A Conversation With Andrew Stainton
Andrew Stainton, Sustainability Party Candidate for Monroe County Executive
On Saturday morning, three of the Rochester Turning contributors (stlo7, Exile, and myself) sat down for a conversation with Andrew Stainton, the Sustainability Party Candidate for Monroe County Executive.
You’re obviously aware of our strong opinions about the current administration. Mr. Stainton is not just “anyone but Maggie”, though. We discovered that he is a man who cares deeply about the future of Rochester and Monroe County, and that he is a man with some truly visionary ideas about where our community should be heading. We were, to say the least, extremely impressed with Mr. Stainton’s intelligence and passion.
One of the things that we liked about Mr. Stainton was his emphasis on local economies, on keeping our dollars in the area and using multiplier effects to crank up the economy.
We also liked his dual emphasis on transportation and downtown development. For too long Monroe County has been sprawling itself into second-class status. Mr. Stainton has viable, low-cost proposals to give our citizens real transportation choice.
His understanding of transportation issues and downtown dynamics lead him to strongly oppose the Renaissance Square project. He believes that, with Maggie Brooks as our county executive, we will very likely spend a quarter-billion dollars on an incredible boondoggle. We’re inclined to agree.
He understands, too, that the future of the City of Rochester is the future of the county, and he is able to articulate that idea in a way that isn’t threating to suburbanites.
Mr. Stainton is the only person in Monroe County with the courage, and the ideas, to stand up to Million Dollar Maggie and the Minarik Machine this fall. We applaud him for that.
The following is a transcript of our interview with Mr. Stainton.
RT: Tell us about yourself.
AS: I got into politics through the Ren Square issue. I worked two blocks away from the site for years, originally I supported it, I mean who’s not for mass transit and downtown development? Then I went to a city council meeting, and I heard what the plan really was, and ever since then the closer I look the worse it gets. You start to wonder, too, if it’s like this for this project, what’s it like for other stuff?
(He was part of PFABBS - People for a Better Bus Station)
RT: Are you going to get your 1500? (1,500 signatures are required to get on the ballot)
AS: Oh, absolutely. No doubt about it, we’re going to get a couple thousand. You’ll see us at the Public Market, the beach, the East End. Any place there’s people. You know, the value of this is really a couple of things. Somebody ought to be in there contesting the race, and raising some tough questions for Maggie Brooks to answer. There’s also the larger issue of sustainability; this allows us to address those issues, which, we believe, need to be heard pretty quickly.
RT: You wrote a piece in the D&C, maybe a year ago, about the Inner Loop. Could you tell us about that?
AS: Sure. It was about three years ago. The idea is that there’s a LOT of asphalt there that’s not getting used. There’s no traffic, if you stand in the Kinko’s parking lot and watch for a while, it’s like looking at the traffic on a dirt road. So you’ve got all this asphalt, and you’ve got to pave it, plow it, clean it. You’ve got to maintain it, salt it, it’s a lot of effort. The idea is to take out the part of the loop from Monroe Avenue to at least Main Street. We could capture about 100 acres for development.
RT: That’s more than I thought. I’ve always felt like that part of the loop really does cut off the East End from the rest of downtown.
AS: It’s huge, that things got it’s own climate. Think about how much money we’re paying to maintain this mistake; to keep something that saps Rochester’s vitality. We should return that land to the tax base. Of course, people would still be able to travel that 1.3 miles by car, they’d just do it at 30 miles per hour instead of 50. The transportation people and development people in the city are on board with this, they’re ready to go get some land. The state’s on board, too. Where’s the county? Talking about a bus station.
AS: Let me give you an example of the kind of thing I’m talking about. There’s no sidewalk in front of MCC, this is an institution that prides itself on connections to the local community, and you can’t walk there. East Henrietta, West Henrietta, Jefferson Road - the center of the county - you can’t walk there. You NEED a car, we’ve made it impossible to go there without one. We’re not talking about a harebrained scheme, here, we’re talking about being able to walk to the community college. Again, the county is focused entirely on this bus station.
RT: So, just to be perfectly clear about this, you think that the emphasis on the bus station is keeping the county from getting the ball rolling on things like the Inner Loop, and other development projects?
AS: What’s the centerpiece of her administration? The bus station. They claim that this thing will create vitality downtown. They keep using that word “vitality”. I find that to be extremely nonsensical.
RT: There was a letter to the editor today in the D&C by a woman from Greece, saying that it was a bad idea to remove the inner loop. I’m wondering how you plan to reach out to people who, like most of us, live a car dependent lifestyle? How do you talk to them without challenging their decision to live in the suburbs, without threatening their identity? How do you convince them that they will personally benefit from downtown projects?
AS: Well, I own a car too. Certainly cars are part of our lives. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon. She (the letter writer) may have been talking about the northern section of the loop, which actually gets a lot of traffic. We’re not talking about that section. We’re talking about the southern part, and the eight people a day who use that 1.3 mile section will be OK using surface streets. In a larger sense, the answer to the person living in the suburbs is that we also have a county-wide commuter rail line proposal, which connects Brockport, Spencerport, Downtown, East Rochester and Fairport. There’s a lot of towns that would really be strengthened by this. There’s a three-year long overhaul of 490 going on right now. What do we hear from the county? Nothing. What do we hear from the sustainability party? Let’s create a viable alternative to sitting on the highway in a construction zone burning gas.
AS: I think too that a suburban person would appreciate that their teenager could delay buying a car for a couple of years, or their college student could not own a car while they’re going to a local college, or a senior citizen could give up their car earlier and still stay in their home, instead of in an expensive care facility. I’m not talking about giving up cars altogether, I’m saying that we need some real transportation choices.
AS: The price of oil has doubled during the four years of Maggie Brooks, and nobody thinks it’s going to get any cheaper, and we’re no closer to solutions for any of these problems. Their idea of transportation choice is: “six cylinders, or eight?”
The light rail idea isn’t grandiose, it’s a simple solution to a major problem. The tracks are already there. We’re talking about leveraging existing assets to create a natural transportation spine across the county. How does this help a suburban voter who might not be directly served by the line, well, now you’ve got that much less traffic on the roads, that much less of a tie-up on 490.
RT: We’re a pretty easy audience for you, in some ways you’re preaching to the choir here… How are you going to cut through…the BS…and reach the suburbanite out there that says “What’s in it for me?”
AS: It’s going to be economically stronger villages, towns and cities. Every one of us, whether we understand it or not, benefits from being near a strong city. The home prices are better, our children are more likely to stay in the area, there’s generally a more robust economy. This isn’t about taking something away from the suburbs, it’s about making the economic pie bigger for all of us.
RT: To follow up on this, I think that one of our biggest problems as a community is that suburbanites often don’t believe that the city is important.
AS: When I wrote the article in the D&C, somebody sent me a postcard asking “who gives a sh*t about the city anyways.”
RT: It’s always surprising to me. If you read the D&C storychats, there is a lot of very hateful, racist stuff on there.
AS: It’s more people than it should be, but there are those folks every where. We’re not going for the votes of the twenty-percenters.
I do think that fiscally conservative Republicans would feel very at home in the sustainability party. Those types of Republicans - the “Rockefeller Republicans” understand that tearing down tax paying assets (buildings) to create a massive tax drain (Ren Square) is just bad… it’s not common sense. Ren Square is the embodiment of what’s wrong with “big government.”
AS: I’m going to be taking the bike and going out to Brockport and Fairport, McCain had his bus, I’ve got a bike. What’s on my side is the fact that Brooks is selling nonsense, and I’m selling common sense. The closer you look at this Res Square thing, the more you realize how unaccountable they are, how shrouded in secrecy it is. When I got involved, the first call I made was to the Authority (RGRTA?). I asked them when their opportunities for public input where. Their response was that I had to file a Freedom of Information request… to find out when the public meetings were! Is that not the rabbit hole?
RT: For the majority of voters in Monroe County, property taxes are the number one issue. I want to know if you have any ideas about how to lower taxes? Have you thought about how our governments are structured, and looked at where all of the money that we pay goes? I mean, our property taxes are among the highest in the nation, we’ve really gotten ourselves in a hole. How do we change that, how can we make ourselves more competitive compared to other places, so that our kids don’t keep moving away?
AS: If I could answer that effectively in 30 seconds or less, I would win.
RT: I’m not asking for a soundbite.
AS: The real question, to me is “what are high taxes?” High taxes are taxes that aren’t spent wisely, that don’t produce results. If you’re driving buses around in a circle, it doesn’t matter whether it’s $10 per thousand or $1 per thousand, it’s too high.
RT: But the RGRTA budget isn’t really a significant part of our property taxes.
AS: No, but energy costs are not a small part of where tax dollars are going. Look at how much school districts are spending on diesel, getting kids back and forth. It’s a big cost and it’s getting bigger all the time. It’s a question of whether we’re really trying to make these leaps to a more efficient way of life. If we do all those things, and then come to the community with needs, I think that’s different than if you’re running ferries that make no sense, or building bus garages. Are taxes too high? If you had a viable transportation alternative, so that your household could do without one of it’s cars, you’d be saving thousands of dollars.
We’ll continue our conversation with Mr. Stainton in future posts
Related posts:
He is a number of great ideas, certainly ones that I fully support, but the whole PFABBS thing was such a ludicrous concept that it pretty much wipes out all of his credibility on transportation. The whole point of having a central transfer point is to remove the iron wall of buses on Main Street that chokes traffic, discourages pedestrians, and stymies investment in street-level retail. It also aims to curtail transferring bus patrons from having to dart across Main Street into traffic to catch their bus. That is a safety issue; people get hit every year doing this. I understand that $230 million is a lot for some folks to swallow, but the fact that such a huge project is “shrouded in secrecy” is a good thing as I see it. Let the professionals do their job. I wouldn’t trust Mr. Stainton with $230 of my dollars, let alone $230 million.
Furthermore, I have not heard that the current County administration is opposed to raising the Inner Loop; does he know something that we don’t? Probably not. And blaming the county for not having sidewalks in front of MCC? 15A (East Henrietta Rd) is a state road, not a county road. I’m sure that the County is fully in support of adding sidewalks there, but it is up to the state to make that happen. As I understand it, NYSDOT is about to start the 15A reconstruction project that will indeed, gasp, add sidewalks here.
Look, there is much to hate about the current administration and I applaud Mr. Stainton for ensuring that the people will have a choice this year. But I would recommend simply writing in “Man About Town” for the position. A vote for me would be worth much more.
Blaming the state for what happens in our county is passing the buck. No, the County Executive does not have the final say, but to make like she has no influence at all is to allow her and her administration to abdicate their responsibility.
Too many people forget that most of the things that the national government does is done through state offices, most of what gets done by the state is done through county offices, and in short, all politics is local. Of course she could be doing more than she is.
Someone needs to have some PRACTICAL IDEAS and put them into action. You of all people should get that.
This is fantastic! I’m on board already. Where do I get an Andrew Stainton T-shirt?
[...] endorse Andrew Stainton and let him run on the Democratic slate. BTW, RochesterTurning.com has a great interview with Stainton posted [...]
Key Quotes:
I don’t agree that having the RS project “shrouded in secrecy” is a good thing. I don’t think anyone is asking for the public to be involved in the nitty gritty details of designing the facility. However, only opening up public comment for 20 days after the first proposal seems inadequate. At least, they should provide another period for public comment now that they’ve updated their proposal. This facility should be built to serve the needs of the public, and therefore the gov’t should allow adequate time for the public’s voice to be heard. It’s ludicrous that someone has to file a FOIL with RGRTA to find out how his or her voice may be heard. I’m surprised/disappointed this is even legal. The last thing we need in local gov’t are public officials and their planners deciding what is best for us.
Also, I don’t think Mr. Stainton said that the county gov’t was against the Inner Loop idea. He’s simply making the argument that the county gov’t has consumed itself with the RS project, while neglecting other important proposals.
Personally, I admire Mr. Stainton’s courage to stand up for what he believes and put his ideas before the public’s scrutiny. MAT, are you planning to collect 1,500 signatures, and what exactly are your positions?
Does anyone have contact info for Mr. Stainton’s campaign, in case readers would like to sign one of his petitions, but can’t make it to the events he will be attending?
[...] Turning has part one of an interviewwith the only person with enough balls to mount a challenge against the massive Brooks/Minarik [...]
My apologies, I should have included contact information in the article. He can be reached at stainton4mce@yahoo.com
Stainton said, “The transportation people and development people in the city are on board with this, they’re ready to go get some land. The state’s on board, too. Where’s the county? Talking about a bus station.” These comments are completely unsubstantiated, and quite frankly, he is lying through his teeth. I know for a fact through my other life that the state is NOT on board with this proposal, and guess what (?), it’s the state’s road, not the city’s! If NYSDOT was on board, they wouldn’t be requiring the city to do a half-million dollar pre-proposal engineering study to prove that the project is even feasible. Don’t get me wrong, I completely support the Inner Loop project and I’m sure it is 100% feasible, but to make a blanket statement that “the transportation people” are “ready to go get some land” is just plain wrong. Mr. Stainton talks a great game, but he has zero education or experience in transportation. It’s great to have someone interested in public service who gives a damn about transportation and urban design, but please don’t kid yourselves that he is a viable candidate. If you endorse him, I’m afraid you’ll lose credibility amongst those of us who want our elected officials to have some level of competence, even if they’re on the wrong side of the fence.
Also, to suggest that the County Executive has any impact on how the State DOT conducts its business is quite ill-informed (I don’t mean any disrespect, I just happen to work in a related field and understand how these things work). Maggie can’t force NYSDOT to change its 12-year capital program just to fit her needs. She provides input on relevant projects through Terry Rice and his staff. Suggesting otherwise is just absurd. Look at how much effort it took on the part of the Town of Pittsford to stop NYSDOT from doing whatever it wanted at Jefferson & Clover. The County had little to no say in the matter, that’s why you heard little to nothing from them.
He reminds me of Sting…
MAT, we have not endorsed Mr. Stainton, but we have interviewed him and published the first half of the interview.
When Bob Smith interviewed Mr. Stainton on WXXI, was that an “endorsement?”
He has the guts to run against Ms. Brooks, and he has ideas about the future of our county that we believe should be heard, regardless of anyone’s opinion of the viability of his candidacy.
Thank you (seriously, no snark) for your comments and your expertise. We have great respect for your opinions, and for your knowledge of urban planning, and we hope to hear more from you.
We’ll publish the second half of the interview soon.
Vote for you?
MAT - Declare and make plans on getting 1500 signatures and we will interview you. I think DFE is spot on here.
One of the things that impressed be about Stainton was a practical approach using as he termed low hanging fruit as opposed to large and grandiose ideas. Lots of little actions.
MAT - we simply interviewed him. He is the only candidate running against Brooks unless you count your write-in campaign. You certainly aren’t begrudging someone who is running.
At our next opportunity we will ask him to clarify his comments. Regarding who is on board or not.
Personally, I’d like to see how Mr. Stainton responds to MAT’s allegations. However, I do feel the phrase “you’ll lose credibility amongst those of us who want our elected officials to have some level of competence” is overly harsh. I mean Mr. Stainton is a professor at MCC, who taught math and science in high school. On the other hand, Maggie is a former news reporter. I imagine that if you took away all of her advisers, she wouldn’t look very knowledgeable. I don’t find her all that competent as a politician, even with an administrative staff.
[...] we told you all about Andrew Stainton, who is running for County Exec as a member of the sustainability party. [...]
I admit, I was overly harsh and I apologize. So who is this Working Families Party candidate, Patrick Christopher? Is he also a crackpot? Oh crap, there I go again.
“Is he also a crackpot? Oh crap, there I go again.”
Cute retort MAT. lol
We will try to find out more about Christopher.
First, congratulations to RT for this interview series, and also congratulations to Mr. Stainton for running against the horrid Maggie Brooks.
I would encourage Mr. Stainton to develop more policies and positions other than simply regional transportation. No doubt, we need a vastly improved regional transportation system, and it is good that Mr. Stainton will focus some energy onto that issue that has been long neglected, or cynically mis-used to push Ren Square.
I do take exception this statement by Mr. Stainton’s:
What tracks, specifically? There are no existing tracks other than those owned by private corporations. I seriously doubt those corporations will let the public use those tracks for passenger service. Furthermore, there are empty railroad right-of-ways with no tracks (some exist now as hiking/biking trails) that might be used, but creating a light-rail system is extremelyexpensive, time-consuming and limiting. Limiting? Yes, once you build it, the light-rail system only goes to those locations…which was one of the downfalls of the old Rochester Subway. When new locations need transportation, they get no benefit from the light-rail system that doesn’t go there. A better solution: improved county-wide (and regional) bus systems. Little infrastructure improvement is required, purchasing buses is less expensive than building light-rail systems, and routes can be planned for today’s needs, and if tomorrow’s needs change, there is almost zero expense to change the routes.
Thank goodness you aren’t running, I guess that would make four?
Great perspective, hsrstud!
dj raises important points (even though I like the idea of a light rail system.).
The rr tracks and track beds are privatley owned - CSX, which is only interested in profits - and they’ve torn up some of the track already. The old trolly bed tracks are gone in many places, too.
The County tried to get the old CSX bed in North Gates a few years back, and the company asked for more than 10 million just for that small section..
We’d have to spend tens if not hundreds of millions to buy the old bed and lay tracks, or to track the old tolly bed.
I don’t know if anyone in government has the guts to support that.
Hey Massa - an issue?
[...] halfway through the 7 to 8 o’clock morning show on WHAM Channel 13. The piece will feature Andrew Stainton and Bill Nojay discussing whether or not there should be a debate in the race for County [...]
[...] Andrew Stainton will be at Boulder Coffee (100 Alexander St) from 5:00 to 6:00 pm on Weds 8/15. RSVP at http://www.dfalink.com/event.php?id=22764 [...]
[...] the TV… 13WHAM ran a piece this morning with Andrew Stainton and Bill Nojay talking about whether or not Million Dollar Maggie would debate Stainton. I’m [...]
Lee said
“The County tried to get the old CSX bed in North Gates a few years back, and the company asked for more than 10 million just for that small section.â€ÂÂ
If that is indeed true then CSX has determined that the value of that small strip of land is $10 million dollars and it should be taxed accordingly. Gates has been suffering from the Property tax loss from Kodak so this little piece of land should make up for a lot of that.
That might make them rethink the actual value of this property.
I’m not sure what to think about this Stainton guy but I think I’ll swing by Boulder Coffee tomorrow to sign his petition. If nothing else at least Maggie may have to answer some questions as to why she hasn’t done anything in the last 4 years and why anyone should support the Renaissance Boondoggle.
Andrew Stainton and others will be at the Public Market today collecting signatures to get him on the ballot. Come sign and help make it happen
.