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APR 28 - MAY 05, 2015

Choolokian on the Centennial Circle Jerk

By Glenn Choolokian
Candidate for Mayor of Niagara Falls and current council member

April 28, 2015

How can this possibly keep happening?

It's incredible, and almost unfathomable, that Mayor Paul Dyster continues to drain our city funds on frivolous things.

Last night - against my vote  - the Niagara Falls City Council majority approved handing Mayor Dyster $50,000 of casino funds to help fund the downtown Centennial Circle project.

State taxpayers will also pay $50,000 via USA Niagara.

This $100,000 will join more than $300,000 of valuable and scarce Greenway money allocated to Niagara Falls to purportedly put some kind of art - based on Dyster's sensibilities of what is art - in a small traffic circle.

With his continuous lack of common sense, Dyster always seems to have outside interest groups in mind and not the taxpayers of Niagara Falls. This is just another example.

Before this is over, most of the more than $400,000 will wind up in the hands of the usual suspects. People connected to Dyster and his interests. This is another Dyster spending spree.

With nearly $200 million dollars of casino cash having come to Niagara Falls how are we talking about a current tax increase and a fiscal year where  we started $280,000 in the hole? 

How is this possible? Would any other small city be in this mess with the kind of casino cash we have taken in?

Would the other cities that lost out on being the host community of a tribal casino believe this was possible?

I can hardly believe it myself.

After some $200 million in casino cash - the city of Niagara Falls is in worse shape financially than before the casino arrived in 2003. 

As I have said it in the past, under Dyster - who has controlled most of the casino cash - we have broke a key law of investment by failing to pay ourselves.

We paid the consultants, we paid out of town developers to do business here, we even paid out of town vendors, while failing to set aside some of the casino windfall for our own city and for our taxpayers.

It is simple- it should be about "our"  families.

 

 

 

 

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