WBEN Radio - David Bellavia Interview of L. Nathan Hare 5-12-19

5/12/19 WBEN RADIO DAVID BELLAVIA INTERVIEW OF L. NATHAN HARE David Bellavia

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Well welcome to Hardline. It’s Sunday. It is Hardline. This is what we do every Sunday 10 to noon on WBEN and we’ve got a guest that – you know I’ve got to be honest with you, I had read in February an article in the Buffalo News and you know to be totally fair, when you see – we’re so polarized in our politics that when you see people that are perceived to have differences of world view and Ideology and you look at folks that are getting hammered by the Buffalo News, you know republicans are the ones that always say it’s a democrat newspaper. It’s a far-left newspaper.

So when I see the Buffalo News attacking someone who sees the world differently than I see it, there are times that you sit back and say: Well let them beat each other up. But in this situation I read about Nathan Hare.

I’ve heard about L. Nathan Hare is, if you want to google him, but Nathan Hare, this is a man whose reputation precedes him. He’s a part of, a pillar in Western New York, and what we’re talking about is someone who has dedicated his life to service and a piece that was written by Matthew Spina a Mary Pasciak from the Buffalo News back in February, and it seemed to precede just a litany of other articles by the Buffalo News. And one of the things I was not hearing, was I wasn’t hearing from Nathan Hare. I wasn’t hearing your side of this piece. Now we’re talking about the CAO of Western New York. This is an organization that was created in, I think 1964.

65 actually.

1965.

Right.

This was President Johnson’s war on poverty.

Right.

We’re not talking about a couple of hundred thousand dollars affecting 20 or 30 people. We’re talking about a budget of $50 million.

That serves 55,000 people.

That serves 55,000 people. But as we mentioned, we just got into a very long conversation that I would like to continue on the air if I could.

Sure.

But first and foremost, I want to get back to February of this year, it really kind of started at the end of 2018. The rumors were that there was something that was going on at the CAO. That there was a coup d'é·tat going on with the leadership at the CAO. And people have connected this to your relationship with the Mayor. Your connections with some attorney that is the most powerful attorney in America. That he could have solve the situation. You didn’t respond to the Buffalo News but you wrote in an op-ed that I read and it wasn’t published in the Buffalo News.

So first and foremost I want to say do you believe that you have been treated fairly by the Buffalo News?

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Well absolutely not. I mean you can’t be more unfairly treated, you know, than I’ve been treated by the Buffalo News. And when people say well you know Nate why didn’t you send something to the Buffalo News and respond, the truth is every single thing that they wrote, I sent something to respond to that immediately. They asserted things, I provided documentation supporting what it was that I was saying, and they never published it. I finally got an email from the chief editor, Mike Connelly, and his rationale to me was I didn’t publish the stuff that you wrote because it contained contested facts. Well everything that you’re saying, it contains contested facts.

Did you burn the house down? No I did not. And that is a contested fact.

Essentially to give you just a little bit of background on this thing, as I was telling you before, sometimes you have situations that happen in community based organizations that have really truly community based boards, and I’ll explain that over the course of the program, what a community based board is for us, that people wind up being on your board that really don’t have much background in terms of professional organization, and see themselves because they become the chairperson of the board as if they’re the boss of the CEO or the corporation. And they really want to be the boss of the CEO or the corporation. So that created a certain amount of tension between myself and the board chairperson. And what happened over the course of time, a lot of this stuff, I mean there’s nothing that they’ve stated that was any particular financial thing. They kept saying…

No, no, no. I’m going to go through the points they brought up and just, you want to talk about vague, let’s talk about vague. First of all how long have you been in this position?

Since June of 2002, so 17 years.

We’re talking about 17 years. Now normally the organizations I’m a part of, if I’m dealing with incompetent people, I can identify that in about 24 months. You can hide for a little bit…

But you can’t hide for 17 years.

But you can’t hide for 17 years. I’m just saying, you can’t hide for 17 years. Now three-quarters of this budget is coming from taxpayer dollars.

Right.

Right? And the reason why many people will look at this and say: well there needs to be a higher accountability because it’s taxpayer dollars.

Right.

I would make the argument that $50 million is $50 million. You should be accountability for $50 million at any rate. That’s a lot of money.

And I want people to understand, we have an extremely high level of accountability. The Department of State which is our primary regulator, they visit our meetings, generally two out of every three of our board meetings, someone from the Department of State actually comes without notice and they sit in our meetings. We get reviewed by Health and Human Services, the Office of Head Start, by the Department of State, Page 2 of 28

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routinely. I mean we get a review of some kind every single year.

Sometimes we get two or three reviews in the same year because of the timing of how these reviews take place.

So I just want to get to this January 4th, 2018. You received what is described by this disgruntle board member, as a written warning. Okay now when I look at a written warning it is you know: Mr. Hare please stop bringing a gun to work. Or Mr. Hare could you stop using profanity in front of … that’s a written warning. It’s a behavioral situation. You got a letter on January 4th, 2018, that basically said there were deficiencies.

And when we get to the deficiencies it’s your inability or unwillingness to address the deficiencies that were in the letter on January 4th. That’s still not talking about what the deficiencies are.

Well not only that. She’s the board president. She’s not my boss. If you go to the January 2018 board meeting, they meet every two months, the March meeting, the May meeting, and so on, you don’t see a word in the board meetings about this. This was something that she did on her own.

So the board is ultimately, any CEO is accountable to a board?

To a board.

And that board, if they’re having a meeting and there’s a continuing problem where you’re late or the job isn’t getting done, or there’s missing money, that’s going to come up in a board meeting.

Right. In a board meeting. In the minutes of the board meeting.

Right.

And if the board has an issue, the board would direct you. So she could not on her own send this kind of a letter. She did this because she felt that nobody would react to it. She just did it on her own. And what her issue was is they wanted finance reports formatted in a way that to me didn’t make sense that would be very difficult for us to do. And it gets really technical to explain the detail on this.

Well see I just want to get to the 35,000 foot approach now.

Right.

How many board members are at the CAO? There were 18 board members we had at that time.

And how many people went to the Buffalo News?

There were two that went to the Buffalo News.

Okay so of the 18 people, did the Buffalo News contact the other 16 board members?

From my understanding they had not. They have over the course of time, they’ve tried to get two, some of the board members, but I don’t recall them having spoken to more than like four.

Okay. So this article comes out. It said that previously the board has met with you to discuss deficiencies. Well I would argue that the board will meet with you all the time since you’re the Chairman of the Board.

Right. And what would the deficiencies be? So the deficiency that she’s talking about is these finance reports. But I actually had a study done bringing three independent agencies together to look at all of our Page 3 of 28

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processes, that was in December of 2016, and then we began to implement all of those processes over the course of the following year and one-half, and the board was a part of all part. We report on it at every board meeting.

Well when it comes to the finance department there’s a bit of a — they’re upset that you lost $250,000 from a grant, not we lost $250,000 because it went out the window and there’s no receipts for it. You’re driving around a, you know, Lamborghini.

Right.

The grant was lost.

Right, and I just want to be clear about that. That again is another one of these — I’m going to call it a misstatement, to say I don’t put a pejorative on that.

Right.

But including her, saying it was misstatement, because this was a grant that I had gotten for a program that I had created called a “Home Improvement Resource Program.” I created a program and operated it for a year with no grants. I just used excess capacity from people that we had on staff. The program worked. I started campaigning to get money to actually fund the program. Crystal Peoples helped me to get some money through the office of Tutoring and Family Services. That worked for a couple of years. Then they weren’t able to maintain that grant. That’s the grant she says that I lost. There’s was no RFP for it. There’s nothing that you could apply for. This was discretionary money that the majority leader was able to provide for me. But over the course of that two year period that I was getting the money from OCFS, I developed for other grants that use that same structure. So by the time we didn’t get that renewal of the $250,000 OCFS, I had $1.7 million coming from other sources. So that that program was actually a much bigger program at that point. This again is people just saying stuff that is, it sounds true, but it’s not really true.

Well let’s talk about your record as the Chairman of the CAO. When you started this thing there were about 350 employees.

Right.

A budget of 23 and ½ … $23.5 million, right.

Today …

And they were circling the drain. That’s the reason why they came to me in the first place.

Right.

Because they were in such deep trouble that they were about to go out of business.

17 years later we have a $50 million budget.

Right. Actually $52 million.

A $52 million budget.

We have 850 employees.

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Okay.

And we go from serving something like nine or ten thousand people to serving fifty-five to fifty-six thousand people.

And there have actually, the Head Start Program, which every politician is going to say, especially the democratic party, their presidential candidate is running on expansion of Head Start.

Right, right.

Everyone is talking to Head Start.

Right.

The CAO is Western New York, you guys are the agency that runs Head Start.

Right, right.

So you cannot have any democrat elected today that is going to run around talking about how great Head Start is and how important it is to our community and say but unfortunately the Chairman of the group that runs Head Start has all of these major deficiencies and he is so absolutely horrible that he has to be removed.

Right. And of course that just never, never took place. In fact, they made a big issue about a – there’s a study called a class study, it’s the name of a particular kind of a review that helps what _____ does of your Head Start program. They picked one indices where we had a really low number, a rating, I think it was like a 30% rating you know in that area, the net rating, they took that one indices and they treated that as if that was the indices for the entire agency. When you actually look at the numbers, not actually provided the documents, I can give it to you right now, you will see that the agency was up in the 70-75%, 80% range, on all but one of these indices. So again this was the news reporters taking a fraction of a piece of information and making it seem like that was the whole deal and then making it seem like the agency was you know going out of business where that’s not the deal.

Well we’re talking with Nathan Hare. He is the chief executive of one of the most powerful organizations in all of Western New York, the CAO of Western New York. There have been a series of articles written in the Buffalo News. This man has had no opportunity to defend himself in a public platform. We’ve got a pretty big audience here. We’re giving him that opportunity. And we’re hitting him with everything he got in the Buffalo News. The only difference is you have a chance to respond.

Right.

And I think that’s only fair to do when a man’s character is deemed a lie.

We’re going to get more with Nathan Hare. I want to get into audits, previous audits. The man’s been running this organization for 17 years.

We heard about the Department of Justice, the FBI. Well the State audited him for 17 years. We’re going to hear about some of those audits and how they came back and more. It’s Hardline.

Welcome back to Hardline. We’ve got Nathan Hare in the studio, he’s the chief executive of the CAO of Western New York. This is an Page 5 of 28

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organization that was created in 1965, in President Johnson’s war on poverty. 17 years ago when Nathan Hare took over this job in 2002 there was about $23.5 million and maybe 350 employees. Today that number is a $50 million budget. Two-thirds of that is from the government. But one of the main things that the CAO does, again this was designed to have stakeholders in a community deciding the best course of action for people in going through poverty, homelessness, the Head Start program, it’s something you will hear every elected official, democrats, 20/20 candidates running on Head Start, this is one of the most important, you know organizations on the left to the Democratic party. You have a Chairman of the CAO of Western New York who is being accused of some of the most vague, without any bite, no merit whatsoever are these allegations to the Buffalo News. Nobody has given Nathan Hare a chance to get a microphone and say defend yourself. This is a man who has dedicated himself to the community. Now I want to get to, you’ve been audited for 17 years.

Right.

And you’re not audited by you know an internal audit from the board.

You’re not audited from you know a group that just comes in, a volunteer high school students, you’re audited by the State of New York. As a matter of fact the State, the Secretary of the State of New York. 17 years of audits. Mr. Hare what has the result been of 17 years of audit?

Every audit that we have had since I’ve been there, we’ve had a clean audit. What I mean by a clean audit is that there were no unresolved findings in the audit. There are always things that come up in audits where we didn’t find this until we found it, we found it in a different folder than we found the other piece of paper. Or you didn’t pay somebody in 30 days, you paid then in 35 days. You know things like that come up. They give you recommendations of what you need to do to address that. And that’s it. No missing money. You know no deficiencies in our processes and procedures. No what we call a going concern where you’ve got bills you didn’t pay from the previous fiscal year that weren’t paid you know in the next fiscal year and things like that. None of that occurred. All clean audits. And the audits say, that’s not me characterizing the audits, the audits say that this is a clean audit.

So. Well the allegations go on, this board determination letter that you received, and it says that there’s a loss of confidence and trust in your character. Now let me tell you, if I’m going to have a disagreement with you, I could talk about the issues, I could talk about the actions, the fruits which you have shown to, but when I go after a man’s character. I mean listen people talk about your salary, you’ve been around long enough where if you were in the private sector you can make a ton of money.

This salary is not at all indicative of what you have given back to the community and what you can make outside. Let’s just be honest.

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Well what I would say to people is Business First produces a report every year on the top not-for-profits in the area and also produces a report on the top salaries of the top not-for-profits in the area. My salary never comes up at all because even though I’ve been the number two or three largest not-for-profit that’s not a school or a health care organization in Erie County, my salaries have been lower than the top 100 not-for-profit companies’ salaries in Erie County.

But to have your character.

Right.

That is one of the most outrageous things I’ve ever read. Now why are you attacking Nathan Hare’s character? What has he done? Is he parking in handicap spots? Is he slapping people?

Laughter.

No but these are legitimate allegations if I’m going to make them.

Right.

So here’s what we have. We have a board member that they – this president of the board decides to write this letter. You misrepresented your knowledge of the removal of a board member. I want to get to the allegation of you misrepresenting anything. I also want to talk about the FBI and the Department of Justice which are quoted in this piece and we’re going to get to Erie County too. We’re talking to Nathan Hare. He is the Chairman of the CAO of Western New York. And we’re responding to a Buffalo News hit piece three months ago and it’s piling on, it’s snowballing.

Right. Just continuing to make mountains out of nothing. Out of air.

We’re going to go through every point in this termination letter to you.

Which by the way was a failed termination on your part.

Right.

And we’re going to get to how that happened all after this. It’s Hardline.

Welcome back to Hardline. We’re got Nathan Hare in the studio. He is the Chairman of the CAO of Western New York, an organization created in 1965. President Johnson’s war on poverty. When you started 17 years ago this was a budget of $23.5 million. It’s now $50 million. This organization runs Head Start. Every one of the democratic party loves Head Start. There was an article written in February of 2019 by the Buffalo News that took a letter from a board member, there’s 18 board members, and one-third of that board is elected officials and the other third – so we have 18 people. Two people came forward and made allegations of your character. Of the fact that you are responsible for a grant of $250,000 to not be renewed, which I never heard anyone be accountable for that. But I want to get to a part here that this really rubbed me the wrong way. And this was a statement made by Mark Poloncarz, who is the Erie County Executive. And he said not — I mean I’ve heard him talk about Head Start more than any elected official in Western New York. I’ve heard him just talk about your organization.

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This is one of the most important parts of Western New York. What the CAO does every single day. Yet when asked about a statement about how he feels about you and these allegations …

A big chunk of it A big chunk of it, he’s going to wait for the audit to come back to see whether or not your character, whether you’re a felony, whether you’ve abscond, you know taken millions of dollars and bought…how much money is Erie County given the CAO $11,500 a year. Out of a $52 million budget $52 million, this guy’s given you $11,500 and he could not make a public statement in support of 17 years of service.

And just to put a fine point on it, every year that we close our books for the kind of contract with the County, we actually send the County photographic records of every single transaction that makes up the $11,500 that they could contract with for for services in Erie County. We send them the exact documents, the purchase requests or orders, the invoices the paid receipts, we send them the exact document. So you can audit it yourself you don’t have to audit it it’s already self-audited.

So when this vote goes through 18 members are on the board, the vote is done in October and the vote only consists of 8 people through a teleconference.

Right. Okay, not even a teleconference, a phone, Like an Iphone conferencing people Right, this is just on the telephone, this is not like a Skype conference.

So I’m just trying to think of what a quorum would be Well a quorum would be 6 out of 18 Okay But what’s interesting about this is that letter was sent from this faction on October 19, October 26th because it takes a while, remember in order to call a special meeting of the board you’ve got to do it by your bylaws. So the meeting that they called to do this board vote on October 17th or whenever they took this vote that was a no meeting because it was not called appropriately. But the board did have another meeting of the full board on October 26th, at that meeting they nullified everything that was supposedly done in this meeting that they claim there was a vote to terminate me, the whole board nullified that 7 days later. So it cannot be what the News has continued to put forward that the board you know terminated me, the board did this, the board, that’s not true.

Let’s talk about some other things that turned out not to be true. There’s a report in this article, the second article that was the follow up to this.

There’s mention that the FBI and the Department of Justice sat down to interview some, these 2 disgruntled board members. Now the FBI has no comment on anything because that’s not what they do.

Right

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But I could just tell you from the limited amount of experience I’ve had watching the FBI work in the last 2 years with the Trump thing, they interview and then they indict And you saw Chris Collins situation.

Chris Collins, you don’t answer the door at 6 am, the FBI doesn’t want coffee Right.

They want, so I’m saying right now I’m not having a conversation with Nathan Hare, if 4 months ago the FBI the Department of Justice sat down and there was actionable evidence that there was something going on, you are not here, you are under indictment or you are in the South District of New York or certainly someone is going to notch their belt by taking out the Chairman of the CAO of Western New York for taking money or doing something unethical.

Right Why would you even put that in the article if the FBI has no formal statement you’re basically getting a quote from someone who’s giving you a quote of a third party of a meaning that we don’t even know actually happened Right. So that just tells you something about these reporters for the Buffalo News and the editor who allows that stuff to go into the newspaper, that doesn’t go into the newspaper by itself, somebody who’s an administrator to Buffalo News had to go along with that. What their agenda is it’s not for me to be able to say, that would be Their agenda is to take you out. I’m telling you that’s what their agenda is, it’s black and white here and the other thing is that there’s this meeting that happened with the Mayor and a member of the board and somehow this is looked at like a smoky room nefarious, they met in a coffee shop and you know not exactly, that’s not deep throat in a parking garage on the bottom floor Right.

They met in a public spot, they sat down and had coffee and they talked about what was going on in the board. And this was written to almost imply what business is it of the Mayor of Buffalo to know anything that’s going at the CAO of Western New York. Surely he’s sticking up for his friend Nathan Hare, he’s not looking out for what the best thing is for the CAO. But the answer to that is that he certainly has a vested interest in what happens to the CAO, it’s his City that is receiving support and it’s also he’s supplying a third of those board members that are coming from his office.

He’s not supply a third of the board members, he’s supplying just one.

I’m sorry but these are elected officials all part of the same So on a tri part time board one third of the members have to be low income people and living in a low income community, one third have to be elected officials, one third have to be private sector people that they call community interest. One of the elected officials that’s represented on Page 9 of 28

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our board is the Mayor’s office. So the mayor gets to designate a person on the board. So obviously if you’re designating somebody on the board of the CAO and that designee calls you up and says Mayor craziness is going on with the CAO somebody is trying to fire Nate Hare, of course he would step up and say what’s going on and try to get his arms around what’s happening. But it’s not because the CAO is owned by the Mayor, we have 5 other elected officials that designate people to the board. We have people that work for private companies who are represented on the board, we have low income people that are members of the board. This is just a fallacy and a hoax that’s being perpetrated by these reporters for the Buffalo News.

So you’re out of a job, they fire you, and then all of a sudden the tables turn and very quick period and a letter is sent to the legal counsel of the CAO, not your personal legal counsel but the legal counsel that represents the CAO of Western New York and they say that the letter that due to a deficiency in your qualifications and the process used by the board to consider and vote on your election that they action of the board, that you’re basically the people that did this aren’t board members of the CAO Right.

Now why would you have people that really aren’t board members on the CAO, be on the CAO and then all of a sudden when they vote to basically terminate you you’re like oh by the way you’re actually not a board member, how does that work Well what had been happening is the chair of the board over the course of roughly April of 2018 through October 2018 had been literally winnowing people off of the board sort of discharging the people, kicking them off of the board because she wanted to get the board down to a small enough level that the votes that she felt she had control of would become a majority of whatever was left, that’s what she was really trying to do. She got the board down to where there was only 11 people left on the board at the end of September and only 2 of those, or 2 of those 11 people were not participating people they were either sick or had other kind of issues that were going on. So they left 9 people so they end up having a meeting with 8 people and they got a majority of the 8 people to vote on this notice. But the notice itself was invalid because the meeting itself was invalid, then the people that made up many of the people that were on the board that were left were people that were not elected legitimately to the board. Now because I’m not a board member, I’m not in a position to decide who gets to be or not be on the board, the board has to do that, all I can do is advise people. I’ve been working with the board from February 2018 on trying to help them identify people to fill board seats and to deal with these board people that look like they may not properly be on the board. But she’s playing a different game, she’s trying to get control of the board for the agenda that she’s trying to mount. So I took it to the law firm that is the firm that agency uses for its legal advice and let them look at this entire process just like the issue with regard to me, when I received Page 10 of 28

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this so called letter of termination I went to the law firm and I said well how can that be if there’s no motion of the board you know that says that I’m terminated, how can some person say that I’m terminated from the board Well here’s the other thing too, how does an organization run when the president is actively trying to take out the Chairman. I mean, so what ends up happening is you’re not terminated, they’re terminated.

Right. That’s what ultimately happens, right.

Talk about a juxtaposition.

Right You go out…it would be like you know Mueller goes after Trump and Mueller is not only fired but he’s disbarred out of the entire process Right It was the colleagues of the Board that said not only do we not agree with you taking out the Chairman, you shouldn’t even be here. Like there are people that are basically squatting on the board without any — Fundamentally that’s what was occurring.

Yeah. You did a coup d'etat with people that aren’t even a member of the military Right. So all of that we got straightened out so we’ve replaced virtually all of those board members with new board members that we’ve gone through proper vetting process and so on. So we got out governance issues in the right space right now. It’s unfortunate that you know we continue to get this campaign on the part of the Buffalo News trying to denigrate the Community Action organization when even in spite of all of this stuff I have in front of me a letter from the health and human services that says that there are no unresolved, it’s in my hands here, there are no unresolved findings against the Community Action organization, there’s nothing else, this is the letter right here that says based on the information gathered during our review we have closed, this is February 9th of this year, we have closed the previously identified findings accordingly no corrective action is required at this time. If you have any questions contact our administrators for Children and Families regional office. I can give you all kind of documentation showing you that the CAO has, we have issues that happen like every other large organization, our issues get put on the table, we address those issues, we are audited and reviewed by Health and Human Services, the Administrators of Children and Families, the Department of State, we get It’s unbelievable.

We have Syncoiack(sp?) Financial Services that does an independent audit so we just get audited all the time and of course our audits come up clean because we’re doing clean work. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have a mistake happen every now and then but that’s the process, that’s the reason why you have these independent reviews so that if something that is happening that’s not good you fix it, you know and you fix it right away.

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I want to get to some of the issues that the community is dealing with and some of the things that you do on a daily basis and get your point of view on a bunch of other things. I also want to talk, we’re going to take a break here but I want to talk, were you shocked that this happened from the Buffalo News, I mean if it was a right wing radio guy or if it was an elected official that doesn’t see the world total opposite ideology that’s one thing but the Buffalo News, I went back and looked at articles written about the CAO in the last 10 years and I hear nothing, you should be you know helium balloon the amount of smoke that they’ve blown you know how incredible you are, you would think that you were a candidate for mayor 5 years ago.

Honestly, I think that there’s something else going on with the Buffalo News that’s more recent and that you know Buffalo News has lost a lot of readership over the course of the past 7 or 8 years, I don’t know what really is at play here but I do know that this is a very disingenuous dishonest campaign a malicious campaign. They cannot say that this is something that’s being done with integrity. I have provided document after document after document which I have in my hand evidencing the things that I’m saying.

You even wrote an op ed Say again You even wrote an op ed I wrote an op ed, right That was not printed They would not print, right. And you have to go on the Buffalo News electronic you know newspaper site and you’ll see all of the responses that we’ve done. But you can go on the CAO’s website www.caowny.org my plug now Absolutely www.caowny.org and you’ll see on the first page on the left hand column you’ll see all of the different articles that we have submitted just click them and you can read them for yourself all of the documents that support them are there on the website. So I don’t have to hide anything, everything that I’m talking about I evidenced. The Buffalo News just sets aside the evidence and just everything they get evidence of something they said wasn’t true they just start saying something else.

We’re going to take a break when we come back we’ll have more Nathan Hare CAO of Western New York it’s Hardline.

Welcome back to Hardline, we’ve got Nathan Hare the Chairman of the CAO of Western New York Organization been around since 1965, 17 years at the helm, recently a series of article in the Buffalo News some disgruntled Board members came after him and I’ve been reading the articles, I’ve been talking to my colleagues here at Entercom saying how we hear the other side I mean this seems like it was just a pile on, it was a drive by character assassination. So you were kind enough to take this opportunity to join me and I appreciate that sir. I want to get, you have Page 12 of 28

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defended yourself, you’ve gone through every one of these questions, I’m looking you square in the eye by the way. You’ve got what looks to be like the new congressional budget in your hand of documents but I want to talk what is your motivation for doing what you do. I would be bitter after this, I’m seriously, you’ve got a lot more wisdom, you’ve been around and this is not your first rodeo. But at the same time, with all due respect, this is not worth it to me to do something that your passionate, to do something that you believe in and have all these people follow you and then have this attempted really an amateurish coup that they tried to stage, but again that article you can google, this is going to be on the internet forever and you’re going to have to be able to have your reputation and character defend what you’ve done for the rest of your Nathan Hare David Bellavia Nathan Hare David Bellavia Nathan Hare

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For the rest of my life For the rest of your life.

Right.

But why, why are you still doing this, what is the motivation, what is a good day for you after something like this.

So motivation wise I grew up believing, I grew up in the era we were just kind of ending the apartheid era in this country, and I basically grew up with the value that somebody has to be willing to be the generation that’s willing to pay a price for the generations of people that are going to follow you. Somebody has to pay the price to create the structures, to create the equity that the people that follow you are going to be able to build their lives around. Equity as you know equity doesn’t happen by itself, work creates equity, self-investment creates equity. And so I just felt it fell on me, I seem to know how to do it, I was good at it and I just felt that I was drawn, I had a calling to take on this role in my life. Now in terms of what we do with our community itself, how do we connect this community to the processes, we have such disintegration you know in our communities, people don’t really have a good foundation under themselves about who they are and what they can expect you know of themselves, somebody has to connect the dots you know for people and help them to build structures that allow them to be able to reach the rungs on the ladders — economic ladders in this country. So I’m just a part of that cadre of people in this society who does that work and I hope that I’m doing reasonable well.

When you look at 17 years that you’ve been doing this, the budget has doubled, the employees have almost one and a half multiplied, but the results right, when you look at, you talk about communities that are violent communities that are no longer violent Right.

Families that you have to have interaction with these people that have had their lives affected by the work that’s done at the CAO. This is what you know in fact my staff, I give credit to my staff to tell you the truth because they are the ones who are working case to case, Page 13 of 28

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household to household, child to child, family, parent and child. They’re the ones who really are doing this work but when you see people who were under educated, people that were going through legal difficulties, families that have been broken up, kids taken away from their families, people losing their homes, never ever having a home, people being denied the access to educational opportunity now having access to educational opportunity. When you see those things happening you feel that what you’re doing is making a difference. We did an assessment, I know you probably catch on with what I’m about to say, we did an assessment of the economic value in 2017 of all of the things we’ve done, people that we kept out of nursing homes, people that we got jobs, people that we got advanced education you know and so on, it turned out to be a value of something like $223 million That would have been taxpayer dollars Right, or dollars that we didn’t earn That’s right Dollars that we had spend you know Right, no, no they are just saving money And I know you by this right, you know when a guy goes to jail not only do you lose his income you know $20 -$25,000 a year coming into the community you got to spend $25-$35,000 a year to take care of him while he’s in prison Right.

That’s a tremendous And his family that’s behind you’ve got to take care of that family as well. I want to talk more, you stay with for another segment Sure I want to talk more about these existential issues and see if we have common ground, more common ground Right I appreciate that, it’s Nathan Hare CAO, now it’s news its Hardline.

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SECOND HOUR - HARDLINES Welcome back to Hardlines, the final hour where we’re here with Nathan Hare, Chairman of the CAO of Western New York. You know one of the things – by the way our conversations are fair, I think are far more entertaining than the ones we talk about.

The ones we talk about.

The ones we talk about, yeah, the first hour was a waste. But I want to talk to you about some of the things we were talking about off air. When we talk about rights, okay, we hear a lot on the left especially about health care is a right, education is a right. Well we’re talking about you know my vision of the way I interpret the constitution is that a right is something that has to be enforced. And when you are talking about let’s say health care for example.

Right.

I can’t go – I don’t help the situation by going in and enforcing a parent for not providing for their child and then taking that parent away from that child because now we’re creating a system where we’re forcing the government to basically, and our community, to raise a child. If you really look at the Head Start program that’s not designed – would you make the argument that Head Start is not designed to replace parents?

Not at all.

It’s designed to supplement.

It’s a tool.

And so an effective Head Start program cannot be, you know a parent is working a job. That’s what we want. We want people to work.

Right.

And we want people to be a part of the community. So how do you look at the current system? You mentioned that little four year old boy who comes home at 2:30 but mom is raising that family, mom’s working the job. Mom’s not on welfare. Mom’s not sitting at home. Mom is doing – she is an example for those kids.

Right.

But she’s not there from 2:30 to 6:30.

Maybe 6:30. Right.

So what’s the answer?

So it would seem to me knowing that that’s the case that you would have to design the school system in a way that the day is open up for the schools where the schools are open until 6:30, 7:00 at night. Now the first thing people are going to say is well how do we pay for all of that?

Where is the money going to come from? Well everything doesn’t require new money. Some things just require innovation. How do you redesign the day so that some teachers start school at 7:30 in the morning?

Some start at 8. Some start at 8:30. Some at 9. Some at 9:30. So that you can have staff that are in the building until 6, 6:30, 7:00 every day. If you did it like that then you can redesign how you schedule classes so that you can have teachers only teach 22 hours a day but they would have their Page 15 of 28

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say six hours of what they call office hours, I’m not quite sure what they mean by office hours, but those six office hours could be used to provide say three hours a week of after school academic programming where you’re doing homework help. You’re doing skill building. You’re doing in-grade course tutorial. And it would allow you to be able to build through volunteer associations. Through enrichment programs. You can build drama clubs, debate clubs, football programs, baseball programs.

All kinds of stuff. Enrichment stuff that you can do after school in the school building. So that by the time that child gets done with their afterschool programs they come home at 6:30, 7:00 at night, (a) the child is tired; (b) their parents are home; (c) a tired child is an easy to raise child. You know that. That child is asleep, you’re okay with that child.

But you know let’s be totally honest with each other. When you say the CAO of Western New York. When you use words like poverty. When you talk about education, Head Start. This is only for black people. Only for African Americans. The fact of the matter is that’s not true at all.

At all.

There are more Caucasian white people that are homeless. There are more white people that are uneducated. There are more white people in jail.

Right.

There are — when we talk about the Head Start program — the majority of the people that the CAO you know is helping, these are Caucasians.

Many served are Caucasians, are Caucasians right.

So where did we get confused. When I hear someone talking about civil rights, automatically they’re talking about rights for black people.

Right.

Suburban white people hear that and think we’re only talking about the language that could only be used by black people. The things that only black people can do that white people can’t do. And then black people are looking around saying what was that called? You know. When, when, you know, what do you call the Winter Olympics? You know.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of African Americans represented in certain, right.

Until recently there were none.

Exactly. So my argument is where do we get from okay air your grievances? You’re upset that things are now the pendulous swinging in another way to correct you know sins committed for the better part of half this Country’s you know existence. We’re now swinging the pendulum to the other side but we need to focus now on civilian rights. As you eloquently stated.

Right. Right. And I think that is – you said something about, off the air, that I think is also important. I think that democrats and progressives have a tendency to take custody of civil rights as if it’s their piece of the story, not that’s our piece of the story. I don’t think of civil rights as the democrats or the republicans or the progressives and so on. I think Page 16 of 28

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republicans should have the same focus on civil rights as anybody else should have. Because civil rights are citizen rights. They’re the rights that all of us have. There’s no extra rights. I guess that’s the best way I can say that. If you have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, there’s no color scheme on that. It’s either a right to life, you know, liberty and pursuit of happiness or it’s not. So if we focus on those issues and then figure out how we make those issues happen for our communities, I always tell people when you think about government there’s no reason for us to be a Country if we don’t get something out of it. So the first thing you get out of being a Country is protecting your borders so that we can all say, we’re the “us’s” and everybody that’s not inside our borders they’re the “them’s.” Right. That’s the first thing.

Right.

Then once you make that decision you make other decisions. Like how do we make sure that we can get up and down our rivers? We have to dredge the rivers. Who’s going to dredge the rivers? Us collectively.

We’re not doing that individually.

Right.

Who’s going to build the roads to get us from one place to another?

We’re not going to do that individually that’s going to be collectively. So we start making collective decisions about things that we have to do that can only be done effectively if we do them collectively. And we pay taxes to be able to get that done. Once you start making those decisions you can now have more intelligent kind of conversations. Is it in our collective self-interest to insure that every single child is successfully educated to the point that when they finish high school they’re able to get into a vocation certification program or degree conferring program with the academic skills they’ve learned by the time they finish their senior year of high school? If we agree that that is something that has to be done across the board because we can’t afford to have a whole bunch of disconnected, undereducated, you know, unable children walking around our Country, if we believe that then we have to put our resources up to do that. Now the enforcement part of it that you were talking about is well what if you have parents that just don’t care. You know you put these structures up for the child to grow up but you as a parent don’t do anything to support that structure. Well that then creates a different issue but we need to come to some agreement about that. If we feel that that means we should take that child away from that parent and find other parents to raise that child, that’s a decision that we get to make. I don’t make these decisions or think about these things in terms of black or white, I think about them in terms of how do we get to the goal that we agree that we have to get to? Now maybe there are some things that you don’t agree are a goal and I do agree are a goal.

The priorities are obviously going to change with individuals but it doesn’t mean that they’re not important.

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Exactly. We’re going to fuss with each other you know about those things and sometimes David is going to be right and sometimes Nate’s going to be right. Sometimes I might not be right but I still get my way.

Right. You sound right, I’m sure you will.

I might suffer for it. That’s our word.

Hey I want to take another break. Stay with me. This is the real reason why I wanted you on the program, to talk about these things.

Yep. You know the idea that it’s a different point of view but also it’s not just the demographics of a point of view, it’s the fact that you lived through a period of time I didn’t live through. Right. I’m talking to a man who has seen this change from the very beginning. I mean President Johnson at that time, I would argue that as polarized as we were in the mid-60’s, we almost came close to that two years ago.

Right.

There was a powder keg here.

Right.

And it was community members that defused that because we certainly could have had race riots like they did in the late 60’s here. I want to talk about, we’re going to go to break but we’re going to talk about some of the things that were done to avoid that.

To avoid all that.

The City’s burning the classed America. And it’s Hardline right after this.

We’re back with Nathan Hare. He’s the Chairman of the CAO of Western New York. You know one of the things that, and again we should really be carrying the broadcast between the commercials, but one of the things that I’m really, I get very frustrated at by being a conservative is when I go to, you now, when I have conversations with you know Muslims, Christians, Jews, black churches, white churches, this is the same ideology across the board, okay. There is no difference whatsoever behind, you know, what you’re learning in a clan with Caucasians or what you learn in a black family in America. The most, I think it was, the Hispanics and African Americans were the most religious demographics in the United States.

And still are.

And still are. So there’s not, the idea is that you don’t want any person in the suburbs to lecture to you about Medgar Evers or Dr. King. But just like you don’t deserve to be lectured to by a white person, Dr. King and Medgar Evers are American institutions. They’re not black institutions.

They stood up for American rights. They stood up you know against the machine, right?

Right.

How do we make the designation that every single African American, how can 98% of one ethnicity vote for a political party that pushes the programs that quite frankly I think are part time programs. Section 8 Page 18 of 28

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housing isn’t suitable for black people. It’s not suitable for any people.

This is horrible housing. People in Gaza have better housing. People in Iraq have American taxpayer dollars that have better housing than our own citizens in the United States.

Right. See I think that what happens is people make pragmatic, if I can say it that way, decisions. In other words the pragmatic decision is not a pure decision. It’s not like I’m 100% this or 100% that. So I might be 100% against abortion as an example. I’m not trying to fight anybody on this, right. Where I might be 100% against abortion. But when I look at the rest of what you’re about, you might be 100% against public schools.

You might be 100% against, or 100% for, segregated neighborhoods.

You might be for going to war in Iraq against some people who didn’t go to war against the United States. They didn’t have anything to do with.

We find with the things that separate us and that’s…

Right. So say that you have like 19 things that I’m against and you’ve got one thing that I’m for, then I’m not going to be with you. I’m going to be with the people that are with the 19 things that I’m for, even though I’m not with the one thing that I’m against. I think the people make those kinds of decisions, right? And so what I’m hoping that we can do over the course of time is to get us to focus on what are our shared agreements amongst each other and make sure that we are doing what we can to enforce our shared agreements. I think that all of us agree that we don’t want the world to warm up by 7 degrees and end up with deserts all over the United States. I’m pretty sure that we all would agree with that, right?

So we’ve got to make decisions to ensure that we don’t, you know, desert-ify, or whatever the word is, you know we don’t create that.

But we — when I’m looking at people in the City of Buffalo and I ask them, give me a top ten list of the things that affect your life, that’s not even in the top 20.

Right. People don’t talk about that.

But they don’t care about it.

Right.

Now we can argue whether it’s real or believe it or not, but I’m saying that there are things, nobody is going to stand for an open, you know out of the, I’m saying racist things derogatory things, we’re well versed in handling that as a society.

Right.

But what we’re not well versed at is saying where do you want to put the brand new stadium? You want to put in the Perry Projects. We want to build up the City of Buffalo. We want to have more expensive homes and more jobs. But what happens to the people that live in their communities that are law abiding. That are providing for their families. But they’re in low income areas and those low income areas just aren’t good for the future of the City. Guess what happens, we kick them out. And where they go, does anyone really care? Does the government care where they’re moving people from neighborhood to neighborhood? Because in Page 19 of 28

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a period of time there’s going to be one section that’s going to be low income and the rest moderate to upper income. That’s the future of American cities. In and of itself that’s a racist ideology. But it’s unaccounted for and nobody seems to own it.

That’s true and because nobody really is putting together a strong ideological, not ideological, a strategic framework about how to solve the problem that you just identified. Since nobody has really done that, nobody is trying to own one side of it or the other. You do get the democrats will say we also have a right to good housing. That’s a great statement. I love it. Now how do we get to good housing for everybody?

Well I haven’t solved that yet. We’re talking about good ideas.

Yeah.

And then of course then you’ll get another party that will say, well I don’t really think you have a right to decent housing. If you can get it, you get it. If you don’t, you don’t. I don’t have a plan and I’m not going to make a plan. So now you’ve got those two different polarizations. What tends to happen is African people will go with the people that say they want housing but don’t know how to do it as opposed to the people who don’t care about housing and don’t have any kind of strategy for it when at the end of the day as you and I were talking about it off the air, is those are really the same positions, right?

No they are.

At the end of the day you both have the same position.

When you hear people talking about reparations, right, that it’s very controversial and it just divides everyone. And we talk with the words that we use, the language, how that could be divisive on its own, but when there are ways that you can actually address the sins of a nation towards a specific people. Other countries have done it with the Holocaust and everything else. But why does it have to automatically be a dollar figure?

How do you put a dollar figure on someone whose ancestors were treated as subhuman or as property?

Right.

And then take two, three generations removed and said you know here’s a tax credit. Here’s an opportunity to get you know something because of what your, your ancestors went through. How does that? How does that?

What does the argument to make that work?

That’s interesting. I mean the tax credit thing might even be a viable way to spread how you did something like that out so they didn’t have such a severe cash flow impact on the Country. I find it, however, a difficult concept for me to process in my head because (a) everybody doesn’t come from the line of enslavement, there’s a lot of people that nobody in your families ever were enslaved, so you have that issue and then it’s particularizing something that we’re talking about, literally hundreds of trillions of dollars. And you just, where’s that money going to come from? So you end up creating inertia that really doesn’t take us anywhere.

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forward and do what’s possible, right? The out of the possible. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a good sign. And so I think that we have to approach this from a different perspective. How do we insure that people who didn’t have an opportunity to get into higher education or vocation certification, how do we insure that that happens for people?

How do we insure that people have access to home ownership? The Homestead Act, the Southern Homestead Act that was supposed to provide a route for African people in the South to get land. 26,000 acres of land were acquired through the Southern Homestead Act and only 4% of that land went into the hands of African people. That’s perverse, right?

So how do we correct things like that so that that doesn’t happen in the future? I don’t really have all of the ideation about how we tackle all of that but I think our approach has to be one that is balanced and reasonable and pragmatic and not one that just says you know you did this.

Bumper sticker.

Right. Because the “you” we say did this is not that you. That was the Legrain Plantation, you know, 150 years ago.

Right.

That you isn’t here anymore. They’re dead, right?

That’s right. Hey I want to get more with you if I could.

Sure.

Alright one more segment with Nathan here. Thank you so much for being. We’re going to take a break now it’s news – it’s Hardline.

Pat I want to get more with you if I could.

Sure.

Alright, one more segment Nathan Hare, thank you so much for being here. We’re going to take a break, get news, its Hardline.

Joined by Nathan Hare from the CAO of Western New York, the Chairman, we went through the Buffalo News, everything else, now we’re talking more 35,000 foot approaches here and you know one of the things that I think I’m fascinated by is the way not only you see the world but the fact that you know I hate to date you as an elder, but I always look at people that have come through elements of American history and we think as narcissistic people living in the present this is always the worst it’s always been Right Nothing is worse as it is now But you have not been here for a while Right you know what I’m saying so It has been worse You go back to, but there was a time Baltimore, Ferguson, that we were starting to hear the stories Detroit Detroit Page 21 of 28

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When I was a child Detroit had over 2 million people living in it, in a span of 25 yeas it went from 2 million people to 750,000 people. People were dying on the streets from gun battles over groceries. You would come out of a supermarket and you’d leave your groceries in your cart so you could go grab the rest of your groceries and bring them out when you come out somebody is grabbing your groceries, he’s got a gun out and shoot you to defend them taking your groceries from you. I mean we’ve had really difficult times in this country, so I don’t want to minimize what we are living through right now because this is difficult times that we’re living through right now. But I just want people to be mindful, it has been worse, okay.

But when you consider how much anger there was and the fact that Colin Kaepernick took, you know it was almost like black lives matter was a movement, that Colin Kaepernick protest was a movement and we made them into one big amalgam and said well here’s is what the argument is, it’s far more complicated than that, there are different issue all across the board. But when you look at race relations, when you look at where, it was really community stake holders that put out that fire.

Right.

Because Buffalo is no different than Rochester and it’s not different than any of the other North Eastern cities.

Sure Ferguson was a situation that just was completely out of control and they got to a point where law enforcement lost trust and if there’s not enforcement it became violent. And Baltimore the same thing, it was the police the, the, what eroded was the trust in law enforcement and then the City responded. There are people in the community that are anti Buffalo police, there are people that hold Buffalo police accountable, but when you look at the relationship between the police department and the community stakeholders there is a dialogue in Buffalo that does not exist in some of these other places. Where if things are bad or there is a questionable shooting or something happens there’s at least you know a checklist right.

I have to say this about Buffalo and I know this is going to sound selfingratiating when I say this and I apologize for it upfront. But I’ve lived in Buffalo for all but 2 years of the last 69 years, I have never been in a community that was more, that was easier to fit in and get along in than the City of Buffalo. You come to the City of Buffalo and within a day you got friends. People will talk to you, people will help you, now people live in their own areas don’t get me wrong, you know Polish people live over here, and Italian people live over there, and African people live over here and Puerto Rican people live over there, all that stuff is true but you can go into those areas, I can have my car have a blow out on Abbott Road, and folks will walk up to me and help me to fix my tire, right, that’s the Buffalo character, it has that quality. Even though we have these parochial kinds of qualities as well. So I feel really good about Buffalo to Page 22 of 28

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be honest with you. In spite of the fact that we have these balkanizations you know that go on in our areas. What we have to be concerned about is the behaviors that we see that go on sometimes like at the Holding Center where somebody gets beat up or they let somebody get beat up, somebody gets killed, somebody’s not prevented from you know hanging themselves you know and that sort of stuff that’s because you’ve got people how should not be prison guards that are prison guards in those facilities.

Instead of trying to apologize for the prison guard’s behavior by saying it’s a tough job, why not say you shouldn’t be a prison guard, you’ve got to go work someplace else, let’s get people in here who really have the personality types that they can be prison guards. Same thing with police you know the same kinds of things. We spend too much of our time trying to make it a political issue when misconduct takes place.

Misconduct is just misconduct, I don’t even put it on racism or this ism or that ism, misconduct is just misconduct. If I steal from you does it matter whether I’m black or white, I steal from you I’m stealing from you right, that’s wrong That’s wrong and it shouldn’t be done.

We should address that right, and I think that we have to adopt that kind of framework in terms of how we deal with our issues in our community.

We have to figure out how to prioritize our resources, how we spend our resources in a way that allows us to be able to meet the challenges of our day and we got challenges of our day, we have, Buffalo doesn’t just have tough neighborhoods we have old neighborhoods. The average born on day of a house in the Masten District is somewhere between 1906 and 1913. We have 110 year old housing that’s the normal housing that we’re living with. Where the house I live in in Amherst was born in 1987, that’s a completely different kind of house. Insulation is built into the walls, Lead paint, all that No lead paint, no asbestos, you know it’s built to the best modern standards and so on. We have to figure out a way to address those kinds of issues and organize our resources that way. If I had control of municipal housing I would take places like the Perry projects I would gut them, I would knock out these walls, instead of having a building that’s got 24 apartments in in it, you would have a building that would only have 8 apartments in it and I would try to make it as you know luxurious a place as I could make it you know because you’re in a pretty tight community if you rebuild it right. You can make this a very nice place for people to live. And then use the resources, the net resources from that to be able to build affordable housing someplace else.

So, but when you look at the housing crisis in 2008 everything is always rooted in the best of intentions, allow people to have ownership and allow people to live a dream even if it’s an artificial dream, even if we know that these people are going to foreclose, white, black, Hispanic, in between, if you’re making a certain amount of money and you have a certain amount of debt and we give you access to credit that far exceeds Page 23 of 28

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David Bellavia Nathan Hare David Bellavia Nathan Hare David Bellavia Nathan Hare David Bellavia

Nathan Hare David Bellavia Nathan Hare David Bellavia Nathan Hare David Bellavia Nathan Hare David Bellavia Nathan Hare

that don’t have the bank come back and say wait a second it’s time to pay the piper when you know that that person when they applied for that loan didn’t have the ability to cover it to begin with.

Right.

Right. So predatory practices are here but predatory practice for sins good for a season right, I mean, the fact is it is good to have a house.

Right. It’s good to feel like you are contributing and you’re part of a community and if you’re going to spend the kind of money you spend on housing subsidies let say a person is eligible for public assistance and they get I don’t know a family of 4 maybe they get $500 a month you know that they can put towards their rent. But you know if you can put $500 a month on something you can probably buy about $10,000 in principal for maybe $110 or so dollars a month. So if you’ve got $500 a month you could probably borrower $40 or $50,000 you know with that piece of money, you can go buy a house.

You don’t find it at all nefarious that nobody thought of bailing out all the people who owned those homes, it was about paying back the banking system.

Right.

But when it comes to student loans — oh my God — we’ve got to bail out every single person with a student loan because it’s a huge lobby there’s a tremendous amount of money, education is a much — And who are the people that have these student loans, who are the lion’s share of these people, they’re the people that you feel you have to look out for, they’re primarily 80-85% Caucasian kids It’s the truth.

And that’s where the political muscle is But no one, if there were candidates running for President in 2008 that said, stop giving the money to Lehman Brothers. Don’t even worry about CitiGroup. Why don’t you pay off all the mortgages — that’s the money we put into it. We didn’t have those trillions of dollars. We took a loan from China and we said we’re going to pay back all these toxic mortgages. The people still lost their homes.

Right.

And they didn’t get their homes back.

Right. But the banks didn’t lose their banks, did they?

No. They’re bigger now than they were then.

So if you’re going to bite the bullet on a social program, you would think you would want to do it for the most affected people that are actually putting it back into the system.

You know, you’re not talking like a conservative. I just want you to know that.

No, I am. I’m talking about accountability.

Right.

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David Bellavia Nathan Hare

I’m saying it needs to be accountable. And I think, fundamentally, a conservative should stand for fairness.

Right.

— Across the board.

Yep. And if you’re going to say one group deserves a bailout — which everyone seems to be on board —of these poor kids didn’t know what they were doing when they went to college. I looked back at 2008 and said, what, well what did you do with the housing prices? You know, you hear about this earned income benefit — Earned income tax credit, right.

There you go. I’m actually talking about the — just Budajedge and other candidates on the left are talking about giving just money to people. Just, you know, because jobs are going to go away — That’s another new thing that I just heard in the last year or so — the idea that — — 20 grand a year.

Just give everybody, you know, $500 or $400 a week, you know, they got a living piece of money to work from.

You think though that we can at least — Sounds like Star Trek to me.

But couldn’t we find common ground to say, if you’re going to put money into the East Side of Buffalo, which obviously no one seemed to care about for the better part of 80 years now — Um hmm If you’re going to put money into the East Side of Buffalo, maybe those construction jobs should be done by the people of the East Side of Buffalo.

Right.

If you’re going to invest money into the East Side, you pass a law that states that if plumbing work is going to be done in a certain section, that those jobs go to the people that do plumbing in that section.

Right.

Isn’t that how — if there’s going to be a social program that gives back, it should at least benefit the people that live there.

I’ll go even further than that. I’d move those prisons from these tiny communities, you know, all over the state. I’d move those prisons into the cities where those people’s prisoners come from and then let the people in those communities be the laundries and maybe the carpenters and the plumbers and so on at those prisons with need, so at least the people would benefit from the economy that comes off of those people being — Now you sound like Carl Paladino.

I know, I know, I know, I was thinking about Carl when I was saying—

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— turning the prison into apartments, now what’s happening? All right, listen, we’re going to have one more segment with Nathan Hare, just an open dialogue talking about it. I really appreciated this time. I did.

I thank you. Oh, and happy Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day. What is the show on Saturday’s?

It’s on Saturdays from 11:00 to 12:00 on WWKB, a sister station to this station.

And your website is? www.caowny.org There you go. There it is! Nathan, hey, thank you so much for your time.

You are most welcome.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Bye. Take care.

Welcome back to Hardline. You know that last what hour and 30 minutes there were people on hold that I just didn’t want to take calls today. I didn’t, and no offense to you. But I just really, really appreciate that type of radio. I love bringing someone in that you have, really you don’t have any connection to ideology politics.

You come from totally different walks of life with different age groups.

We’ve had different journeys and different experiences. And you can sit down and you don’t have to be narcissistic enough to point out where you disagree, but you can defend where you come from. He defends his point of view. I defend my point of view, and you have a conversation, and you leave with a mutual respect.

Whether or not I even believe in the Head Start Program, or think that our taxpayer dollars should go in this direction and what the product of, that comes out of these public groups that are funded by taxpayer dollars.

Here’s what I certainly will defend — Nathan Hare was given an opportunity to defend himself and there were allegations that were made against his character that if you have evidence, and you want to back that evidence up, more than happy to bring you on.

But that was not a piece that was written with the others side. And, quite frankly, I don’t think it was fair to him. I don’t think it was fair to his organization.

But do I disagree with Mayor Byron Brown? You better believe it. I have a ton of different — the way we see the world completely different.

But do we attack people that we disagree with?

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Do we just go after them because, naturally, a 69-year-old African American — you know who deals with — you know — poverty and everything else, he’s far left, you’re far right, and you’re just going to bash each other’s heads in when they sit down.

Well, maybe that’s the radio that you’re accustomed to or you appreciate.

I don’t want to be a part of it. I want to be a part of dialogue. I want to be a part of finding out where the commonality is and then deciding for yourself how you want to live your life.

What are your principles? How much do — because at the end of the day — whether it’s the border, immigration — what communities are affected the most by it?

If you’re a person that says that I only want success in America for people who look like you or people who share your background — if those are the only people that you want to work jobs or you want the other people to be successful or have families that love them and children that are taken care of, then I’m sorry, but you’re part of the problem.

This is about — you know, you could look at what’s happened in Canada, India, Pakistan, Israel, Iraq — this is about the United States — the citizens of the United States. We are all on the same team here. Do we disagree? Absolutely. Are there people on the other side that are repugnant? Absolutely, there are, without a doubt. We will have intellectual combat with them all day. But that doesn’t mean that just because someone disagrees with us, that we have to pull out knives and rip them apart. We listen, and we learn, and hopefully that respect is reciprocated, and we can continue to move on in a functioning society.

But, you know, talk about — this was a complete miscarriage of what I think you do when you have a story. You give the other side — you just do — you tell the complete situation. I mean, there’s a part in here where the DOJ and the FBI is involved. Well, look, if the FBI is talking to someone, the FBI has a reason to talk to them, they’re going to do their job professionally — regardless of the last two years here — the 99.9% of the FBI and the Department of Justice are honorable, decent Americans who believe in the rule of law.

And I don’t believe that’s it’s responsible to interview a person who’s telling you hearsay questions and motives of an interview that occurred — the FBI would put that out there. But if this guy was under investigation, you would hear about it. This is a big player in Buffalo with a $50 million budget and connections all across the Democratic party, all across the State of New York. If they were going to take him down, and he had done something to be taken down, you would’ve heard about it.

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And you would’ve heard a lot of Republicans probably jumping on bandwagon too.

But I though Poloncarz’s statement was very weak. You know, we’ll see what happens — implying that $50 million of his budget was coming from the County. It’s $11,500 of a $52 million budget and you want that audited. I mean the whole thing was nonsense.

So look, you can call the station — you can say it’s all right-wing radio.

That’s your opinion. My opinion is, I’m going to be as fair and as honest as possible because all you have is integrity. All you have is your honor and your character. And when you see someone on the other side that’s treated poorly, you reach your hand out and say, hey, I want to hear your point of view. I want to know where you’re coming from. And if you’re wrong, I’m going to dot you. And if you’re not wrong, I’m going to give you a helping hand.

No one deserves to have their character assassinated because of some infighting in an organization and what happened there. And I don’t necessarily look at these journalists at the Buffalo News and think they’re bad people, I think they’re doing their job. But it would’ve been a little more intellectually honest to get the other side of the story. We presented that to you today. I hope you enjoyed it.

We’ll be back next week. We’re going to have elected officials, more interviews, more commentary, and we’ll even take your calls.

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