Perez tours Buffalo infrastructure projects with Mayor Brown

Thomas Perez, assistant to the president and White House director of intergovernmental affairs, walked Main Street in downtown Buffalo with Mayor Byron W. Brown and Buffalo architect Steven Carmina, observing not only the street work and of track aimed at restoring automobile traffic along the metro. trains but also the redevelopment of many important buildings that Perez remembers from his childhood.

“We are very fortunate to have Tom Perez, senior advisor to President Biden, with us today to review a number of projects in the City of Buffalo that were built with federal funds, and to see the difference that these federal resources that we have made in our community,” Brown said.

Brown and Perez touted more than $300 million in infrastructure spending across all parts of Buffalo, with significant investments in the often-overlooked East Side.

That will include $25 million in landscaping work for Jefferson Avenue, as well as similar spending on Bailey Avenue and other thoroughfares. And that includes support for the Black Achievers Museum, the new Buffalo Urban League headquarters and a new health and wellness center planned on Jefferson Avenue by Dr. Greg Daniel.

“No neighborhood in our city will be left behind,” Brown said.

Perez and Brown also stopped at the edge of MLK Jr. Park, at the corner of Best Street and West Parade Avenue, to see where the Kensington runs through the African-American neighborhood on the East Side.

That’s where the billion-dollar project would begin to restore the great Humboldt Parkway by burying the highway in a three-quarter-mile-long tunnel, under a wide swath of new landscaping, trees and trenches to reconnect the community. .

“This project is a very important part of reconnecting communities,” said Perez, who also visited Syracuse earlier in the day. “The story of urban renewal in the early 1960s is a too-often-told story of divided communities, whether here in Buffalo or Syracuse.”

Some community members have continued to question Kensington’s plan, saying it is insufficient or would increase pollution from car exhaust at either end of the tunnel. But Perez expressed support for the project.

“We’re going to be able to solve all these problems,” he said.

“The reviews have been done and they have been comprehensive, and I would say they have been very, very inclusive,” he said. “We will continue to listen. I really think this is a project that we will remember with pride, because reconnecting communities is reconnecting opportunities. That’s what it’s all about.”

Finally, he visited the 5/14 memorial under construction in the parking lot of the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue, where 10 people were killed almost exactly two years ago in a racist shooting that attracted national attention.

His visit came four days after a 14-year-old girl was killed and five teenagers were injured near East Ferry Street, and a week after four police officers from different agencies were shot and killed under ‘an arrest warrant in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“To experience another shooting near where the massacre took place breaks my heart, and I know it breaks the president’s heart,” Perez said. “He has a very vivid memory of coming to Buffalo after this shooting to console the families. This consolation happens too often.”

That’s why Biden continues to push for gun control legislation, he said, while ridiculing Tennessee lawmakers for responding to a school shooting by allowing teachers to carry weapons.

“We must continue our efforts to eliminate the scourge of gun violence,” he said later, during a panel discussion at the Beverly Gray Center on East Utica Street, a block from Tops. “I’m a person of faith, but I’m tired of people offering thoughts and prayers and nothing else.”