CD fight over council cuts should spare hospital request

Mark Rivers of Boise Idaho got $481,000 of what wound up being all city money. Where did it go? For 20 shacks (Top) But the city is reluctant to invest CD money for the Hospital to build this (above).

The City has money to burn on a thousand useless projects but can’t find money to help the hospital...

Seth Piccirillo, the director of Niagara Falls Community Development (CD), has apparently picked a fight with the City council. CD oversees the spending of $2.2 million in federal funds earmarked for Niagara Falls each year. Much of it goes to a bloated bureaucratic overhead.

The council has to approve the final budget. Part of the fight was prompted over Piccirillo’s plan for CD’s budget last month when he chose to ignore Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center’s capital improvement request for a new entranceway.

Memorial is one of the few success stories in Niagara Falls. A community hospital, it survives in one of the poorest cities in America without dedicated government funding. They pay theirexpenses from payment for services rendered to patients, and, to a lesser extent, from donations and private grants.

Once in a while – in a city with money to squander – on six figure city hall salaries, Hard Rock Concerts and Holiday Markets - Memorial gets a pittance from the city that depends much on its success. In fact, the City contributed less than one quarter of one percent of their total budget over the last four years. The hospital received $900,000 in support since 2009.

Consider, the same city gave Hard Rock $657,000 for outdoor concerts. It paid Idaho developer Mark Rivers more than $481,000 for his failed Holiday Market. And more than $1.1 million in grants went to Faisal Merani, a millionaire hotel owner, to fix up his hotels and restaurants- which he could certainly afford to do himself.

The Hospital, by its mission, is apolitical and expends its efforts to heal people, many of whom are poor in this poorest of cities. About $8 million a year in medical services go to poor people who do not have insurance and ultimately wind up as charity patients.

Memorial turns no one away.

Meantime, the hospital wants to make an improvement, mischaracterized by some as a mere entranceway, but in reality an efficient, better lit and more accessible entrance to the city’s only hospital – which includes elevators to make it possible for the infirm to get where they need to go when they enter the hospital. The enhanced entranceway will also help Memorial look more like what it actually is – one of the premier hospitals in the state.

Council Chairman Sam Fruscione and Council Member Glenn Choolokian chose to ignore Piccirillo’s radical cut and apparently intend to approve a portion of the support the Hospital needs - about $50,000. The council also chose to cut some fat in an obscenely obese CD budget, by:

• Eliminating funding for the Department of Public Works’ Zone Outreach Objective Mission (ZOOM) ($50,000.) ZOOM, as many homeowners who have been abused by it knows, is a Gestapo-like, periodic sweep of selected neighborhoods where a bunch of city employees (often on Saturdays, when they can get overtime pay) descend on poor neighborhoods (somehow skipping the many rental houses owned by favored city hall officials) and taking struggling homeowners to task and court if they do not make selectively enforced repairs.

• Eliminating CD funding of Niagara University’s vacant lot beautification project. A $25,000 savings for a feel good project where students clean up a few vacant lots that soon are overgrown again with weeds and littered with garbage anyway.

• The Niagara Falls Public Library wants a floor reconstruction. The cost is $50,000. The money wasn’t going to pay for the floor, but only for a study on how to fix the floor.

* The NACC. While the artists and troubadours there are talented, it cannot be a function of government to subsidize them. Artists and songsters should support themselves through their work and not the forcible confiscation of the money of others through taxation. What is artistic about poor people in a dead broke city being taxed so you can do art? That is the opposite of talent; it is greed and laziness. You want to be an artist? Then go out and create such art as the world cann’t resist. Then you’re an artist.

Piccirillo, of course, objected to these cuts and wants to preserve all - except the hospital.

Of course there is more ugly waste. First and foremost, there is the Downtown Housing Incentive Program (DHIP.) - the plan to use CD money to pay 20 college graduates $6,984 each to move into Niagara Falls with no obligation to stay longer than two years and no obligation to invest anything. Canceling DHIP will save $200,000, including $61,016 in overhead.
Meantime the council ought to ask:

1- How the DHIP program is doing. Sources tell the Reporter there are only five active applications on file for the plan. How many hours went into PR work, the program study, website, report writing, administration? What will it cost to bring these few people into the city? How much money is being wasted and how much, if any, of the staggering 40 percent administration fee gravitates to Piccirillo as “Program Manager” as stipends?
If DHIP approves a single student, large amounts of bureaucratic babysitting will occur with city inspectors regularly examining properties, on-going meetings between Piccirillo and the few (if any) college cash recipients, meeting with landlords and Piccirillo, and of course the application, certification process, monitoring of payout, credit checks and on and on.
Now it seems nobody is interested.
Leave it to Niagara Falls to pay people to live here and nobody even wants to live there even if they’re paid.

2 - Demand an update and report on the HUD Inspector General’s investigation into CD- a story that was broken by the Reporter - that centers around inappropriate bidding processes that favor certain contractors over others; the misuse of lead abatement money; the personal use of contractors equipment by an employee of CD; checks sent to the wrong contractors that were not returned; purchasing products for up to three times the cost at outlets pre-directed by CD employees; and the holding up of payments and non payment of contractors who did not play along.

3 - Request a report on the cost of ZOOM from day one with emphasis on overtime, which is why ZOOM operates on Saturdays.

The original request from the hospital was $250,000. The council reduced it to $50,000. The hospital plan is a much needed plan and one of few cases where CD does not waste money. or put it into the hands of the politically favored few.