Kicking Cahill to the Curb Now Beginning to Compute Dyster Getting his Reelection Ducks in a Row

John Cahill l was not looking to retire.  As a Republican Johnny Destino ran against the Democrat Dyster in 2011 and Dyster narrowly beat him despite having a heavy Democratic plurality in the city. With Dyster's waning popularity and Destino's switch to the Democratic party, many observers believe that Destino, if he ran a primary race against Dyster, would trounce the mayor. Mayor Paul Dyster gave John Cahill an ultimatum - "retire or I'll fire you and, if I fire you, you lose your health benefits."

On January 20 of this year the Reporter ran a story titled, "Dyster's removal of John Cahill does not compute."

Cahill was the city director of Management Information Services...in other words he was the city's "computer chief." Cahill was a long-time employee who was by all accounts qualified for his job and efficient. Well, qualified and efficient never trumps "connected" or "political" in the civil service abusing world of Mayor Paul Dyster. Cahill did not quit and technically he wasn't fired. Mayor Paul Dyster simply eliminated his position from the budget. The city did not need a director of Management Information Services anymore.

 Cahill did not - emphatically - did not want to quit and he attended several council budget meetings with his wife to literally plead with the council to put his job back in the budget.

For reasons best known to himself, Dyster ran Cahill out of city hall by craftily having his "budget team" place the mark of Cain on Cahill and as a result the computer expert was essentially "fired", not a voluntary "retiree", as Cahill's name was literally removed from the 2015 budget. Cahill never knew what hit him and by the time he did there was no way he could fight the quasi-dismissal since if he did choose to challenge the city he would lose his post employment health insurance benefit along with the $20,000 going away present engineered by Dyster as a lure for employees who were considering retirement.

 In our story of January 20 we wrote "The Reporter is predicting that the job (Cahill's job) will reemerge but without Cahill." And we further wrote, "The Reporter predicts that His Honor will fill the vacant position with a person directly connected to the Dyster campaign (2015 is an election year) or linked to Dyster's Buffalo supporters."

On April 13 the Buffalo News carried an Aaron Besecker story headed, "City of Niagara Falls considers Destino for top computer systems position." We understand that Destino is a trained computer person. But so was John Cahill. And we do know that while Johnny Destino is a good and decent person, he did run a close race against Mayor Dyster four years ago.

While Destino we have no doubt is looking to work at city hall and perform his work admirably, we can't help but wonder what motivated Dyster to eliminate Cahill's job from the budget then bring it back. Now we hear that Dyster is interviewing his former opponent - who he beat by the narrowest of margins.

Does Dyster figure Destino is less dangerous working in the ground floor office of the MIS department than going door to door seeking to be the next mayor?

Cahill was in effect fired before he retired and while Dyster removed his job from the budget as a cynical ploy meant to confound the taxpayers, the mayor knew all along he was going to give Cahill's job to a favored political individual in 2015.

Whether that individual is Johnny Destino or some other connected person remains to be seen, but we know exactly what Dyster is up to here...and now, so do you.