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By Jerry Zremski - June 4, 2021
You want flood protection for downtown Buffalo, and maybe shorelines along Lake Ontario as well? You got it.
You want more money for clean-water efforts? It's there, too, in the 72-page spending plan and the 1,422-page appendix that Biden dropped into lawmakers' in-boxes last week.
You want more money for social programs and community development? Well, Biden will give you more – even for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program, which presidents of both parties have been trying to slash for decades.
You want more money for medical research and education? It's all there in the $6 trillion Biden spending plan for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, which Congress must approve.
Then again, if you want tax cuts and a balanced budget, Biden's spending plan is the wrong place to look. His budget proposes hiking the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, increasing capital gains taxes and raising the top tax rate for the wealthy from 37% to 39.6%. Meanwhile, the federal deficit would balloon to a one-year record of $3.7 trillion.
Not surprisingly, then, Republicans like Rep. Chris Jacobs of Orchard Park detest Biden's offering.
“This president has taken reckless spending to unimaginable heights," Jacobs, a member of the House Budget Committee, said in a statement.
But Rep. Brian Higgins, a Buffalo Democrat and also a Budget Committee member, said the spending plan is a down payment on Biden's vision for rebuilding the nation – and a big-time boost for Buffalo.
"This is all infrastructure," he said. "It creates jobs."
Flood prevention
Biden's plan would go a long way toward completing a piece of infrastructure that's critically important to Buffalo: the breakwater that protects downtown from Lake Erie's most ferocious waves.
The Army Corps of Engineers previously received $11.9 million to begin work on rebuilding that breakwater, which suffered catastrophic storm damage in October 2019. Biden's budget would set aside another $20.9 million for projects in Buffalo Harbor – enough to maybe even complete the rebuilt breakwater.
"It's a large amount of money, and would it get us most of the way there? Absolutely," said Army Corps spokesman Andrew Kornacki.
Work on rebuilding the breakwater has begun and would continue through 2022 if Congress sets aside the money. And that's good news to residents of Waterfront Village, who, according to Higgins' office, experienced flooding three times last year.
Biden's budget would also set aside $500,000 for a Great Lakes Resiliency Study, which aims to identify the most vulnerable coastal areas and propose solutions to help them withstand flooding. That plan could be especially helpful to residents of the Lake Ontario shoreline, who have experienced flooding on several occasions in recent years.
Biden's budget also includes $10.6 million for improvements to Black Rock Channel and $680,000 for Dunkirk Harbor.
Environmental efforts
Biden's budget would also do plenty to clean up the Great Lakes and the cities that surround them.
Spending for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative – which turned the Buffalo River from an industrial wasteland to an active waterfront – would increase from $330 million to $340 million.
And that's just one of the spending plan's many clean-water investments. A fund that states can tap into to improve their wastewater systems would get a $232 million boost, as would a similar fund aimed at improving drinking water systems.
Those are the first installments of the investments that Biden has called for in his American Jobs Plan, a massive, multi-year infrastructure effort that's still being negotiated.
Together, Biden's budget and his infrastructure plan offer a historic opportunity to rebuild the nation's sewer and drinking water systems, said Brian Smith, the Buffalo-based associate executive director at Citizens Campaign for the Environment.
Noting that about 60% of Buffalo's homes are still served by lead water pipes that potentially threaten the health of homeowners, Smith said Biden's budget will begin to fix problems that will only get more expensive to fix over time.
"If we continue with the status quo, we will never be able to address these needs," he said.
Social programs
The Biden budget also boosts several social programs that are important to cities such as Buffalo that have high poverty rates, including some programs that Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, wanted to eliminate.
Perhaps most notably, Biden would increase funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program by 2.2%. Trump wanted to shutter the program and other presidents annually suggested cutting funding for it.
The proposed increase is important to Western New York because the energy aid program serves so many people in the region. Some 82,733 households in Erie County got basic federal aid for their heating bills in the winter of 2019-20, while 28,815 households received emergency energy assistance.
That is by no means the only social program that Biden would boost. Funding for food stamps would spike 55% under the Biden budget. The Community Development Block Grant program, which will bring $14.1 million to Buffalo in the current fiscal year and which Trump also wanted to eliminate, would see a 7.7% funding increase. Federal housing programs would also get millions more.
Not surprisingly, the spending plan made Sharon Parrott, president of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, very happy.
"Our nation faces significant challenges, which the pandemic has both worsened and laid bare," she said. "It is time for an ambitious effort to tackle them. The president’s budget meets this moment and Congress should move swiftly to craft legislation that acts on this agenda."
Other items
Like every federal budget proposal, Biden's includes an astonishing amount of detail on how the president wants to spend the taxpayers' money. Here's a grab bag of other line items of particular interest to Metro Buffalo:
• The National Institutes of Health, which funds research at the University at Buffalo and the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, would see a 10.6% funding increase.
• Several federal education programs would see major increases in funding.
• The West Valley Demonstration Project would see its funding hold steady at $88 million.
• The Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station – which has received money for several construction projects in recent years – would go without any new construction funding during fiscal 2022.
• And despite Republican cries that Democrats want to "defund the police," Biden's spending plan would actually increase funding for the Community-Oriented Policing Services Program from $343 million in fiscal 2021 to $651 million in the following fiscal year.