VOICE Buffalo's Public Meeting

Sunday afternoon I went to VOICE Buffalo's annual public meeting. VOICE Buffalo is a faith-based community organization that is working on projects many projects in the community. I wanted to do a write-up about the meeting, but my thoughts don't seem to be coming together on it, but I wanted to write something...

I am interested in safe neighborhoods, education, public transportation, transitioning former inmates (particularly youth) back into the community, and extending the millionaires tax cut; however, I work with National Fuel Gas every day so that's what I found most interesting.

One of the things they talked about was the “National Fuel Campaign For Fairness” with the National Fuel Accountability Coalition. I've recently had a small a run-in with NFG and I have lots of clients who have big problems with NFG, so this was something I was quite interested in. At the meeting, I learned that the CEO of NFG (David Smith, in case you care) makes about $3,500 an hour. Yeah, an hour. That's double what I make in a month. Last winter, NFG ran over 2,000 adds on TV in the Buffalo area about their winterization efforts even though last year they didn't spend a single dollar of their profits on winterization. NFG's winterization efforts are funded through donations they ask for in their customer's bills. I don't have a bill yet, but I did receive something asking for money for different programs they have (also, they spelled my name “Maty,” so that's one more black mark against them in my book).

Think of all the winterization NFG could do with just one hour a week of their CEO's pay check. Of course, that wouldn't really be to their benefit since it would lower heating costs for the customers who had their homes winterized. On Tuesday, I went to a utilities workshop for work that was sponsored by NFG. The representative from NFG who spoke talked about how little profit they actually make because of how much they help people who have trouble paying their bills (I don't see this happening much at all--what I see is NFG cooperating with non-profits like Catholic Charities and government-funded programs to pay the bills for the clients and sometimes forgiving a small amount of the bill as long as most of it is paid for by the programs). I know that a lot of their profits come from places other than customers, but they can't be doing too poorly if their CEO makes about 7.1 million a year.

Back to the VOICE Buffalo meeting—VOICE is working to organizing meetings with community representatives and National Fuel. Recently, they have also successfully pressured NFG into increasing their winterization efforts by 50% (and this includes using some of their own money).

Some other things I learned at the VOICE Buffalo meeting:

--Buffalo's High School graduation rate is 50% and for black males the graduation rate is only 25%. This is embarrassing for Buffalo and if the Millionaires tax is cut, funding for schools will be cut by 20%, which certainly will mean nothing good for those percentages.

--Eliminating the Millionaires tax would decrease funding to Medicaid by 25%

My favorite quote of the meeting was “love is the only force capable of turning enemies into friends.”

I learned a lot at the meeting and it certainly made me want to get more involved in my community to help creative positive change; however, they didn't offer any volunteer opportunities except one that took place during the day on a week while I'm at work. They did give the opportunity to donate money, but I don't have a whole lot of that.