City fumbled ferry oversight, leaving taxpayers awash in debt

Assemblymen Brian Kolb and Joseph Errigo

(July 30, 2006) — In 2004, New York state government made a multi-million-dollar investment in a project that was supposed to revolutionize our region.

Unfortunately, the high-speed ferry project never lived up to its promise and spiraled into financial disaster.

As the ferry project began to develop, several setbacks began to arise, causing public doubt and skepticism that led to our call for a state investigation into the matter.

About the same time, the city of Rochester purchased the ferry in an attempt to salvage the project’s future, despite the many red flags that are now being brought to the surface as a result of our inquiries.

With the report now public, the results of the comprehensive audit conducted by the state comptroller’s office has brought about more questions than answers.

What we do know is that millions of state and local tax dollars were misspent on a project that had insufficient oversight.

This nonpartisan report clearly indicates that officials, including former Mayor William A. Johnson Jr., acted without any oversight or accountability and failed to protect the taxpayers of Rochester, the region and New York state.

There is a great deal of confusion in regard to the accountability of money paid to subsidiary corporations of Canadian American Transportation Systems and just what the city paid for.

The audit illustrated numerous instances of mismanagement and operational changes that brought about the problems our region now faces.

The ripple effect of the mismanagement of the project will impact the region for years to come.

The demise of the high-speed ferry project is estimated to cost taxpayers a total of $28 million that must be repaid over the next 15 years.

We are truly disappointed in the performance by the former Rochester officials who did not exercise the appropriate due diligence and instead gambled with taxpayer money.

Officials were so eager to salvage the project that they chose to ignore obvious deficiencies of CATS and its management team.

As businessmen, we understand and appreciate taking risks in the private and public sectors when there is a focus on creating economic opportunity. However, the city of Rochester can’t justify its pursuit of the project when there was such compelling evidence to the contrary.

In addition to learning from the mistakes made, we continue to call for additional review by the Attorney General’s Office to determine if further legal action should be taken.

We also want to explore the opportunity of recovering the state taxpayers’ monies from the city or CATS principals.

Kolb, R-Canandaigua, represents the 129th Assembly District; Errigo, R-Conesus, represents the 130th Assembly district.

Proof that government entities should never take on projects like this again. This thing was doomed to failure from the get go. Why would anyone ever take this on with such a huge investment, start small, if the business is there it will grow on it’s own. To dive in like this was and is criminal when using taxpayers money.

Will Mr. Spitzer ever investigate it further? Doubtful.