Only in NT: Fire Them if They Don't Start Listening to Us!

 

 

Have you ever driven through the City or Town of Tonawanda’s or the Town of Amherst’s business-industrial areas? Have you noticed signs advertising the availability of vacant property or land in their communities? Have you noticed they have good roads that make those vacant sites more appealing to potential new owners or occupants?

Why has it taken a decade for the Buffalo Bolt Business Park to become a reality? Why is it still mostly a vacant, untended area behind a fence with no indication it fronts a business park with available property?

Why hasn’t LCDC courted some large medical groups, like Buffalo Medical Group, which has locations in Buffalo and its suburbs, wonderful buildings, large parking lots, and sometimes hundreds of patients an hour? A friend recently shared an experience at BMG’s Amherst location where several patients complained they had to come all the way from Grand Island and Niagara Falls to Amherst because there is no such place in Niagara County.

Why can’t LCDC go after such groups to build a Niagara County site in the Buffalo Bolt Business Park? The combination of their medical personnel and their huge patient caseload would be a valuable contribution to renewing Oliver Street!

Envision the restaurants and shops such a medical group at that location could bring to Oliver Street! NT might even figure out how to get Oliver Street properly repaired, create public parking in some of the empty lots or where there are decrepit structures in need of demolition so customers of new restaurants and shops will have places to park!

Open Buffalo Bolt through to River Road, whatever you have to do with the railroad. Since you haven't found other businesses to locate there, medical offices that don't block the view of the waterfront for all of us, drugstores, a dollar store, other shopping businesses, not the kind on Webster, would bring people back to Oliver. If it’s possible to put restaurants for the working class there without digging into the environmental nightmare below, that would be great.

Why not turn the dead end portion of Schenck west of Oliver into a parking lot? There are several areas along Oliver Street with blacktopped lots from previous businesses. Instead of leaving them idle or selling them off, why not make them Oliver Street business district parking lots?

The Council is planning to use casino funds to add 25 planters on Webster and decorative signs for Webster and Oliver. If money is spent so foolishly, will NT take care of what is planted? Will they again make merchants responsible for flowers as they did about a decade or so ago? Why did NT remove the original ones a couple of years ago anyhow?

Wouldn’t it be simpler to use NT's Botanical Gardens greenhouse to grow annuals, offer them to merchants who buy their own pots and plant them, water them, and put them away in the fall?

Why not fix up the benches installed along Oliver which now look abused and ugly. Hopefully, the new decorative signs won't be like the silly little hard-to-read ones they installed previously on Oliver. Oliver Street banners are getting tattered and have names of sponsors no longer in business. The pony project which never was completed also has names of no longer existing sponsors. Several ponies are missing their tails.

Instead of a waste-of-time one-day Oliver Street cleanup for photo opportunities for NT politicians, why not do something the City is responsible for doing and doesn't do very well--clean up its parks, including Buffalo Bolt park.

Instead of hot dog stands and concerts, give residents the amenities we deserve. Budget to properly maintain them and the infrastructure. Don't tell us you can only do so many miles of streets a year when you ignore some streets for years on end and put the money into others that aren't as much in need of repair.

Eliminate the tacky “art” on the Fish Place and the ugly “painting” at the corner of Schenck.

Why hasn’t something been done with the Mirror Room, Wagenschuetz building? Why isn’t Mr. Brown required to make his buildings safe inside for his tenants while you help him fix the outsides?

Why not find a creative new use for the old Hungarian church building and the old Pee Wee’s, both owned by George Maziarz’s brother?

Fix the damn road!!!!! Not piecemeal to patronize your political supporters but the entire length of the street from the Town of Wheatfield to Sweeney Street!