Wacker Job

It’s now old news that a German company called Wacker Chemie Ag had narrowed its search down to five candidates, including Niagara Falls, for a $620 million facility that would employ 1,000 people. That’s 1,000 jobs in our desperate area, and they wouldn’t have been jobs selling fishing lures or dealing blackjack. They would have been decent jobs. Probably jobs with health benefits and retirement packages. So what did our business development leaders and politicians do? They fucked it up. The company sent a letter saying they’ve lost interest. Apparently, we couldn’t deliver the goods. Poof.

What is particularly infuriating about this massive snafu is that nobody knows what happened. The only thing we do know is that the people who were responsible for enticing the company to locate here were Thomas A. Kucharski, president of Buffalo Niagara Enterprise, Buffalo Niagara Partnership President Andrew J. Rudnick, Gov. George E. Pataki and Empire State Development, Pataki’s economic development agency.

The problem was identified, after the Niagara Falls was scratched off the list, as an inability to provide low cost power. Get that? They couldn’t get enough low cost power in Niagara Falls. They wanted 70 megawatts and could only get 30 or so. No one has made clear what that means, or how much it would have cost. We guess it wasn’t important enough to ask about.

None of our politicians even knew about the potential deal. Too busy trying to get reelected, no doubt. Neither our Senators Clinton and Schumer nor our Congressional representatives Reynolds, Slaughter and Higgins had a clue. They were all in the dark until they read about it in the news.

The one thing that’s clear is that this was a major screw up. Most working people know that if you screw up this badly, you get fired. That doesn’t happen to the people that we are relying on for leadership. We can’t fire politicians, but even parasites like Kucharski and Rudnick appear immune from responsibility. Heads should roll, but they won’t. We’re sure many would like to see a lifeless, mustachioed head tumble by. We feel better just thinking about it.

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