Our friend Lewis "Babe" Rotella called last week to say he was going to run for one of the two open seats on the Niagara Falls City Council. A lot of people around town thought he should've run for mayor.
A blue-collar guy who built a multimillion-dollar business, Rotella owned Niagara Frontier Ambulance here until selling out to Rural Metro Ambulance in 1996. He has since held an executive position with that company.
Born and bred in Niagara Falls, he raised a family here with his beautiful wife of 35 years, Marge. Earlier this year, he was appointed by Gov. George Pataki to the New York State Athletic Commission.
An early supporter of the Reporter, Rotella would bring a level of business savvy to the City Council that has been sorely lacking in recent memory.
"I just thought it was time to get involved. I go to all the meetings and I enjoy it," he said. "I think, with my business background, I can bring a lot to the table."
We think so too.
There was a lot of feedback on the parking meter story last week, including that of a number of people old enough to remember when there were meters not only in the city's South End, but in the North End and on Pine Avenue as far as Hyde Park Boulevard.
"It was those meters that drove half the businesses out of Niagara Falls and out to Wheatfield and the Town of Niagara," said one former Pine Avenue restaurateur. "Some people never learn."
A common definition of insanity is repeating the same mistake over and over again, expecting each time to get a different result. By that definition, our city government is certifiable.
In the lamer-than-lame category, the Niagara Gazette stands in a class by itself. A week ago Friday, after South End entrepreneur Frank Amendola sued the city over its crazy parking meter plan, the Gazette successively failed to get the story into its Saturday, Sunday or Monday editions.
Only on Tuesday -- more than 18 hours after the story was posted on the Reporter Web page -- did the crack investigative team of Jill Terreri and Tim Marren, whoever they are, track it down for the Gazette's front page.
Woodward and Bernstein they're not, but it's good to see that Gazette management is finally taking the time to show its rookie reporters how to use the Internet.
Fortunately, while they can steal our stories, they haven't been too successful when it comes to stealing our advertisers. Last Tuesday's Gazette featured just 13 mostly postage stamp-sized display ads, while 35 advertisers chose the Reporter to get their message to the people of the Niagara Frontier in a big way.
The ill-conceived plan to change the southbound lanes of the Robert Moses Parkway into an eco-tourism attraction claimed a life last week. Steven "T-Bone" Porter, a local musician, was killed when he was struck by a car on the parkway near Devil's Hole.
He was 22.
The tree-huggers who intensely lobbied the state to close the southbound lanes and wrote dozens of mind-numbingly dull and endless letters to the editors of local newspapers were strangely silent. In fact, they've been strangely silent since succeeding in their campaign a couple of years ago.
After getting what they wanted -- and the cash-strapped state was all too happy not to have to maintain the roadway any longer -- the Birkenstock-shod nature lovers, who said the city would soon be inundated with plaid-shirted outdoorsmen coming to look at the Gorge from the closed highway, drifted back into the woods from whence they came.
They left the city with another eyesore, an abandoned road that's now in worse disrepair than the Appian Way in Rome. Worse yet, they created a hazard for motorists and pedestrians alike.
And, last week, their harebrained scheme contributed to the death of a young man who had his whole life ahead of him.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 10 2003 |