Well, that tears it. Last week Mayor Paul Dyster and the weak-kneed City Council that services him went ahead and committed $44 million to build a new train station in a lonely, isolated corner of one of the city's worst neighborhoods.
That's $44 million that won't be spent on fixing the streets, or hiring more cops to help curb the out-of-control levels of violent crime we deal with here every day. Forty-four million dollars to make things nicer for the 23,754 souls who Amtrak says arrive in Niagara Falls each year by rail.
That number is trending downward and has fallen in each of the past three years.
As was pointed out last week, that is about one quarter of 1 percent of the people who come to the city each year.
The rest drive down the barely paved Buffalo Avenue, occasionally having accidents because of the poor road conditions over which the city has been repeatedly sued.
You never read about these lawsuits, because our joke of a City Council discusses them behind closed doors in "executive session" and our joke of a city Law Department settles them out of court.
The mayor did an interview with Dave McKinley of Channel 2 following the groundbreaking at his new train station. McKinley asked him why anyone would ride a train rather than fly from New York to Niagara Falls, when a flight costs half as much and the train takes nine hours. Dyster froze as if in caught the headlights of an oncoming locomotive.
"You take a train ride for a lot of different reasons," he finally sputtered. "You take a train ride sometimes because you want to ride the train, right?"
Later, when asked if he was spending $44 million of the people's money on an "if you build it, they will come" philosophy, Dyster became visibly agitated.
"Is that what you want me to say?" he asked indignantly.
Neither Amtrak nor CSX, which owns the train tracks, have signed off on Dyster's little project. There is every chance in the world that the money will be spent and the new train station built, only to have the railroads say they aren't going to use it.
Dyster and "City Planner" Tom DeSantis tarted the white elephant up a bit by manufacturing some sort of phony connection between the city's North End and the Underground Railroad, and plan to have a museum and "interpretive center" dedicated to this pseudo-history.
In a way that would only make sense in Niagara Falls, it's kind of fitting.
We'll be the only city in the United States that has a train station no trains come to and houses a museum highlighting a history that never happened.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Aug. 31, 2010 |