A lot of stupid things happened this week. Let's see if I can remember them all.
There was the decision by City Councilmen Sam Fruscione, Chris Robins and Charles Walker to allow a Canadian firm to install high-tech parking meters in front of my house and every other building and vacant lot between Niagara Street and Buffalo Avenue, a plan first thought of by our greatest former mayor, Irene Elia. News reports indicate that electronic sensors will be placed "beneath the asphalt" on the street in front of each meter to monitor how long a vehicle has been parked.
Fruscione justified his boneheaded and shortsighted vote in favor of the project by saying something to the effect of "we'll get money out of it and it won't cost anything for six months," demonstrating once again that he has all the financial acumen of a welfare mother buying furniture at Rent-a-Center.
Who's going to pay to smash up and repave the downtown streets -- again -- in order to install the electronic sensors? The parking meter company? Don't bet on it. And if the city decides for whatever reason that it's not happy with the deal, are the streets to be broken up again so that the sensors can be removed?
And what of the revenue, if any, generated by the meters? Will it go toward paying down city debt, lowering taxes or improving the city's crumbling infrastructure? Again, don't bet on it. Five will get you 10 that Mayor Vince Anello's on again, off again "director of parking," Louis Cheff, will once again find employment to "oversee the meter program."
File this under "disaster waiting to happen" and remember it when Fruscione, Robins and Walker next run for election.
Just when I thought the Council couldn't be any stupider, though, it went ahead and voted unanimously to give $500,000 to the Niagara Arts and Cultural Center to put a new roof on their "facility," the crumbling and dilapidated eyesore known as the old high school at the corner of Portage and Pine.
This was another one of those deals that wasn't going to cost anything, remember? Thus far, it has cost the school district -- which had already agreed to sell the property to Benderson Development -- more than a million dollars. Benderson was going to build a shopping center there, which would have put the property back on the tax rolls and resulted in significant revenue for the city. Now it's cost us another half-million to fix a leaky roof that the geniuses running the place knew was leaky when they acquired the property.
Back in 2001, as a tiny but vocal group of "preservationists" bullied the Council and the school board into going along with the deal, we predicted on this page that it would end up costing the city at least $3 million. You can look it up. Well, they burned through that figure some time ago, and -- given the Council's inexplicable action this week -- it appears as though there's no end in sight.
They say about 100 artists are currently occupying the building. For the money the beleaguered city taxpayers are shelling out, they better be a bunch of Picassos.
The whole mess makes me want to take a sabbatical. And write a children's book. I'm going to call it "Dick Cheney's Grandkid Has Two Mommies."
In case you haven't heard, Cheney's lesbian daughter, Mary, and her partner, Heather Poe, are expecting. Mary Cheney's the one who's actually pregnant.
Talk about family values! Vice President Dick Cheney's the second-highest elected official of a political party that has actually adopted bigoted planks opposing both gay marriage and gay adoption. His wife, Lynn, although she's the author of a lesbian-themed potboiler herself, is a right-wing political firebrand, a harpy forever harping on behalf of conservative and evangelical causes.
Between his wife and his daughter, it's little wonder that our vice president is always out having a heart attack, shooting a trial lawyer in the face or avoiding comment from an undisclosed location.
Anyway, I think "Dick Cheney's Grandkid Has Two Mommies" has plenty of potential for readers of every political stripe and possible prejudice. Way more than, say, "Heather Has Two Mommies," a book that many Cheney supporters fought to have banned when it was published in 1990.
Quote-of-the-week honors go out to county Legislator Danny Sklarski, who balked at a state commission report recommending that the troubled Mount View Health Facility be closed.
"Shame on them to tell us what to do with taxpayer money," said Sklarski, D-Bizarroland.
That somebody ought to tell the Legislature what to do with taxpayer money is a given here in Niagara County. Maybe, that way, we could all avoid the embarrassment that comes when a national publication such as "Reader's Digest" holds Sklarski and his confederates up as poster children for bad government following their truly shameful squandering of the county's tobacco settlement money.
When it comes down to it, I think I would have more faith in the fiscal judgment of just about any bum I tripped over in an alley than I would for most members of the Legislature.
Not to insult any bums or anything.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 12 2006 |