The trees being removed are one thing.
The stalling on providing the addresses where four trees were removed under a $20,000 publicly funded contract change order, in our view, is an even bigger concern.
As a recap, Mayor Robert Restaino acknowledged on Thursday that two trees were removed from College Avenue where he lives — one on his property and a second on a neighbor’s property.
Although no one from the administration has said, the Niagara Gazette believes both trees were located on the right-of-way, the area between the sidewalk and the street.
It is possible, as the mayor told a reporter from the newspaper, that both trees were identified as in need of attention by the city forester. It’s also possible that both trees were on the city’s list of tree concerns for some time, perhaps even years.
Of course, we don’t know for sure because the administration has, for days now, stalled on clarifying the matter with relevant information.
What clouds the issue even more is the change order.
It was added, at Restaino’s request, to an existing $157,657 contract for tree removal services with a private firm, M2 Tree Service, Inc. of Westfield, New York. It was approved in June, apparently without adequate due diligence by the city council and without the mayor divulging addresses for the extra tree removal work, which averages out to $5,000 in public money per tree.
On Monday, Councilman Donta Myles asked the mayor’s brother, City Administrator Anthony Restaino, for more details about the work that was done and where it was done under the change order.
Our newspaper followed up on Wednesday with a request of our own to City Administrator Restaino.
We asked, very simply — can we have the addresses where the four trees, identified as “problematic” by the city’s engineering department, are located?
We CC’d all the council members on our email.
The response?
There hasn’t been any, not for days now.
A reporter from the newspaper interviewed Mayor Restaino following an event outside city hall on Thursday.
He acknowledged the removal of the two trees.
He also said he didn’t ask for the work to be done.
What he hasn’t said is whether the cost of the work was covered under the change order.
We can’t say for sure because we still don’t have the list.
We know this — if the addresses of the mayor and his neighbor are on it, then the mayor did, in a written request from his office to the city council in June, ask for approval to spend a portion of a $20,000 change order covered with interest from federal pandemic relief funds to take down those two trees.
The mayor told our reporter his administration hasn’t released more information because it is still in the process of gathering it together.
There’s no excuse for having to wait here.
It shouldn’t take days for an entire administration of city government to find four addresses.
This is clearly public information.
The mayor indicated that his office at city hall isn’t big enough to have everything in it.
Nobody’s asking for everything.
Just four addresses tied to a contract change order worth thousands of dollars in public money.
Residents and taxpayers deserve to see that list.