By JAMES FINK
Business First

The smiles on the faces of Hon. Richard Arcara and Hon. William Skretny said it all.

For Arcara, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York, and Skretny, a judge on that court, the Oct. 9 groundbreaking for the $137 million federal courthouse was a landmark chapter in what amounted to a 13-year quest to take the project from a "what if" scenario to reality.

Along the way, the duo went through a series of emotional peaks and valleys, spent massive amounts of political clout and maintained a pit-bull-like tenacity.

"It was a long, difficult journey to get here," said the normally unflappable Arcara.

Their efforts have not gone unnoticed.

"(Other districts) tried to push their courthouse ahead of Buffalo, but they didn't let that happen," said Sen. Charles Schumer.

The 10-story, 265,000-square-foot courthouse, located along the edge of Niagara Square across from the Statler Towers and Buffalo City Hall, is scheduled to open in mid-2010. The sleek modern courthouse - which was designed by the New York City firm of Kohn Pederson Fox, which also designed the Buffalo Niagara International Airport - features nine courtrooms and 11 judicial chambers.

At $137 million, the courthouse is one of the largest construction projects on the local books, behind only the $333 million Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino & Hotel and proposed $313 million Peace Bridge expansion. HSBC Arena, by comparison, cost $127.5 million to construct when it was built a decade ago.

More importantly, the courthouse will dramatically change the downtown Buffalo skyline, adding a shimmering glass-dominated structure that will complement such historical landmarks as City Hall and the Statler Towers. Although listed at 10 stories, in reality the building is closer to 13 stories tall and will be clearly visible from the nearby I-190 section of the New York State Thruway.

Some see the courthouse as a guidepost for the future of Western New York.

"It is the same kind of anchor for downtown that Bass Pro will be to waterfront development," said Andrew Rudnick, Buffalo Niagara Partnership president and CEO. "It is going to be a striking building. The judges deserve enormous credit for making it happen."

Both Skretny and Arcara said building the courthouse became something of a personal mission.

The project's roots can be traced to 1994, when Skretny, as a member of the Space and Facilities Committee for the Judicial Conference of the United States, was asked to look at 167 federal courthouses across the country that needed to be renovated or replaced.

On that list - but way down - was Buffalo's Michael J. Dillon Courthouse, constructed in 1936 and considered cramped and a tad obsolete.

Right then and there, Skretny began to lobby on Buffalo's behalf.

Skretny happened to be talking to Arcara about another matter when the courthouse came up in conversation. Both agreed that Buffalo needed to be near the top of the list for a new facility.

Initially, Skretny and Arcara were pushing for an annex across Franklin Street that would have connected with the Dillon Courthouse. The price tag for that project was estimated at $44.1 million.

That seemed attainable, as the federal government had allocated $500 million nationwide for the various courthouse projects.

Things changed on Sept. 11, 2001 - the day terrorists attacked the United States.

In the wake of the attacks, the federal government put a premium on security. The Buffalo courthouse, because of a number of factors, including its proximity to Canada, continued to climb up the list.

To Arcara and Skretny it was becoming increasingly clear that the Western District needed a larger courthouse, not just an annex. It also helped that the cramped U.S. Bankruptcy Court had just started its own local site search.

It made sense to shift the Bankruptcy Court and some other federal operations to the Dillon Courthouse if a new facility could be funded and built.

Skretny and Arcara were making almost daily calls lobbying for the new Buffalo courthouse.

"We were doing a lot of grunt work," Arcara said. "There was a lot of (political) muscle being exercised in Washington, and we just couldn't sit back and wait."

During that period, Buffalo had an almost complete changeover in federal officials. Senators Alfonse D'Amato and Daniel Patrick Moynihan were replaced by Schumer and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Reps. John LaFalce, Bill Paxon and Jack Quinn retired and were replaced by Reps. Louise Slaughter, Tom Reynolds and Brian Higgins. For Skretny and Arcara, it meant that they not only had to lobby, but also had to educate a new wave of elected officials about the issue.

"We had to stay on top of it," Arcara said.

When the so-called "Lackawanna Six" were arrested on terrorism charges in September 2002, it put the need for a new federal courthouse in the spotlight. "It highlighted our security needs," Arcara said.

Before that, Buffalo was in the top 10 list of federal courthouses in most need of a new facility. The Lackawanna Six trials pushed Buffalo to the top spot in the federal General Services Administration ranking.

That ranking was challenged by politicians from the Southwest who wanted the limited facilities dollars to go toward their projects. They cited problems with illegal aliens as a reason they should leapfrog over Buffalo.

For a while San Diego jumped ahead of Buffalo, but to date its $245 million courthouse project remains delayed because of funding and local issues.

Meanwhile, Arcara and Skretny were fearful that the Buffalo project would be pushed aside because a federal courthouse in Brooklyn was $90 million over budget.

"We exhibited no shame in making the calls we did," Skretny said. "We were our own lobbyists."

Federal officials jumped on the bandwagon, as did local political and business leaders. For seven years, the Buffalo Niagara Partnership made the new courthouse the top item on its federal lobbying agenda.

"We had to work across political lines," Rudnick said.

Higgins said securing the funds for the courthouse was a personal mission for him.

"This wasn't a Democratic Party project or a Republican Party project. It was a community project," Higgins said. "It would have very disappointing to lose the courthouse to another city or region."

There were times when it looked like that just might happen.

While Buffalo remained at the top of the GSA's courthouse project list, funding continued to be in a state of flux. The GSA had allocated $115 million for the project in late 2002, and some $20 million was released.

A number of preliminary and visible steps moved the project forward. The GSA acquired the necessary properties and buildings it needed between Niagara Square, Elmwood Avenue and West Mohawk Street to construct the courthouse. Existing tenants were relocated and the buildings were secured for demolition.

Kohn Pederson Fox was selected from a pool of 37 architecture firms to design the structure. Cannon Design of Grand Island was hired as construction manager and Pittsburgh-based Mascaro Construction Co. as general contractor.

Everything was moving along - and then things came to a grinding halt last year.

President Bush froze the funding for all courthouse projects as he attempted to tighten the federal budget. The fiscal freeze opened the door for other communities to push for their projects.

Western New York's federal delegation pushed hard for the federal dollars to be released.

"Everybody felt like this Buffalo's last hurrah," Skretny said. "We all felt if the funding was delayed even one year, the Buffalo project would have been in serious jeopardy. And we had to make sure no one back-stabbed us."

The lobbying paid off in March, when the federal government agreed to include $137 million for the project in its budget.

By late summer, the buildings that stood on the site were demolished and construction equipment began arriving.

The Oct. 9 ground-breaking made it all official and brought huge, Cheshire-cat-like smiles to the faces of both Arcara and Skretny.

"It was all-consuming," Skretny said. "Whenever we had a spare moment, we were on the phone talking to someone, somewhere about the virtues of the project. We would have been devastated if it didn't work out."