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Sex Offender List Grows Under Dyster

 

Mayor Paul Dyster rightly says of sex offenders, "They have to live somewhere."
But does it always have to be in
Niagara Falls?
How's this for leadership?: One out of every 329 people you meet in Niagara Falls (above ) is a registered sex offender. One out of every 3,889 people you meet in North Tonawanda (below) is a registered sex offender.
 

Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster owes the perverts, pedophiles, predators and rapists who have made it onto the state’s list of registered sex offenders a big debt of gratitude.


Were it not for them, Niagara Falls might not have qualified as a city in the 2010 census and, as a result, might have lost millions of dollars’ worth of state and federal subsidies, making the fiscal hole Dyster’s dug even deeper.


The city had a grand total of 50,193 residents at the time the census was taken, just 193 more than needed to qualify as a city under federal guidelines.


Currently, 156 of those residents are registered sex offenders. These tragedies waiting to happen have been placed here by state parole authorities who must see Niagara Falls as a dumping ground for the dregs of society.


In a recent interview with National Public Radio, Tom Lowe, an urban researcher with Niagara University and unofficial adviser to the Dyster administration, explained the gravity of the situation.


“We're just over 50,000 people. And if we fall below 50,000, we lose all sorts of federal funding,” Lowe said. “We lose the federal designation as a city… Losing funding, it would be crippling. Layoffs would be astronomical. It'd be a tough go of it.”


So desperate is Dyster to prop up the city’s population by any means imaginable, no matter how ridiculous or underhanded, that he’s actually implemented a program that will pay college students a stipend of up to $7,000 over two years just to establish official residence here.
Little wonder then, at a meeting of concerned citizens following a Niagara Falls Reporter expose about sex offenders being housed at the Midtown Inn near Niagara Street Elementary School in 2009, that Dyster famously quipped, “Well, they’ve got to live somewhere.”


It could not be determined whether or not there were more sex offenders living in the city at the time of the census, but certainly the number of sexual predators – nearly all of whom target children – has grown exponentially in Niagara Falls since Dyster took office.
In 2007, the year he was sworn in, there were just 82 registered sex offenders living in the city. Two years later and halfway into his first term, that number had jumped to 133.


By July 2010, Dyster’s official “They’ve got to live somewhere” policies toward violent sexual predators resulted in a population explosion, and 178 convicted predators were reported.


Things seem to have leveled off since the census was taken, but some remain suspicious. After all, the number of sex offenders in Niagara Falls jumped by more than 217 percent during Dyster’s first term. Can such a whopping increase be attributed to simple happenstance?
In any event, if Dyster was deliberately trying to marginalize the East Side neighborhood along Niagara Street, drive down property values and make the area unattractive to prospective home buyers, he could do no better than to allow the high concentration of convicted sexual deviants who currently call the area home to continue living there unmolested.


And allow them he has.


Former state assemblywoman Francine DelMonte had no stronger supporter than Dyster when she ran for re-election in 2010, and it was the state's Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act, which she co-authored, that was chiefly responsible for the flood of sexual predators taking up residence in formerly quiet neighborhoods across New York.


Niagara Falls, the city she represented in Albany, was particularly hard hit. Today, the chances of someone you meet randomly in the street being a sex offender anywhere in New York is one in 1,203: In Niagara Falls the chance is one in 329.


Clearly, Dyster’s laissez-faire attitude when it comes to dangerous, deviant sexual predators living in our midst threatens the safety of our children, crushes property values and provides yet another reason for decent, hardworking citizens to leave Niagara Falls for destinations where leadership is more than just an empty catchphrase heard at election time.



 

 

Niagara Falls Reporter - Publisher Frank Parlato Jr. www.niagarafallsreporter.com

Mar26, 2013