When Paul Dyster takes the oath of office and becomes the new mayor of Niagara Falls on Jan. 1, the former college professor, arms negotiator and councilman will arguably face challenges more severe and widespread than any of his predecessors in the top job at City Hall.
While the specter of insolvency and the state control board that goes with it no longer looms over every decision, thanks primarily to the infusion of casino revenue, outgoing Mayor Vincenzo V. Anello has saddled Dyster with a Department of Public Works decimated by four years of patronage-heavy management and an economic development branch unable to attract new businesses other than government-subsidized taverns and an alleged whorehouse masquerading as something called an "acupressure spa," as well as a corporation counsel's office the myriad conflicts of which are impossible to keep straight.
Oh, and then there's the ongoing federal probe into corruption at City Hall, triggered when the Niagara Falls Reporter revealed that Anello accepted at least $45,000 in payments from people connected to businesses requiring special treatment from his administration.
Dyster and his transition team started addressing these and other problems well in advance of his inauguration. In the week before Christmas, Damon DeCastro -- Anello's hand-picked, resigned-but-still-acting corporation counsel -- and John Soro, a patronage appointee at DPW who repeatedly incurred the wrath of workplace safety officials by ordering city employees into dangerous situations, were informed that their services were no longer required. Robert Curtis, the city engineer under Anello, will not be retained, either.
Dyster also made his first hire, tapping Dave Kinney -- a veteran of City Hall and Niagara County government -- to lead a reconfigured DPW. The mayor-to-be also announced that Fire Chief William McKay and Police Chief John Chella will be retained.
In the first installment of a two-part interview, Dyster explains the rationale behind starting a national search to fill five key jobs in his administration, positions historically filled by campaign supporters and party hacks, as well as his decisions to retain the heads of the city's public safety departments and some other appointed holdovers from previous administrations.
The second installment will run in the Jan. 8 edition.
Q. Why did you decide to start building your administration by naming a head of DPW?
A. People have asked, was that a reaction to the (mid-December) snowfall? It isn't directly. But because you take office in the beginning of winter, I think any incoming mayor has to be concerned about keeping essential services functioning, and this was a department that clearly needed some reorganization. That probably was important in terms of where you go looking for candidates. This is a place where you're looking for a steady hand, a tried-and-true person. It was a relatively small pool of individuals. I approached Dave Kinney. I knew there was a situation there at DPW that was probably going to have to be addressed on day one and I was trying to think of who was a person I could send there on day one who was familiar with the operation of the department.
Q. Before your predecessor took office, he and his city administrator made a lot of forming "blue-ribbon panels" that wound up deciding the best-qualified candidates for most jobs happened to be Anello's relatives and campaign supporters. Why should people think that won't happen again?
A. We're running a national search for five key positions in the administration: City administrator, corporation counsel, city engineer, a restored position of economic development director -- this would be the position that existed before (Donald) Zuchelli was hired as a contractor, he was eliminated but the position wasn't restored -- and an upgraded tourism position that we're calling director of tourism development. Not a marketing person, not a liaison with NTCC -- we pay them enough money, we should be able to liaison with them without hiring someone to do it -- but someone who can work on tourism-related projects in the city of Niagara Falls and who can work on enhancing the visitor experience here. We have NTCC to do market research and to promote our city as a destination, so their job is to get people here, but we need to be certain that once they get here, they've got something to do and that they have a good experience. This is going to be a high priority, and we need to put people where we think the strategic priority is.
Bill Bradberry has agreed to remain (as city administrator) pending the outcome of the search, which means that it's entirely possible that he'll be a candidate in the search. No guarantees have been made, but he has very graciously agreed to stay on.
Q. Why did you decide against keeping DeCastro and Curtis in their positions pending the outcome of the national search?
A. Those were policy decisions. We thought we could get by with the corporation counsel's job vacant pending the search, thinking that the deputy, Tom O'Donnell, could fill in where needed, but we've been advised that we should elevate him to the role of acting corporation counsel in the interim. So that's what we're going to do.
With regards to the engineer's position, that was vacant for some time prior to Mr. Curtis being hired, and in consulting with people who know something about this, if you did require a licensed engineer acting on the city's behalf, those services can be purchased on a fee basis from some of the same contractors who work on city projects. We're not suggesting we want to go in this direction, but in our search for information on this, we even found some municipalities that don't have city engineers, that contract all of it out but maintain a staff right up to that position. So we don't anticipate a problem with that.
Q. How "national" is the national search?
A. We're not discouraging local people from applying. What we're trying to do is cast a broad net so that we're certain that we're availing ourselves of the best talent that's available to us. We're trying to look outside the normal pool of applicants to see if there are different ways of approaching these positions that maybe we haven't thought of or haven't considered that would be appealing to us in moving forward.
We said we were going to have an administration that's based on merit and by moving in this direction with five key positions within the administration, as mayor, I am in effect voluntarily surrendering some of my patronage power. I could use these positions to put in place people who are my political loyalists and build some kind of a power base doing this.
That's the way things often have been done in the past. I think people said they want to do something very, very different from that. I'm not uncomfortable working in an environment in which you have other independent-minded professionals who are not cronies in some way. They obviously have to be sympathetic to the policy goals and work for the mayor, but hiring those people in a process where there is an independent judgment of merit before you get to the finalists, I think is the right way to go.
We debated long and hard with regard to some of the positions, like city administrator. We know there's a local knowledge component, but we felt since it's the top appointed position in the administration, if we held that out of the national search, that we couldn't really say we were doing a national search for the top, or key, positions. So we decided to include it.
We have received some applications already from some people outside of the area. It's a national search, but we know that it's also the case that you may still get a larger number of applications from the northeast region than anyplace else. Within the northeast region, you'll get a larger number of applications from Western New York than from Massachusetts or something like that. And within the Western New York region, you may get more from Buffalo or Niagara Falls than from Jamestown. But that doesn't invalidate doing the national search, in our view.
Q. How is the search being conducted?
A. We're using search firms, or head-hunter firms. Head-hunter firms utilize their own contact lists, they maintain their own databases, they track Web sites where people are posting credentials, they track journals in professional fields, so they have the ability to reach out to people. We feel that's the best way to get the largest possible reach. That process is getting underway as we speak.
The process of the search and interviews and hiring decisions -- I think you're looking at at least 60 days and as much as 90 days.
We're trying to have a merit-driven process and we're trying to get away from patronage. You've also got people who are serving in exempt positions who have risen to those positions after long service as civil servants who don't deserve to be fired simply because the administration changes. They have no legal claim on an expectation of continuation in their positions, but on the other hand, it seems to me as though they've got sort of an ethical or moral claim to be judged based on their performance.
Some people might say, "You want to shake things up, so you should come in the first day and just fire everyone." That isn't shaking things up, that's kind of doing things the way it has usually been done. To shake things up, what you do is actually evaluate people based on their performance, so we're trying to do that.
What we're trying to do is, we're trying to fairly evaluate people who are in current positions, and if we think that they've been doing a good job and there is not a reason to change them, we're going to retain those people.
Q. Why did you decide to retain Fire Chief William McKay and Police Chief John Chella, rather than add those jobs to the national search?
A. During the campaign, I talked about a desire to depoliticize the chiefs of police and fire. I talked about this back when I was on the City Council.
I don't think that necessarily means you're talking about making these civil service positions. I think there is policy content to those positions. They have to be responsive to political leadership. If, for example, I were to go to a chief of police or fire and say, "I have concerns about diversity on the force and I want to institute major diversity programs designed to increase minority recruitment" -- this, by the way, is not a hypothetical point -- and that person said, "Well, I don't think we've got a problem there and I don't want to do it," I want to be able to say, "You're fired."
On the other hand, I don't think there should be an assumption with regard to those positions that they serve only at the whim of political leaders and that there's no assumption that there's a neutral way of judging job performance. I know that in the past, the fact those positions were acutely political, intensely political, has broken out into some of the uglier political incidents that have occurred in the city.
There was even an incident, and I won't say specifically but everybody knows what I'm talking about, that there were allegations that maybe public safety services weren't being evenly distributed, that you got different treatment depending on whose side you were on in this dispute. That is absolute poison. It has to end, can never happen again.
The reappointment of McKay was relatively easy. I had absolutely nothing but good reviews about him from basically everyone. That includes the union guys within his own department, who in the past have always been angry with whoever their chief was, even if their chief was making other people angry on their behalf.
Chief McKay has been very, very active in the community, appears to be extremely progressive -- when we I sat down with him, he was already talking about things like green firehouses. He was talking about increasing on-board computer capability on the equipment in order to be able to derive more information as you're driving as to what the characteristics are of the building you're going to. These are exactly the directions in which I would like to head.
He shared my concerns and is already starting to work on diversity issues within the department and generally has taken the time, aside from fulfilling his duties as chief, to become active in the community.
One of the things that I think has been a problem is that we've had mayors who have wanted to be the center of attention in city government. And the mayor is always going to be the center of attention. But there should be other community leaders who also have stature and who are viewed as representatives of the city. I think it's important that we build people up. We only have five City Council members, and each of them should have the opportunity to become a community leader in their own right. They're elected at-large by the population of the whole city, and so I think each of them deserves that opportunity.
I think it's also the case with the leaders of public safety. They have to have the respect of the community and they should be viewed as having a stature that isn't just because they're the mayor's guy or girl, but because they are someone that is respected for the professional expertise they have and their dedication to the community. For not being here so very long, McKay seems to be a model.
Q. Chief McKay was criticized, including on the pages of the Reporter,after citing Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church officials for housing youth volunteers in the building's basement shortly after the church's pastor spoke out against a motorcycle rally supported by Anello. Was that an obstacle to reappointing him?
A. He told me that from his perspective, he was just doing his job. They didn't go looking for that situation. Once it was called to their attention, he had no choice but to go and enforce the code. He didn't tell me how it came to his attention. Somebody said, "Hey, they've got kids sleeping in that basement. Is that legal?" Once that was called to his attention, he had no choice but to investigate it.
Q. How did you decide to reappoint Chief Chella, rather than open that job?
A. I had worked with Chella previously. At the time the casino was opening, we went over to Canada and talked to them about their creation of a casino investigation and patrol unit. It was obvious from the way that his Canadian counterparts talked to Chella that they had a huge respect for him and his professionalism.
As I went around talking to people, I talked to his peers and people he works with at the state level, looked at the crime statistics in the city and talked to a lot of different people in all segments of the community. I heard a variety of opinions about a lot of different issues that affect the police department, but the vast majority of input that I got on Chella was very positive.
In the process of doing that, people raised issues with regards to specific situations and policing out in the community, where they had questions in the last couple of years.
I tried to investigate each of those, because if you're taking office as a new mayor where there's an ongoing FBI corruption investigation, the decision to hire a police chief is an absolutely critical decision. There's a huge public spotlight on it, and you don't want to get it wrong. So I spent a lot of time chasing down various leads about different things, and in the end, there was nothing I found that reflected poorly on the current chief in any way.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Dec. 28 2007 |