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The insensitivity of Mayor Irene Elia and others in her administration to the city's growing minority population is as astonishing as it is ugly. Her 16 months in office have been marked by one insult after another to the African-American community, which has shown remarkable restraint in dealing with the situation.
This pattern of behavior began during the 1998 mayoral campaign, when Elia chastised residents of the city's South End and Highland neighborhoods for their lack of "pride" and "self-respect." The rundown condition of many of the properties between Niagara Street and Pine Avenue wasn't the fault of the country club types who actually own most of these houses, she insinuated, but of the people forced for economic reasons to live there.
After her election, Elia and some other white people toured the South End in a bus, giving her yet another opportunity to "tsk, tsk" in the plainly biased local media.
Another slap in the face was delivered when Elia fired Renae Kimble as the city's Director of Human Rights and subsequently made no serious attempt to fill the position. The Human Rights office was the court of last resort for people of color who had been mistreated by landlords, government officials or the police, and its absence most certainly has been a factor in the current escalating tension.
At a recent meeting in a Highland Avenue church, residents gathered to share stories of police abuse, and one man, Jeff Street, attended a recent City Council meeting to report what appears to be an incident of racially motivated harassment by a city policeman.
Off the record, any number of the city's good cops will tell you that such things do take place, but Elia prefers to keep her head stuck firmly in the sand and pretend everything's rosy in her "clean and pristine" world.
Walking the halls at City Hall, the Public Safety Building, the water and wastewater treatment plants, any of the city's fire halls or the Public Works compound, one easily could get the impression that Niagara Falls is an all-white community. It most emphatically is not.
City Councilman Charles Walker is the African-American community's only effective voice in city government, and you can bet that a well-financed, Elia-backed campaign will be mounted to unseat him in November.
We're not saying Irene Elia is a racist. We're just saying she is as inept at race relations as she is at maintaining the city's streets, attracting new business or doing any of the other things a mayor is supposed to do.