No Cost Savings with Dyster-Owens Garbage Plan

Mayor Dyster and City Administrator Owens said their garbage plan would save taxpayers $500,000 a year. Now they admit it will save only $100,000 while drastically cutting services. Before it is over, we predict, it will be discovered that, not only will services be cut drastically, but will cost taxpayers drastically more.

The mayor and his city administrator originally pitched the new refuse contract as a cost saving measure that would reduce the amount paid by the city by $500,000 a year, based on laughable projections that depend on Niagara Falls going from having the worst recycling record in Western New York to the best almost overnight.

That potential savings has already been whittled down to around $100,000 by the administration, and the great likelihood is that residential properties going off the tax rolls and small businesses closing due to increased costs and penalties, along with additional but as yet unknown costs incurred by the DPW to administer the complicated new program will more than offset the paltry "savings" that have been optimistically projected.

Dyster added an additional $380,928 per year in order to: provide pickup at Packard Court and Jordan Gardens; pickup for 400 city businesses; city wide pickup of weekly yard clippings in clear bags; and, city wide pickup of leaf waste in clear bags.

Like other Dyster initiatives arrived at with no input whatsoever from those in the community most affected by them, the new garbage collection ordinance is an engineered disaster, a series of trials and tribulations that will result in an attempt to fix a problem that didn't exist in the first place.