The Buffalo News : Opinion

The Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, like everyone in this community, is eager to move forward with the construction of a new international bridge, a spectacular gateway we can all be proud of between Buffalo and Canada.

In his article “Saving Buffalo’s Untold Beauty,” (New York Times, Nov. 9), Nicolai Ouroussoff focuses his commentary on four prime examples of why a city tour of Buffalo can bring a person “about as close as you can get to experiencing first hand the earliest struggles to define what an American architecture would look like.”

The Erie County budget is once again threatening the extinction of 4-H in Erie County. Many people are unaware that Cornell Cooperative Extension of Erie County is the “parent” of 4-H, and without it, there is no 4-H.

Kim Mark Jackson’s Nov. 14 Another Voice column, “High-tech stamp system could help foil smuggling,” implies that proposed legislation requiring use of a counterfeit-resistant cigarette tax stamp is the answer to New York’s cigarette tax evasion epidemic.

When a Catholic parish policy bars people from becoming registered members because their exclusion reaps some financial benefit to the parish, the policy should be made null and void by whoever has the power to do so.

No one admits to pork barrel spending in his own district — the Route 219 Expressway, a signature bridge, a truck plaza. Bad transportation projects happen because politicians interfere with lawful procedures to weed them out.

Everything I ever wanted to know about the Great Depression I learned from my Uncle Hank.

The economy is fundamentally sound! That’s not a political statement. It’s just a fact.

My family, as many families did, came to the United States from Sicily in 1955. We sailed on the Andrea Doria, a ship that sank six months later. I was one of seven children, ages 2 to 17. We knew not a word of English and lived in a household on the West Side in which only Sicilian was spoken.