Here are two pieces you'll want to read by Jill Hurst-Wahl:

• Jill went to hear Dame Anita Roddick speak about entrepreneurship, how Syracuse can draw entrepreneurs, form an identity, and all that good stuff.
• As a seriously inspired afterthought, Jill goes on to write about an expanded need for public art in Syracuse.

Maybe we can get some of the th3 venues involved.

I may have been harping on this just a bit lately, but it's really not easy to do business in the city of Syracuse.

Well, there's now a task force to help make it easier for developers to get things running in town.

The task force – which includes actual humans trying to do business here – is out to cut down paperwork, and help prospective developers give investors timelines they can stick to.

Hopefully, this task force will not just include people who hope to drop hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars here. In casual discussions over the past couple of years with a former small business owner in Syracuse, I've learned that one of the biggest obstacles to doing business here is the lack of direction the owner got – no one was able to just hand the owner a list of required permits, licenses and inspections.

And when someone walks into a small business and says, "By the way, you need to spend $5,000 on X," it's a lot more difficult for someone with a $50,000 small business loan to conjure up another five grand than it is for someone dropping a couple of million on new development.

The most frustrating part of this equation, though, has to be Mayor Matt Driscoll, a former business owner in the city who has been in office for five years now and has had ample opportunity to step up and improve the process. Proof of his own inaction comes in a quote at the very bottom of the P-S story:

"I've been through it (as a businessman) and it is very, very painful," he said. "Every person in City Hall really needs to develop a customer service mentality. After all, they are being paid by the taxpayers. If a city worker is telling a developer about a code that has to be met, it needs to come along with the message 'we want you and we need you.' "

Umm, yes it does. Now make it happen.

The T-U reports today that the Canal Corp. has cut off talks with Pyramid Corp. over the Inner Harbor.

They claimed they'd do that last February, and then they spent the summer futzing around, but now, well, maybe they're serious.

Pyramid's imagined Destiny complex, which would start with giant additions to the existing Carousel Center, would have included the 18-acre property that drew an estimated 50,000 people total to weekly concerts this summer.

This comes as something of a kick in the teeth to Pyramid, because last week, the company cleared the last legal hurdle to expanding the mall (which is not to say that practical hurdles have been cleared).

Carmella Mantello, the head of the Canal Corp., said that Destiny (which many doubt – and few hope – will ever happen) "may be a little smaller scale."

Mantello said that by January, she will come back with a plan for the property. That plan will likely be one of these three things:

• A land auction
• A new RFP
• Awarding of the contract to the partnership between Norstar Development and Sutton Cos., which was the second highest bidder in the 2002 RFP that Pyramid won.

Personally, I'm hoping for number three, which would get something going as soon as the ground thaws.

Josh has done an excellent job of chronicling the destiny fiasco (including the myriad claims disparaging small businesses) and pointing out the mayor’s proposal to raise the certificate of use fee. Now, the Syracuse New Times’ Best of Syracuse 2006 featured two categories with national chains nominated where national chains have no business being nominated: Best Coffee Joint and Best Record Store.
Perhaps it’s the snob in me, but music stores and coffee shops are personal. I shudder to think I live in a city that can’t do better than Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts for Best Coffee Joint—conspicuously missing from the nominations is my local coffee shop Recess and probably one or more of your favorites. (I haven’t had the chance yet but soon I’m hoping to get out to Sertino’s Café in Liverpool—it’s new to the area, so hopefully we’ll see it on next year’s Best Of list.) NOT TO MENTION, Barnes and Noble, Best Buy and Borders for Best Record Store?!?!?!?! (Shudders are now uncontrollable convulsions.)
National chains serve a purpose. Yes, I understand this. But it’s a supplemental purpose. Just as your multivitamin shouldn’t be your sole source of all those necessary vitamins and minerals, neither should national chains serve as any city’s Best Of.

UpdateI removed the link to Recess' site. It might contain a virus. Their coffee is still good though.

I have been preoccupied for a bit publishing 2 books. The first was the long awaited Monday Night Poetry Anthology called Coevolution -funded in part by a grant from the DeFrancisco Arts & Cultural Grants administered by the Cultural Resources Council. (It can be purchased for $10 at Monday Night Poetry or at Follett's Orange Bookstore in the Marshall Square Mall.) We received our 200 poems from a whole bunch of poets living near and far. Here's me Name Dropping: Rick Lupert, Mary McLaughlin Slechta, Jane Cassady, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Paloma A. Capanna, Therése Halscheid, Daniel J. McGinn, Omanii Abdullah-Grace, Martin Walls, Gregg Yeti--and that ain't even the half of it. (All the folks I didn't link to are very Google-able.) I was and am totally blown away. Special thanks to Rachel Schlesselman for all her editing help.
The second is a collection of poems by Jane Cassady called An Awkward Kind of Faith . (It can also be purchased at Monday Night Poetry or Follett's Orange Bookstore in the Marshall Square Mall for $5.) This is my review:
"From the completely (un)biased editor of Turtle Ink Press: Sometimes the reward for having done the homework is the knowledge that water’s moving under snow, sometimes that instant evaporation is a possibility, sometimes knowledge sits somewhere between. Jane juxtaposes these bits of knowledge, wrestles with their implications, wrings them out, dips her pen into the drippin’s and writes into the morning. She proves that there are no still life's, no still lives: cities make us hot and sticky; history reminds we all have damn spots; the quest is worth passing on the bucket. Pay attention, Jane says, pay attention. Indeed, we should."
I certainly lead a beautiful life.

A state appeals court yesterday got rid of the last legal hurdle to the building of an 848,000-square foot expansion of the Carousel Center mall by tossing out an appeal by 10 of the mall's tenants. If you know the area malls, they're basically going to take ShoppingTown and stick it in the parking lot.

What the court didn't do was clear practical hurdles.

In order to qualify for tax breaks, construction has to begin by the end of the year. Which means really soon, because the ground will be frozen in not too long.

It'll be interesting to see what the city requires for "construction must begin." Because this expansion would take up a lot of parking and block some major entrances to the mall (including direct entrances to some of the stores who lost their appeal), and the Christmas shopping season is nigh, it's not really a good time to be pissing off your retail tenants any more than you have to.

My question still remains, though. What happens if Macy's, Lord & Taylor, Borders, Circuit City, J.C. Penney, and all the other stores that will lose direct entrances and nearby parking, lose too much business and decide to close? I highly doubt Pyramid can fill those spots and and entirely new mall. It takes steady tenants to recruit new ones, and when your biggest stores become Best Buy and Ruby Tuesday, well, you're not exactly setting yourself up to become the most successful mall on the planet.

Oh, and let's not start talking about the Destiny project yet. This initial expansion holds none of the promise of being green construction or using green energy, does not involve taking half the North Side by eminent domain (which, when it comes time, the city may well not do), and isn't promising $60,000 a year jobs that require training for positions without job descriptions.

And the Inner Harbor? Don't bet on Pyramid plopping down any money any time soon, despite the fact that it put in the most attractive bid four years ago and the next-highest bidder actually would do something with it if given the opportunity.

I hate to see development projects fail, but I could stand to see this one go south.

Also at BlogJosh.

With U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert – a moderate Republican – retiring this year, there's a chance that control of the House could swing on the seat he's vacating. With less than three weeks left until election day, Republican candidate Ray Meier and Democrat Michael Arcuri are in a dead-heat.

But the National Republican Campaign Committee has stooped to a new low in campaign advertising – such a new low that when I saw the story about the new ad against Arcuri (via Sean Kirst), I just glossed over it..

And then I saw the ad.

The ad – which Meier, the Republican, has asked the NRCC to pull (the NRCC has declined) – takes Arcuri to task for calling a sex hotline from his hotel phone while in New York City on business, and charging Oneida County taxpayers for the call. The P-S investigated the claim (it's in the story), and the AP looked into it, too.

Turns out that an aide mis-dialed the call – the Department of Criminal Justice Services in Albany has the same seven-digit phone number, but with a different area code. Phone records show that the correct number was dialed one minute after the incorrect number was dialed.

The P-S story says many of the stations approached with the ad declined to run it, but I saw it on the local Fox affiliate, which is owned by Sinclair, a large media company run by people who donate heavily to Republican campaigns.

And never mind a distaste for accuracy, Sinclair has an evident distaste for actually informing the public. In those markets served by Sinclair that still have local news shows, only about 15 minutes of every half-hour is done locally (with 10 of those minutes being weather and sports).

Other stations – like our local Fox affiliate – rely (or, as in this station's case, relied) on other local stations to produce their news. The CBS affiliate here, WTVH, owned by Granite, used to produce the Fox affiliate's local news show. When the CBS affiliate decided to focus on its own news, the Fox affiliate ran a nasty-gram on its web site asking viewers to write to WTVH.

Because WTVH should have to program someone else's news. Right.

Here's Fox affiliate WSYT's contact info. Tell them to at least purport to tell the truth.

Angela and I braved the rain Thursday night for The Third Thursday (th3). Eight months out of the year – all except for December, January, July and August – a dozen local art galleries open their doors for free from 5 to 8 p.m. They have bread, fruit and cheese, wine, coffee and tea. Some artists are on hand.

Since we opted to park downtown and walk, rather than take the Connective Corridor bus (a free ride, incidentally), we only got to five of the participating venues before we decided we were too soaked to continue. We made our first trips to Delavan, The Red House, the Warehouse Gallery, Eureka Crafts and the Thinc Gallery at Lincoln Center.

We'll just have to try to get to more next month.

Near as I can tell, Syracuse Arts Net has something to do with the event, but I'm not sure in what capacity.

Anyway, it's a fantastic event. Try to make it out next month – the next date is Nov. 16, and then you're going to have to wait until February.

Buried at the bottom of a story on Syracuse Mayor Matt Driscoll's proposal to modify the Certificate of Use requirements in the city is a doubling of the fee for a certificate.

A Certificate of Use is a permit, obtained every two years, that allows a business to operate in the city. Much like a driver's license, there's a point system, and as a business accrues points, eventually it's denied a permit.

Things that will help accumulate points include selling alcohol and tobacco to minors, operating outside of legal hours, and prostitution.

The fee for a Certificate of Use is $100; Driscoll proposes changing that to $200. An extra $100 every two years is not likely to break an established business, but it may be the straw that breaks the camel's back for those considering opening a new small business in the city, particularly if they can get similar permits elsewhere in similar-traffic areas for what would have been a comparable rate to the $100.

What burns me most about this is that Driscoll was a business owner before he was elected to the mayoral post. How can he not recognize that high startup fees are a barrier to small businesses opening here?

When I first got here, I was really confused by the bus system. Not that it's gotten a whole lot better – the route maps (and names, too) don't really make any sense if you don't know the city really well (go download a couple of schedules) – but at least I've sort of figured something out: The Regional Transportation Center is not the same thing as the city bus station.

In my experience, that's unusual.

Of course, the city doesn't actually have a bus station. You can catch a Greyhound or a train at the RTC, but the hub of the hub-and-spoke mass transit system is the always-cluttered intersection of Salina and Fayette streets. You have to know at which of the four corners your bus stops, and downtown traffic is always stalled.

It also means a lack of visibility for store fronts (with buses stopped in front of them) and a shortage of parking – so people who are driving through downtown are likely to not stop there to do errands.

On top of that, it means that if you're taking the bus, for six months of the year, you are uncomfortably cold, and subject to the elements' effects on the sidewalk. Not great if you've a compromised immune system, aren't in really good physical condition (try navigating an icy sidewalk with bad hips and a walker), and unattractive if you could just drive to work instead, even if you typically would prefer mass transit.

But the city's stepping up, and may soon buy a building for a bus station. It would mean relocating the Red Cross Blood Center – which I don't think would be a bad thing; I know that if I had easier access to it, I might actually take a lunch break to donate blood, but it also means that the buses would clear out of that intersection, and people would have the comfort of a roof over their heads (and walls around their bodies) in the harsh CNY winters.

There are two exciting possibilities here. First, for novice bus takers, there's no wondering which corner you have to stand on – and having to wait another hour if you guess wrong after 6 p.m. And more importantly, it lightens traffic at Salina and Fayette, which could lead to more downtown development.

And if you've been reading, you know we think that's a thing.

Also in the news

• We wrote Thursday about a pact to clean up Onondaga Lake that involves a $451 million promise from Honeywell, which now owns the company that dumped a lot of toxic sludge in there. But there's a lot of doubt about the effectiveness of the planned methods.
• Here's a little more on the AXA lease.

If you're in New York, today is the last day to register to vote in the November election. You can register online here, or go to your local elections office – party headquarters will probably also have forms today, and I know in Syracuse, there will be people downtown with forms.

We've been writing a bit about AXA's desire to stay in Syracuse, and with a couple of smart moves by the city – beautifying public space and finding 600 parking spots for AXA to pay for – the financial company today signed a 15-year lease to commit to staying in Syracuse until 2023.

In development news, you know the whole Pyramid dropping the ball thing is really pervasive when a story about a really cool $80 million sports park/hotel complex starts like this:

Here's a new twist for the Syracuse area: A big development that promises to draw people in large numbers from hundreds of miles away is being built.

In other news, Honeywell, which bought Allied Chemical in 1999, is ready to put almost a half billion dollars into cleaning up Onondaga Lake. The state sued Allied for dumping its toxic sludge into the lake all the way back in 1989, and the company's finally stepping up to start making it right.

A cleaner Onondaga Lake means (a) the Haudenosaunee can feel a little bit better (read: less resentful) about one of their really old sacred grounds, and (b) we can eat the fish, finally. Assuming the clean-up happens, of course.

Sorry for the extended absence. It's been a busy week.

It didn't take long for 10 tenants at the Carousel Center to do something the city just didn't have the guts to do: appeal an unjust ruling [more].

The stores want to be able to negotiate with their landlord for the things they paid good money for in their leases – access to mall entrances and parking. In the public version of the plans, the mall's biggest tenant, Federated Dept. Stores, would lose the direct entrance it has at Lord & Taylor, and all associated parking; its other store, Macy's, would lose about half its nearby parking.

The stores have in their lease agreements the ability to re-negotiate for these things when the mall plans an expansion, and Federated alone puts the value of that clause above all else in its leases. Federated told a court that if the city can take that clause by eminent domain (along with other clauses that allow it to negotiate with the mall owners when major changes could affect the stores), it should just take the whole lease and require the mall to pay a $24 million buyout.

I'm going to reiterate something I asked head of economic development David Michel in a letter: If the city is willing to take lease rights away from businesses without allowing them to negotiate for those rights, who would want to sign a commercial lease here? His response: Don't worry, we're not going to take your house.

Which would have no value in a city with no businesses in it anyway, I'm sure.

Not coincidentally, Federated's CEO praised the Lord & Taylor store at the Carousel Center last week. I'm sure Federated doesn't do this often, but when it's faced with losing a lease it values at $24 million, a little PR campaign is in order.

In related news, John Centra, the judge who ruled against the city in March in Syracuse's battle with the mall owners, is now an appeals court judge.

AXA

Meanwhile, we wrote last week about the city's negotiations to keep AXA financial in town [story]. AXA has promised 300 new jobs, and has asked for a PILOT program similar to the one it's had for the last few decades, some beautification to public space on its grounds, and that the city find it 600 parking spaces it will pay for at market value.

Interesting development last week: The city's not sure it can find the parking. With the promise – in writing – of more jobs and the guaranteed funds from parking, you'd think the city would push a little harder to make this happen. Instead, they're pushing hard for a mall expansion for a company that is alienating existing stores, claiming that it's negotiating with tenants for the expansion (it won't say which ones, and won't say how the possibility of existing stores leaving would affect those negotiations), and talks about job growth but won't put anything in writing.

Updated, 2:45 p.m. Tuesday: Oh, look at that. The city decided to find the parking spaces. Huh. Good idea.

In other news

• Syracuse University is shuttling its students downtown for free. While this gets the students to the architecture school, it also gets them to downtown businesses. It's a great boost to the downtown economy that should have happened years ago.
• It looks like that convention center hotel they've been talking about building at the OnCenter since 1992 is finally ready to happen, with about a half dozen grants coming in to get the project rolling.
• The city is talking to Kingston, Ontario, about forming a tourism alliance [NYCO].
• Lastly, NYCO's got a great post up about community commitment, including how it relates to that mall expansion I keep complaining about.

Last Friday, an appellate court ruled against 12 stores who were fighting to keep parts of their leases – the parts that give them negotiating power over their access to mall entrances and nearby parking, for instance.

There's been no word yet on whether those stores plan another appeal, but CompUSA, which was one of the 12, was already planning to close its Carousel Center store. Federated Dept. Stores, which owns both the Lord & Taylor and Macy's (formerly Kaufmann's) in the mall, asked the court to just require the city to take its entire lease (which Federated values at $24 million); that might be a sign that they're not willing to stick around if and when they get to see the expansion plans.

According to plans distributed at a public information session (which are not necessarily the final plans, or what's on file with the city, if anything), Borders would lose its entrance and parking, as would JC Penney. Macy's and L&T would be in the same boat.

Meanwhile, Dick Case has some questions about just what the heck this thing might be, and he doesn't seem to understand the city's motivation on this. And when I say Dick Case has these questions, I mean a lot of people do, but Dick happens to have a column.

So, the first plan is to build out from the existing mall to Hiawatha Boulevard. That'll be a very large expansion, and about a 50 percent reduction in parking (or, at least, there's no plan drawn up for parking). Carousel's management has not said with which stores it's negotiating for spots in the expansion – never mind if anyone will be willing to come if the major tenants involved in the lawsuit decide to walk away from their leases.

And then there's the question of what, if anything, Destiny plans to do with the Inner Harbor, now that the Canal Corp. has really dropped the ball on its threat to seek another developer. Destiny still hasn't put down any money, and hasn't sent a letter of intent on the property.

At the very least, the city is starting to plan events for next summer – the weekly block parties at the harbor this past season drew an estimated 50,000 people. Doubters: Please stop telling me (a) nothing happens here and (b) no one goes out to anything. Step outside your front door occasionally, huh?

Meanwhile, downtown...

The city is negotiating a new tax and lease deal with AXA Financial Services.

AXA owns two towers downtown with 950 employees (200 of whom were added over the past two years). They have a PILOT program in place until 2018, but the company's lease expires in 2008. (Wow. Tenants and landlords negotiating – and before the lease is up!)

A new lease would keep the company in Syracuse until 2024, and the PILOT agreement would extend until 2028. Highlights of what AXA wants:

• A guaranteed maximum assessment of $27.5 million, with the ability to decrease payment if the value of the property goes down
• A guarantee of 600 parking spaces in city lots, for which AXA will pay market value
• The city to beautify the walkway between its buildings

AXA, for its part, plans to add 300 employees locally in the next year. With 500 new follks working downtown over a three-year span, that can only lead to more people coming before the end of its lease.

Let's review: Destiny wants tax breaks without saying how it's going to bring jobs or boost the local economy; AXA is promising actual jobs, the guaranteed purchase of parking spots, and wants a prettier space to live in. Destiny is using the city to bully its tenants, perhaps driving them away entirely; the city is negotiating with AXA for a mutually beneficial deal.

Someone please let me know which is the proper way to do business.