A capacity crowd filled the Frank E. Merriweather Library auditorium Friday for a community town hall discussion about the New York State Department of Transportation’s plan for the Kensington Expressway at Humboldt Parkway.
A growing number of community groups, now under the banner of East Side Collaborative Partnership, have voiced their opposition to the plan to put a cover over three quarters of a mile of the expressway between Best and Sidney Streets on Buffalo’s East Side. They maintain the project will only exacerbate existing environmental and health issues in a neighborhood that already suffers from high rates of asthma.
They support a full fill in of the Kensington Expressway which would reconnect the parkway from Martin Luther King Jr. Park to Delaware Park.
Sherry Sherrill is the Project Coordinator of We Are Women Warriors, who is in opposition to the DOT’s project. She laid out one of the group’s major concerns.
“Some of the things that are not being addressed at the fact that the Kensington expressway is responsible for severe adverse health conditions, chronic ailments, and also some persons have even contracted diseases and perish from them. And the highway is directly responsible," Sherrill said. "There are research studies all over the world that have been conducted that have absolutely maintained and proven that living in close proximity to a high-speed highway can and does and will make people sick.”
Sherrill said it was a good thing to see the auditorium almost overfull with people.
But not everyone at the Merriweather Library was there in opposition to the DOT's project.
Sydney Brown is a board member for Restoring Our Community Coalition (ROCC).
She says ROCC has been pushing for this project for decades and would not pull punches when asked about the opposition groups.
“I will say they are misinformed. And I believe that they have skewed information,” she said. “I also want to clarify that this project is not a DOT project. It's a ROCC project, which is community led and community driven, it has been from its inception.”
Brown said it was taken a long time to get the DOT to understand community concerns and work with the community to create the current proposal. One prominent politician onboard with the project is State Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes who spoke at the meeting.
Peoples-Stokes lauded the work of East Side Collaborative Partnership but mentioned the fact that others in the community had been doing the work for many years and that work will not be disregarded.
Brown said Peoples-Stokes’ words were powerful, and rightfully so and added that this project is an experiment in social justice.
“We're working on a local hire that people from our community actually benefit from the jobs. Businesses actually benefit from this and there's mentoring and uplifting of our whole community. But primarily, I want to say people of color, the Black community on the East Side of Buffalo has been the most negatively impacted from [the construction of the Kensington Expressway] and ROCCs mission is about minimizing the disparities that have existed. And this project should be a model that can be replicated of how we can uplift black people and the community as a whole.”
Peoples-Stokes estimated the Federal Highways Administration would make its decision to approve or deny the DOT's project by the end of the month.
