Joe Paulk, Emmett Cox and Hugh Leftwich -- three of the six black Department of Public Works employees who are suing the city over what they call a pattern of institutional discrimination in municipal hiring practices -- lashed out at Mayor Vince Anello and the Niagara Gazette for criticism of their efforts to attract more minority candidates for city jobs.
In an article entitled "Job fair stirs controversy," Gazette writer Rick Pfeiffer detailed Anello's displeasure at having more than 65 black people show up at City Hall last Wednesday looking for work.
"To begin with, we never called it a job fair, that was something the Gazette made up," Cox told the Reporter. "What we did was, joining in with the 18 churches of the Niagara Falls Ministerial Council, let people know that the city maintains an office five days a week to take employment applications."
The men told job seekers they would be on hand Wednesday to assist in the application process.
"How can the mayor make a controversy out of something that's supposed to be a positive development?" Leftwich said. "He came over and shook our hands. He had his picture taken with us. Then he reamed us the next day in the newspaper."
Anello told the Gazette the city wasn't hiring, and that the deadline for temporary summer help ended in April.
Cox wondered why the start of the summer hiring hadn't been announced publicly.
"They don't want to announce this because they want to hire from their own families, their own regimes," he said. "We all know that some of these jobs are politically appointed. But now, when you're hiring off the street, why does it have to be that way? We're all paying taxes in Niagara Falls."
Paulk took particular umbrage at the accusation by Anello they "shouldn't have raised people's hopes" by encouraging them to apply for city jobs.
"This administration is the one giving out false hope," he said. "They say there aren't any jobs and yet they've got a personnel office open five days a week."
Paulk, Cox, Leftwich and the other DPW workers involved in the suit say they won't be satisfied with any monetary award handed them individually by the state Supreme Court.
In fact, as the city's Corporation Counsel has been working feverishly to settle the case out of court, the six plaintiffs in the case seem eager for a jury trial.
"This isn't about us, it's about a system that's wrong and one that needs to be corrected," Paulk said. "They can't buy our silence on this."
Since the Reporter broke the story last November, Anello has variously blamed the way "people were brought up" for racial prejudice in Niagara Falls, attacked both the workers and this newspaper for bringing the matter up in the first place and done absolutely nothing to correct the situation.
Anello's appointment of former DPW Director Paul Colangelo as the city's "grants writer" when Colangelo was at the center of the racially charged lawsuit did little to encourage the city's black population.
Colangelo, who has rarely shown up for work since his appointment and has yet to secure a single grant for the city, had the nerve to say that the taxpayers of Niagara Falls will be outraged once they learn of the six DPW employees' work histories.
That the lawsuit brought by Paulk, Cox, Leftwich and the others will cost the taxpayers of Niagara Falls millions of dollars is a given.
That the Anello administration's stumbling and bumbling in regards to the situation will continue is probably also a pretty safe bet.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | May 25 2004 |