My article was about what I saw (and still see) as an ill-conceived plan, one being thrust on the public in the media long before it had time to be given considered thought by any of the agencies that might be involved: the Olmsted Conservancy, the City of Buffalo, the University at Buffalo, and more.  Nothing in Kevin Gaughan’s long and rambling letter to The Public complaining about that article contravenes any of that.  

The major thrust of  Gaughan’s response is to link me to Donald Trump (again, again, and again), and by that association to dismiss any of my criticisms of his untenable golf course plan. Because he cannot argue and does not address any of my major points, he resorts to an ad hominem smear job. That is a fancy way of saying, instead of addressing the questions I raised and problems I cited in my article, he mostly attacks me as a person. 

There is no response to that kind of foolishness other than to name it for what it is, which I just did.

He points to several things in my essay he finds factually wrong. Most of them I didn’t say or suggest. They are in his head, not in my article. He recites his resumé, or what he says is his resumé. I cannot defend things I did not write; his resumé does not address what I did write.

My only response to most of what he writes is: “Go read the article I actually wrote and have at me in terms of what is really there, not in terms of things you imagine I wrote there, or wish I had written there so you could kvetch about them.” 

I will respond to seven of his his specific complaints.

Pursuing Office: Gaughan says I erred when I wrote he “tried for office” and “tried to get elected, as either Democrat and Republican, seven times.” He says he only ran five times, always as a Democrat. He should read his Wikipedia page. I got the information on his pursuit of political office there. According to that page, Kevin Gaughan has tried for office eight times. The page reports that once he tried to get into office by appointment, so I didn’t include that in my original tally. And, according to the page, “In 2001 he sought the Republican endorsement to run for the mayoralty of Buffalo…” Wikipedia pages are easy to amend, so I assume Gaughan would have fixed any errors appearing there. 

Achievements: I wrote that I did “not know of a single public project Gaughan has ever mounted. He has organized a few conferences (the one he cites most was at Chautauqua, a private summering institution, three decades ago.)” He says I’m completely wrong in that statement. He then names some committees he was on and lists four conferences he organized, starting with the one I cited in Chautauqua. (I did make an error there, one he didn’t note: I said it was “three decades ago”; it was two decades ago.) But he does not name a single public project he mounted or carried through. Not one.

PR: I said the closeness in time of the receipt by the Conservancy and City Hall of Gaughan’s proposal and the stenographic articles in the Buffalo News and on the Buffalo Rising website “suggests that Gaughan set his PR in motion before he delivered it to the agencies that would have to deal with it.” Gaughan writes that he emailed the proposal to the mayor and Conservancy before sending it to journalists. So what? I stand by my statement. He got his proposal to friendly people in the press before either the mayor or the Conservancy could possibly have had time to consider it. He was fully aware of that. (He also mentions that he proposed improving the golf course two years ago; he doesn’t mention that the Conservancy totally ignored that proposal.)

Talking about things: Gaughan complains that I didn’t telephone him when I was working on the article. That is true: I dialed the last two phone numbers I could find for him. One was out of service, the other had been reassigned to a residence in North Buffalo. So I emailed him, both at the email address he used the last time he sent me something and at the email address he used when he sent his proposal to the Conservancy and the mayor’s office. The first paragraph of that email was: “I’m doing an article for The Public on your Olmsted project. None of the phone numbers I have for you work. Can you give me a call when you have a moment.” And I gave him my home telephone number. Kevin Gaughan chose not respond. There are a lot of things in that article I would have liked to have talked to him about. He is the one who avoided a conversation, not I.

Drooling: Gaughan says he was “offended by Jackson’s insensitive use of a phrase to describe the editorial support for my plan from the Buffalo News and Buffalo Rising. By characterizing other journalists as ‘droolers,’ a pejorative used at times to denigrate people with physical, emotional or developmental challenges, Jackson crossed a boundary that no educated person should even approach.” So the world “drooling” is now P.C.’d out of usage by Kevin Gaughan? I used it in the sense of people drooling after something that caught their attention and got them acting foolishly, like thoughtlessly pursuing a stupid idea. Gaughan turns that into a smear on people with physical disabilities. That is Kevin Gaughan’s trip, not mine. Academics would call it sophistry.

Trees & flowers: Gaughan faults me for saying that “Olmsted’s Arboretum was never built.” He says it was “fully realized.” Nonsense. Olmsted’s plan for groves, paths, and gardens was radically altered by Buffalo officials. They put up a huge building that contains a lot of plants. It is a lovely plant conservatory, but it was not part of Olmsted’s design. Olmsted had nothing to do with it and, according to Olmsted scholar Francis Kowsky, he didn’t much like it. 

Money: One of my major critiques of Gaughan’s plan was that he proposed to raise $40 million from private sources in Buffalo now. I pointed out that there were several other major cultural development projects in play that would require a great deal of money, and that the amount of private money for such projects in Erie County is finite. His response to that is gibberish, bloviating, rambling, and either cynical or astonishingly naïve about funding complex and very expensive projects: 

A final regretful notion advanced by Jackson in his article: that obtaining private funds to make my plan a reality will ‘take away’ monies for other public responsibilities.  That fear-based sophistry was the hallmark of turgid politicians all through our painful four decade decline, as they concealed their inability to do their job with  threats that doing one project would force foregoing another.  Growing communities, driven by clusters of talented individuals, produce ideas and products that attract capital far beyond regional or even national boundaries.  And that capital is accessed by original, innovative thinking.

That paragraph is, for me, typical of his entire plan.

Arriving where we started: Nothing in Gaughan’s very long response addresses any of the problems I noted in his plan to reconfigure two Olmsted sites, create a new golf course on private property, and create a new educational institution in Buffalo. When I wrote the article, I thought the plan was epidermal and ill-conceived. Gaughan’s letter to The Public ratifies what I wrote.