Buffalo councilmember goes full Trump on highway removal organizers
Leah Halton-Pope's baseless paid protester smear is hypocritical considering NYS DOT and LaBella's actual astroturf operation to drum up support for the 33 tunnel
At a recent press conference, Buffalo Common Council Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope, who represents the Ellicott district, blasted the New York State Department of Transportation for declining to appeal a court decision requiring the state to conduct an environmental impact statement for its $1.5 billion plan to convert a portion of the Kensington Expressway (commonly referred to as the 33) into a tunnel. Halton-Pope further attempted to smear the organizers who sued the Department of Transportation, publicly objecting to organizers for making demands to restore the Humboldt Parkway rather than supporting the state’s plan to preserve the highway underneath a tunnel at great public expense and, in a move straight out of the Donald Trump playbook, insinuating that tunnel opposition was an astroturf operation, a particularly hypocritical ploy considering that the NYS DOT and the engineering firm behind the tunnel project were caught doing exactly what Halton-Pope has all but accused tunnel opponents of.
Of course a full study of the environmental impacts of the DOT’s tunnel plan as well as those of restoring the parkway instead of the far less comprehensive “environmental assessment” conducted by the DOT (which did not examine any alternative besides doing nothing at all) is appropriate. The project represents a massive expenditure of public money, the construction of a tunnel would necessarily impact the neighborhoods through which the highway runs for an extended period of time, and the fact of having a highway running through many residential neighborhoods has proven to cause all kinds of serious health problems, including respiratory illness, cancer, and death.
It is curious that a public official representing some of these neighborhoods would object to a comprehensive study of what the highway she supports will do to the people she represents.
It beggars belief that Halton-Pope would stoop to the level of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and imply that her constituents who oppose the tunnel were minions in the employ of some shadowy power broker.
Halton-Pope’s attack is straight out of the Trump playbook
Halton-Pope’s public comments about the East Side Parkways coalition were carefully couched to avoid directly defaming the organizers. She began her smear by saying “I'm not saying Eastside Parkways [coalition] was paid” before launching into a familiar “just asking questions” schtick meant to cause people to draw exactly that conclusion: “I am worried about those who are behind some of it,” she said, “because who pay for the signs, who paid for the lawsuit? Where did the resources come for that?”
These “questions” are ridiculous on their face. Signs are a tried and true method of communicating and protesting in part because they simply do not cost very much money at all, and East Side Parkways actively and publicly sought pro bono legal support as well as donations to hire a law firm before filing their lawsuit. Besides, what kind of conspiracy is Halton-Pope even hinting at? Is there some wealthy cabal working behind the scenes to undermine Buffalonians’ right to not have a park and to breathe in poisonous automobile waste?
Preposterousness aside, smearing organized communities as paid protesters is a move straight out of the corporate right-wing playbook. It is a strategy currently being deployed by Donald Trump and Elon Musk against ongoing coast-to-coast protests against the Trump and Musk administration’s assault on public healthcare, the federal workforce, immigrants, and the right to free expression.
Halton-Pope’s resort to the “paid protesters” smear is an unbelievably sleazy attack on organizers, including her own constituents, who are demanding that the government protect the public health and restore green space that was destroyed in what is almost universally acknowledged (even by tunnel supporters) to have been a gigantic mistake driven by environmental racism.
NYS DOT and LaBella Associates’ actual astroturf campaign in support of the tunnel
The councilmember’s attack is also incredibly ironic considering that the NYS DOT and the tunnel project engineer LaBella Associates themselves were caught attempting an actual, honest-to-goodness astroturf operation meant to create the appearance of more public support for the project than really existed.
As public opposition to the tunnel grew, the Department of Transportation's community liaison for the project distributed pre-written letters supporting the tunnel at an East Side Parkways coalition meeting and placed a stack of them at the sign-in table in order to induce tunnel opponents to accidentally support the project. The letters themselves, which had been drafted by the chief of staff of Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes (who is Council Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope’s former employer), contained lies and other misleading statements about the project.
From the Buffalo News’s account of the pro-tunnel astroturf job:
The letter claims the project is “Phase One” toward the eventual restoration of the Humboldt Parkway. While that may be aspirational – Peoples-Stokes has spoken in terms of the project being done over two to three phases – the project, as written, does not call for other phases.
[…]
Health claims are made that the project will “improve community health by reducing vehicular emissions,” and will “reduce upper respiratory illnesses.” Many people who live near the expressway have expressed concerns about the widespread illnesses residents have reported, and about the effect the proposed tunnel could have on air quality. The letter’s claims are not supported by the DOT studies.
The letter also says the project “has the ability to create thousands of household-sustaining jobs ... in a low-income community of color,” without mentioning these are relatively short-term construction jobs, or that construction jobs in Buffalo have a low representation of minority workers.
Moreover, it turned out that the DOT’s community liaison, Janate “Solar” Ingram, was actually on the payroll of LaBella Associates, a fact that was not disclosed by the DOT. After Judge Emilio Emilio Colaiacovo ruled that the DOT needed to complete an environmental impact statement before proceeding with the tunnel, Ingram published a letter in The Challenger, stating that she had been misled and apologizing to the community for supplying misinformation about the tunnel in her role as community liaison for the DOT.
Who may be pulling Halton-Pope’s strings?
By insinuating that East Side Parkways is being puppeted by shadowy interests in a plot to force cleaner air on east side neighborhoods, Halton-Pope is inviting the public to speculate about the people bankrolling her own political career. According to public campaign finance records, Halton-Pope has taken:
$2,500 from Douglas Development Corporation, the real estate developer owned by Doug Jemal, who was pardoned by Donald Trump in 2020 for his conviction in a public corruption scheme;
$2,000 from DNC Parks & Resorts, a corporation controlled by billionaire Trump donor Jeremy Jacobs; and
Donations from a variety of corporate lobbyists including $1,000 each from Emily Giske and Giorgio Derosa of Bolton-St. Johns, Rick and Diana Ostroff of Ostroff Associates, and Patrick Jenkins of Patrick B. Jenkins & Associates; $500 from Victor Martucci of Masiello Martucci Hughes; and $250 from Joshua Oppenheimer of Greenberg Traurig.
Halton-Pope’s two top donors, downtown real estate kingpin Doug Jemal and the billionaire Jacobs family, are “major investors” in the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, the lobbying group representing Western New York’s top corporate interests, which has backed the tunnel project in the past. LaBella Associates, the engineering firm developing the tunnel project, is also a member of BNP.
In late 2024, as the court was considering the lawsuit against the tunnel, the Department of Transportation began canceling stakeholder meetings to discuss the project with community members, instead scheduling a meeting with the Buffalo Niagara Partnership at a downtown property owned by Jemal.
As long as we’re just asking questions here, it’s worth considering: Who may be pulling Leah Halton-Pope’s strings?
The state government’s push to build a tunnel and keep the Kensington Expressway polluting the east side has been marked with deception and misinformation from the ground floor. Public officials have made phony claims that the tunnel would reduce air pollution in neighborhoods bordering the highway – the central complaint that has driven decades of organizing to remove the highway – while failing to disclose that a chief stated goal of the tunnel plan is to maintain the same level of traffic traversing the highway and that improving air quality was nowhere to be found among project goals. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand admitted to completely making up numbers in her assertion that restoring the Humboldt Parkway would be more expensive than building a tunnel in order to “make a point.”
Council Majority Leader Halton-Pope’s baseless and hypocritical smear against East Side Parkways coalition is just the latest in this shameful campaign to continue polluting the east side in order to shave a few minutes off of the drive for commuters from the northern suburbs.
This post originally stated that Leah Halton-Pope was the President of the Buffalo Common Council. It has been corrected to reflect that Halton-Pope is the Council Majority Leader.