Longtime activist Kern fed up, leaves city, area
Dick Kern, who has waged a relentless and often acidic battle for 15 years against what he considers the forces of waste and corruption, has stopped fighting City Hall.
Discouraged with the city's state of affairs and weary from the Erie County District Attorney's relentless prosecutions, Kern has moved to Minneapolis to join his longtime girlfriend.
"I decided it was pointless to battle the district attorney anymore. This last prosecution really did demoralize me," Kern said from his new hometown. "I'm licking my wounds at this point. I'm gun shy."
Kern, a 65-year-old Ivy League-educated social worker, said his activism was stoked by investigative reports in The Buffalo News during the late 1980s about discrimination, cronyism and waste at the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority.
He has railed against the authority since then, as well as against other city officials whom he contended have squandered hundreds of millions of dollars in housing and anti-poverty aid. Kern blames it on a "political culture of cronyism and unaccountability."
He spared almost no one, and his targets included those who were trying to solve the same problems he was but taking different tacks.
His methods were varied and often confrontational.
He once conducted a hunger strike on the steps of City Hall. Twice he staged symbolic break-ins of public housing apartments.
He would show up at the houses and offices of his targets, sometimes verbally confronting them, other times leafleting their neighborhood. And he wrote columns for alternative weeklies and, more recently, railed via e-mail, which frequently turned into ugly exchanges between Kern and his targets.
"His passion and involvement will be missed - but not his tactics," said Gillian Brown, the housing authority's acting executive director.
True to form, Kern spent his last weekend in Buffalo last month leafleting Brown's home.
"He leafleted my house and car all the time," Brown said.
Kern's only remaining business is the sale of his West Side home. While he has moved and said he's put Buffalo behind him, he is still issuing an occasional alert to an e-mail list, the most recently coming Thursday.
The most aggressive of Kern's tactics, which his critics characterized as harassment or stalking, made him the target of an estimated 15 to 20 prosecutions by District Attorney Frank J. Clark.
Complainants have included former City Treasurer Marilyn Smith, former Niagara Common Council Member Robert Quintana, and Charles Flynn, former chairman of the Independence Party and a member of the housing authority's governing board.
Prosecutors failed to win any convictions, however, although several of Kern's targets obtained orders of protection against him.
Kern had other legal problems, as well. He was cited for housing code violations twice in the late 1990s and was sentenced to jail time by a Housing Court judge.
Clark's persistence in pressing criminal charges prompted Kern to file suit in federal court several years ago, contending the prosecutions were a politically motivated attempt to stop his First Amendment-protected activities.
As part of the court proceedings April 11, both Clark and Kern agreed to drop all pending legal actions.
Michael Kuzma, one of Kern's lawyers, said Kern's departure is unfortunate, in part because Clark used his office to stifle free speech. "Why I was so interested and concerned about Dick's cases was the First Amendment implications," Kuzma said. "If Dick can be prosecuted for his First Amendment activities, anyone could."
Clark said his prosecutions were based on complaints filed by others and insisted he didn't handle Kern's cases any differently than others.
"My feelings about him are no different than the other 49,000 criminal filings in City Court every year," he said.
While many agreed with Kern on the larger issues and respected his sometimes exhaustive research, most said his strident tone and personalized attacks undercut his effectiveness and prompted many to eventually tune him out.
"His own worst enemy" was the phrase often used to describe him.
Kern makes no apologies for his tactics. "I became radicalized by the trouble I saw not changing. I kept whacking harder," he said. "It's hard for me to see how I could do it differently because no one else was stepping up."
Should officials in Minneapolis be preparing for his wrath?
"The culture here is vastly different, the government is accountable. I don't see the blatant corruption I see in Buffalo," he said.
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