Never let it be said that one person can’t make a difference.

Tammy Shack of Bemus Point is living proof of that. The owner of the Bridgeview One Stop spent months trying to convince state officials that the closure of Exit 9 into Bemus Point was hurting her business as well as to have a temporary exit constructed. The exit has long helped Shack’s business, as travelers getting off in Bemus Point would stop for gas and spend money in her store, which also sells pizza, subs and other items. Closing the exit as part of the I-86 bridge reconstruction hurt her business. Unlike other road closures that can hurt businesses in the short term, a four-year bridge reconstruction project is a different animal altogether. Restoring Exit 9 doesn’t automatically turn the financial spigot back on for the rest of the bridge reconstruction, but it helps.

It’s understandable that Shack was aggressively trying to get the state DOT, the state’s contractors and local elected officials to help reopen the exit. The ream of paperwork Shack generated over the past several months shows both the extensive effort it took Shack to obtain the information she needed to convince both local elected officials and the DOT that the exit was necessary for her business to survive. It was an impressive effort.

Less impressive is the reaction of far too many local officials and state DOT officials. For too long Shack was alone in her struggle with a few supporters helping her along the way but with little in the way of official help in the documentation reviewed by The Post-Journal. That’s particularly disappointing when one realizes how quickly the temporary Exit 9 was constructed. One has to think that with stronger local support earlier in the process that the temporary exit could have been built earlier.

We’re not sure when the government will learn that not all questions asked by the public are bad questions. Not all requests from the public should receive an answer from the government that resembles asking a teenager to clean their room or take out the trash. Shack won her fight for restored access from the I-86 bridge to her business – but it wasn’t easy. And while the state made the right decision, as we noted in this space in July, it didn’t have to be as difficult as it was.

Shack is asking for the creation of a business program to help businesses such as hers that find themselves in a financial hole when necessary public works projects make it too difficult for people to get to their businesses – as happened last summer when the 7-Eleven store on Hazeltine Avenue saw business take a precipitous drop when the Baker Street and Hazeltine Avenue intersection was redesigned. It’s not the type of fund that would be used all the time, but as Shack and Peter Weinreich have shown in consecutive summers, the public good can make life nearly impossible for a small business owner. There should be some helping hand from the government in these cases when the sole cause of a business’ revenue drop is a construction project.