely reauthorize the
next five-year federal transportation appropriations bill this year, and RGRTA
officials are lobbying to have funds for the terminal complex included. Whether
those funds, if included in the bill, are actually allocated, is another
matter.
“We hope to get that [funding] in
the next couple of years,” Nojay says, “but Mrs. Slaughter’s opposition surely
does not make it easy.”
“It is so frustrating in this town
to try to do something, to move forward a project [in which] I can deal with
people on an honest, let’s-put-the-facts-on-the-table kind of basis and work
out a solution,” Nojay says.
The RGRTA has spent three years
looking at a dozen different sites for the terminal, says Nojay, and now the
issue of its location is being debated again.
Of course, those who view Sibleys
Station as a reasonable alternative to keep bus riders out of the rain are just
as frustrated with him.
Read more in our Cover Story section about downtown development,here
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2003.
