Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - Back in early January, just days after the devastating blizzard that grinded the City of Buffalo and other parts of Erie County to a halt, County Executive Mark Poloncarz requested all department heads of county government to provide a memo regarding the response to the Christmas Weekend blizzard.
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As part of the request, Poloncarz asked for department leaders to assess what went right and what went wrong, with each head getting about a week to provide that information.
More than seven months later, those memos from department heads at the county level of government were released by Poloncarz for the general public to view. This included 50 pages of memos from various departments that detailed after action perspectives on the deadly blizzard.
"What I read and what I thought was there's much room for improvement in those pages," said Erie County Legislator Howard Johnson (D) in response to the findings of the memos released Friday. "How the response was handled to how we took in emergency services calls when they called that emergency number. There's a lot of improvement to make from this report."
For fellow Erie County Legislator Chris Greene (R), he feels the release of the memos this past Friday was a step in the right direction.
"Anytime we expand transparency from the government, particularly when you're looking at a catastrophic event and what we did right and what we did wrong, people deserve answers," said Greene in an interview with WBEN. "Unfortunately, I'm not really convinced we have all the information that we need right now. The initial email that I received from the County Attorney referenced anything that was an opinion would not be released. It doesn't look like there was a tremendous amount of redaction, which leads me to believe there's probably a lot more documents - whether they're emails relating to how this was done, whether there are more reports - it actually probably leaves more questions than answers, to be honest with you."
While there were calls for the report to be released well-before Friday, the memos were eventually made public, but in a very quiet and unannounced matter. The documents have been made available at Erie County's website, but there has since been no further comments made publicly by Poloncarz, or anyone else at the county level.
Legislator Johnson did not have much to say about a lack of public presence from the County Executive, other than the information just needed to be made available for anyone that wanted to view it.
"My thing was as long as the report was released, that was my biggest concern. Making sure the public had an opportunity to view it when those who want to view it had an opportunity to view it," Johnson said.
Meanwhile, Greene pushed back on the timing of the release of the memos, saying it was nothing more than the usual "Friday news dump".
"Whenever you don't want something to have a lot of attention, you release it at the end of the day on a Friday. That's exactly what the County Executive did. He waited until the end of the day on a Friday, people are thinking about the weekend," Greene said. "You want to hide stuff, that's when you release it. That's what happened."
So what did lawmakers like Johnson and Greene learn when it came to the entire process? What can be done better in case of another major snowstorm striking Erie County?
Johnson feels the main overarching theme from not just this report, but also the reports at the state and city level was a need for better levels of communication.
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"We need to improve our communication in our communities by taking this storm more seriously. We need to empower our community to be better equipped to take this more seriously, and we need to develop strategies for vulnerable communities as well," Johnson explained. "Whether that'd be community centers opening themselves up, churches, and we, the government, helping stack those places so that if they have to open up, folks who may run out of power can get there and they have cots, toiletries, things of that nature."
Johnson further adds there could be better use of the emergency broadcasting system, while also add the texting element to the county's response to a storm such as the Christmas Weekend Blizzard.
Another recommendation Johnson has to improve emergency response to the 2022 Buffalo Blizzard is a better plan in place to help vulnerable communities in the region.
"When we think about our vulnerable communities, those folks with dialysis and things of that nature, we do need to have a better prepared plan for that, and to be able to facilitate those folks and shelter them as well," he said. "We know that's a big part of our community where those folks that have dialysis had a hard time getting out to that. Nothing that anyone did wrong there, but I think we just need to have those dialysis places and other places to the liking better equipped to handle it when a storm happens."
Meanwhile, Greene feels that when looking at the whole grand scheme of things, reading through the different reports from different departments, the consistent theme he saw was some blame that needs to be placed on the shoulders of the public.
"The public reacted a certain way, the public did this or the public did that. And there's probably some validity to that," he said. "The public probably didn't heed the warnings as well as they should, and I think that's really what we need to drill down on. Why did the public not take this storm as seriously as it should?"
However, Greene sees this possibly being attributed to a constant narrative of snowstorms being so severe when they end up turning into events that didn't have as significant of an impact.
"I think what we've seen over the last 10 years is every single storm, no matter how severe it is, if there's a storm coming in, it's made out to be the 'Storm of the Century'. Over-and-over again, we're told this is going to be catastrophic, and we've had a lot of duds hit our region. We knew, and we had fair warning this was going to be a more serious one. It's kind of like the boy who cried wolf, you can't keep telling people the storm of the generation, the storm of the century is coming, and then all of a sudden be surprised when people don't heed the warnings when they should," Greene explained.
Greene further adds the focus across the aisle going forward is making sure plans are in place that are better than where the county is right now.
One other item Greene is hoping to see addressed in the immediate future is the finalization of the Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) that Poloncarz says have been put together with various snowmobile clubs before the upcoming winter.
"Let's face it, they have the groomers and in the worst storms, they can be out and they were. I know Rich McNamara was on various news outlets, going and taking nurses up-and-down Main Street from Clarence and Newstead all the way down to Buffalo General," Greene said. "The County Executive stated that MOUs had been established to have snowmobile organizations be part of our future response, but when I reached out to snowmobile organizations, they said there were meetings in January and February, and they haven't heard anything since around February, and there are no MOUs actually put together. So I'm not sure if there's still a disconnect between the County Executive or if he's just not telling the truth, but something's not right."
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