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Over the past several months, Mayor Irene Elia and the seven members of the City Council have shown themselves to be completely incapable of dealing with the fiscal crisis confronting Niagara Falls.
Elia's proposed 27 percent tax increase was an obscenity in a city where fully half the population is living below the poverty level. The council now wishes to be patted on the back for reducing the increase to 15 percent. They deserve a collective kick in the pants instead.
No one, it seems, has the creativity, courage, imagination, brains or willpower to deal with spending that any rational observer would identify as completely out of control.
The mayor urges us to "all hold hands" while Council Chairman Anthony Quaranto speaks of Niagara Falls as a "great city" on the "comeback trail." At the same time, they pick the pockets of every hardworking man and woman trying to make a living here.
They didn't want to cut jobs, they said. The jobs they were referring to were those of city workers, however, not those of employees at pizza parlors and other small businesses that most certainly will close as a result of their warped economic views.
As we see it, there is but one solution: Allow the city to go bankrupt so the state can send in a team of competent individuals to come in and run things. Drastic, to be sure, but no more drastic than a disastrous tax hike that everyone--from the Chamber of Commerce to homeowners in the city's most marginal neighborhoods--recognizes will drive residents and businesses alike from the city in droves.
In 1978, Cleveland became the first major city since the great Depression to go into default. For years, a comedic staple of Johnny Carson monologues, Cleveland had a river that caught fire, a blighted downtown and politicians as incapable as those in Niagara Falls of doing anything at all to address the situation.
Now, less than 25 years later, Cleveland serves as a model of municipal planning. With the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Jacobs Field and a new football stadium, the downtown has become an exciting place that draws visitors by the millions. Once-crumbling neighborhoods have been repopulated by young urban professionals eager to find bargain-priced housing. Bankruptcy. It's coming sooner or later, anyway--why not just get it over with?