By Mark David Blum, Esq.

It saddens me to read the news daily and see how many jobs are being lost here in Central New York. Good jobs, high paying jobs are disappearing as fast as the snow. Nobody seems to be doing anything about it.

One may think that a lost job is not a big deal. Trust me, it is. In my own experience, despite advanced degrees and a wealth of work experience, finding even a minimum wage job was extremely difficult. Multiply that by several thousand and you might understand the feelings of many of your friends and neighbors in Onondaga County.

Over the years and even before I ever went to law school, I had sold everything from insurance to tombstones. Most of my career was in advertising sales and marketing. I was good at making money for other people; though never for myself. As an attorney, I was very good in advising and working with clients to make money for themselves. Those who remember know that I built a very successful business in a short period of time.

Then, I gave it all away by being an idiot.

There used to be a time when folks hated me only because I behaved like an ass. Nowadays, folks have a legitimate reason to scorn and hold me in disrepute. No doubt my behavior gave them reason. Through these web pages and in other forms, and for the past 3 years, I have tried to meet the challenges laid before me and re-establish the trust I once enjoyed. I have even tried to heal my relationships with those I have offended in the past. This process is slow and is going to take time and I accept that.

Yet, a lawyer without a client is meaningless. A person without a job feels meaningless. Feeling productive and being productive are inherent to the human condition. If you are neither, it costs you more than your self-esteem. You end up an outcast. Friends invite you out for a beer and you cannot go. They see you as standoffish. You simply cannot afford the ale … or the gas. Charity can only extend so far and eventually everybody moves on. If you can’t hang, then you can’t play. This process is a slow killing machine that can wipe out every aspect of identity.

The job loss numbers may seem droll and invisible to you. “Who are these people?” “Where are they?” “It is sad … and thankfully, it is not me.” If something is not done fast, your turn will come. Lost jobs cut into disposable income across the board. Your employer will feel the ripple. How big the loss will determine whether you will get caught up in the wave of destruction that rolls through society with every job lost.

It only gets worse when you support projects like DestiNY. Yes, you may recoup low-level jobs and generate some tax revenue to the City. I assure you, however, that the real damage will come when these national retailers who inhabit the “Mall To End All Malls” start exporting your capital back to their home offices. Canadian money may flow into DestiNY, but Syracuse will just be a pit stop; though a few droppings may fall en route to corporate offices in New York City, Dallas, and Los Angeles.

The weather is in large part to blame for this ridiculous mindset. We live in a community where every winter, the roads get destroyed from the weather and plowing, and every summer we invest bunches of tax money and hire bunches of people to repair these roads. Construction companies burst at the seams with employees all Spring, Summer, and Fall and by winter, these same minions are on the unemployment rolls. This community is used to a life that has no goal other than to mimic the Sisyphus chore of rolling that same bolder up that same hill year after year.

Tourism in Syracuse is not a major industry. Certainly there is money to be made. But, we are not Niagara Falls, Washington D.C., or Hershey Pennsylvania. The people in charge and who dominate the tourism business in the Syracuse area are not Syracuse people. They are the owners and managers of the hotels in Dewitt and North Syracuse; 7th North Street and Carrier Circle. It is through their energies that a new hotel and convention business is being pushed mostly because they are suffering in their own locations. Wyndham Hotels dumped their Syracuse property because it is not a moneymaker. No way these special interests are expecting splashover business from a new hotel downtown. My money says these Auschlanders will do all they can to compete and assure their own properties are filled before the downtown property does. A downtown property cannot compete with properties in the low-rent districts like the Circle and 7th North and hence, the prices will have to be higher downtown. If you are a conventioneer, where are you likely to stay?

The bigger question facing this community is whether we are just going to continue the mindset of “paying the workers in the summer and welfare in the winter”. Stop turning Syracuse into a toilet stop en route to better locations. It is time to start spending the money here at home. We need to invest in ourselves and in our future.

There are millions of dollars at the City level that are being wasted on failed programs that can be diverted. At the County level, the number climbs into the tens of millions. Our schools should be world class. Our infrastructure should be the strongest. Our focus should divert from exporting our capital to importing and keeping new money here. Until we do, we are just going to keep sliding downward and die a very slow death.

Take me as but one example. A lawyer without a job or a client is disabled from giving back to society that which society has gifted unto them. You gave me an education. You trained me. You invested in me via student loans. Why won’t you take advantage of that? If I end up doing work unrelated to my skills and training, then society loses. As much as it fills my heart to spend my days doing endless pro bono work, paying customers are important.

This community should not be giving its money to Bob Congel. It should find the people who have the skills and talent to be the next Bob Congel. This community should have 1,000 Bob Congels, not one. Contracts should stop going to the same major contractors over and over but to 100 small contractors. We should reconstruct ourselves to not always be on the defensive but to aggressively reach out and plan ahead such that in 10 or 20 years, Syracuse will not be just a pit stop, but the end goal. A mall or a hotel is not going to do that.

The first step, it seems to me, would be to rid ourselves of all the dead weight in local government. Nick Pirro, Matt Driscoll and a host of others may all be wonderful well-intentioned people. But, they have had the reigns of power for way too long and frankly have no solutions other than to blame the other. Every day that passes, their list of ideas grows shorter and the number of people in the loop lessens.

Hey! Hello!

I am one of thousands of highly skilled educated and talented people in this community who are being ignored. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being invested in companies from outside of the community to come in here and tell us how we can export more money out of the community.

Meanwhile, “talent on loan from God” goes wholly ignored.

Whose fault is that?