With me being a musician and thinking about possible excuses for Mayor Robert Restaino doing what he loves doing, instead of him doing what he was supposed to be doing, what came to my mind is the old 1968 Johnny Taylor song, “Who’s Making Love.” The song’s major (lyrics) are, “Who’s making love to your old lady, while you were out making love?”
The answer is simple. What Restaino was doing was what so many other mayors loved doing, and that is monument building. In the meantime, things that he was supposed to be doing were not timely done and some went undone.
Let’s bring some real light to the issues facing Niagara Falls and not let Restaino get it crooked again. He can blame neither Republican Councilman Vincent Cauley and Council Chairman David Zajac, nor me for the mayor not properly bringing the bright idea about street lighting improvement to the city council in a timely fashion. That timely fashion would have been him doing it at a regular city council meeting where the public could speak on it.
Restaino is a bright man, but he has to blame himself for arrogantly waiting until the last possible minute with presenting it in a special council meeting, and then later making a “my dog ate my homework” excuse for his failure to do so at regular council meetings.
Blowing a $10 million deal for free money to the city is Restaino’s own fault, and he needs to take full responsibility for it. With his total salary and benefits being nearly $100,000 in a city that has a $103 million budget, he alone is responsible for a mistake that is one-hundred times more than we are paying him.
Restaino has been out trying to build an unnecessary legacy to his own ego. While he should have been focusing on things like fixing the ragged roads, homicides, and other municipal housekeeping chores, including streetlights, he was focused on his monument building project that he calls Centennial Park.
But now it is not only the council’s responsibility to figure out why the mayor didn’t do his job in preventing the loss, it is likewise the press’ responsibility to also do so.
And the first thing that the council and the press needs to ask Restaino is what exactly was he doing when he should have been preparing the National Grid deal for presentation to the council.
More importantly, what the residents and taxpayers should also understand is that they could lose even more than simply tens of millions of dollars through Restaino’s personal dedication to his real love of following the failures of former Mayor Lackey’s convention center, and other mayors’ conference center, water board buildings, courthouse and police stations, train stations and such other municipal monument building.
What both the council and Restaino need to be doing is being dedicated to our jobs FIRST; and then when we get it right, we’ll have time to decorate the city as necessary.
What the mayor must remember is that though we work together, even the songs that people like Johny Taylor sings are not sung from a one-legged, or even two-legged local governmental stool. Democracy can be sung only from a third legged stool, and most important leg of any stool of small cities like our own are the voices of the people.
Council people like Cauley and me are dedicated to just that. If we have to take a million-dollar spanking to ourselves in order to build a billion-dollar city for our citizens, then we love our city enough to take that unjustified spanking, because Niagara Falls, and not ourselves, is indeed our first love.