I was struck, during the recent election cycle, by the reluctance of candidates for the Niagara Falls City Council to discuss the two biggest elephants in the room. The winners, Council Chairman Charles Walker and newcomers Sam Fruscione and Chris Robins, avoided the topics of Mayor Vince Anello's precarious legal situation and the distinct possibility that a control board lies in the city's immediate future as though they were radioactive.
There was plenty of talk about library funding, the construction of the new public safety building on Main Street, the need to become more "aggressive" -- whatever that means -- and the usual boilerplate of optimism, new ideas and accountability. It was almost surreal, as if the officers on the sinking Titanic had busied themselves preparing the evening dinner menu as the great ship went down.
The race was so lacking in substance that fewer than 6,000 of the city's approximately 20,000 registered voters even bothered to cast ballots.
Make no mistake, every day Anello shows up at City Hall is a day that potential developers and investors stay away. Niagara Tourism and Convention Corp. President David Rosenwasser has said as much, on the record, to several different news organizations, and any number of players interviewed by the Reporter have said the same thing. So long as the looming shadow of possible indictments hangs over City Hall, you can bet that nothing will be accomplished on the development front.
Anello is not simply a bad mayor, he's a community-wide disaster. His tax increase and friends-and-family hiring policy, along with his mishandling of the library fiasco and charges of institutional racism at the city's Department of Public Works, would have qualified him for the former title, but it is his status as a focus of the combined state and federal Official Corruption Task Force that places him squarely in the latter category.
And although Fruscione, Robins and Walker largely ignored this ongoing disaster during their recent campaigns, their first order of business in January should be to join with Councilmen Bob Anderson and Babe Rotella in passing a resolution, a vote of no confidence, asking the mayor to step aside until the investigation is resolved one way or another.
To do any less would be a disservice to the entire city.
Another disaster waiting in the wings that received no attention during the campaign is the possibility of a control board, similar to those already in place in Buffalo and Erie County, stepping in to oversee the finances here.
It could come as early as next year, and will, unless Council has the fortitude to put the knife to the mayor's bloated budget. Last week, Council picked a fine place to start, proposing the elimination of do-nothing, make-work jobs created by Anello over the past two years. Jobs with titles like golf director, events coordinator, tourism director, risk manager, parking director and grants writer were created specifically to provide high-paying jobs for the cadre of politically connected vagrants who helped Anello into office during the 2003 election cycle.
Not only would the elimination of these unnecessary offices save the city a ton of money, it would go a long way toward showing the citizenry and interested law enforcement personnel that Niagara Falls will no longer tolerate a government based on the politics of personal enrichment.
Along the same lines, Council might do well to consider legislation making it a firing offense for a city employee to be convicted of a crime such as assault, theft or drug-dealing, crimes for which a number of current municipal workers have entered guilty pleas.
And while they're at it, would random drug testing of all city workers and officials be a bad idea? It's a common practice in private industry.
The budget is further littered with detritus seemingly designed to create a slush fund, such as the $40,000 earmarked for the 13th Street Playground, a piece of property the city no longer owns. Line by line, the Council needs to go through the document and ruthlessly exorcise such waste.
A hiring freeze should be imposed immediately, and residency laws should be strictly enforced. In this vein, the Council might want to take a look at the residency of City Administrator Dan Bristol, who lives in Wilson.
And every effort should be made to farm work out. The school district, for example, has offered to make its risk management services available to the city, and Sheriff Tom Beilein has long advocated a countywide centralized dispatch for police and fire services.
While some in the city's unions might object to these fiscally responsible measures, that view is shortsighted. A hard control board, empowered to negate any and all city contracts, is the last thing any union member should want to see here.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Nov. 22 2005 |