Don't Give Me That Trash, I'm Council Woman Grandinetti!

Kristen Grandinetti’s home at 710 Orchard Parkway has something that shouldn’t be there: garbage bags. She, along with Mayor Paul Dyster, pushed to make the use of these illegal --for everyone but her. Note Grandinetti’s totes are sitting in her driveway (right of house).

For as long as trash bags have been in existence, which is to say since around 1950, the people of Niagara Falls have been permitted to use them to throw out their trash.

It wasn't until 2014, when Mayor Paul A. Dyster changed that with his new trash plan which features the famous reverse sized totes - the 64 gallon blue tote for refuse and the 96 gallon for recycling. All other municipalities in the USA offer the reverse - the larger totes for refuse, the smaller totes for recycling.

Dyster also sought to outlaw the use of garbage bags and metal garbage cans.

While other council members had doubts, one woman on the council staunchly stood by him and did what she always does for Dyster proposals, no matter how hare brained or wasteful: she supported it without question.

That lady, of course, is everyone's favorite Dyster sycophant, Councilmember Kristen Grandinetti.

Yet, while everyone is supposed to be following the new trash program, and while Mayor Dyster even hired four trash inspectors to make sure everyone follows the rules and uses the totes and not garbage bags any more - at least one person is defiant of the new trash plan, which will cost the city more money and pick up less trash than ever before in the city's history.

According to our friends at www.niagaraspipeline.com, that person is Kristen Grandinetti.

While the average city resident is expected to comply - the above-the-law council woman - who posts videos on her Facebook of six-year-old girls saying the f work - (covered under the First Amendment), took $6,5000 more than she was entitled in health insurance opt out payments (claims she didn't know she was getting the family rate and not the single rate) and tried to have Sam Fruscione arrested for possessing a political cartoon at city hall (which is protected by first amendment). Grandinetti apparently feels that the very trash rules she helped create are for the little people not for such as her.

The little people are not supposed to use trash bags. They must use the totes. And the trash inspectors - led by her friend, chief trash inspector Brooke D'Angelo - are supposed to give warning to first-time offenders and later see that repeat offenders are fined. But Grandinetti is exempt from such petty rules.

Grandinetti is a neighbor of Mayor Dyster and, according to Niagara's Pipeline, their street, Orchard Parkway, gets trash pickup on Mondays. One of the Pipeline's readers sent this picture of Grandinetti's home on a Wednesday -- with full trash bags.

Some say it is only right that elected officials should not have to obey the laws they create since, after all, if they are great enough to create them, they don't need to follow them. But not all would agree.

Lord Acton said "there is no worse heresy than the office sanctifies the holder of it."

How true that is in this case.