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AT LEAST ANELLO GAVE US ALL PLENTY TO TALK ABOUT HIS FRESHMAN YEAR

By David Staba

After Vincenzo V. Anello's election as Mayor of Niagara Falls in November 2003, the Niagara Falls Reporter published an analysis warning of the pitfalls that awaited him as he took on one of the most thankless jobs in modern civilization.


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"Each of the three mayors before him took office vowing a new way of governing," the article read. "And each time, the new way turned out to be remarkably similar to the old way, with patronage distribution, fierce parochialism and personal vendettas taking precedence over what was best for all of Niagara Falls."

Hey, you can't say we didn't try.

Perhaps he thought we meant that description as a complement, since it has embodied his administration since before Day One. During his first year in office, Anello made Jake Palillo, Jim Galie and Irene Elia seem downright statesmanlike by comparison.

In a span of 12 months, he managed to alienate scores of the people who helped get him elected -- at least the ones who didn't get a cushy City Hall job created for them at taxpayer expense. Business owners, job seekers with actual qualifications for the jobs they sought, city employees, bank officers, developers, library workers and patrons, golfers who play at Hyde Park Golf Course, block club members and plain old taxpayers all learned a harsh lesson in 2004 -- it's Vince's way or no way.

Disagree with the mayor, and he yells. Agree with him, and he might still yell.

Such bold leadership might not be so bad if he actually had initiated anything besides larding up the city payrolls with fancy-sounding titles and handsome salaries for friends, family and flunkies, or guided anybody anywhere. It's not really leading if no one follows.

The mayor likes to whine about negativity from the media. We weren't really sure who he meant, since The Other Paper in town shamefully gives him front-page space every week to spew incredibly dull columns that rarely do more than blame Elia, the state, the city's employees' unions and just about everyone else not named Anello for all his problems.

Plenty of good things happened in Niagara Falls over the past year. The construction of the mammoth parking ramp behind Seneca Niagara Casino and the beginning of work on the 26-story hotel behind the ramp.

Come to think of it, those things didn't happen in Niagara Falls. They took place on untaxed Seneca land surrounded by the city, which is something very different indeed.

Nor did City Hall have any role in other major developments, such as Frank Parlato Jr.'s purchase of the former Occidental building and the infamous 40-foot-deep pit next to it.

Surely, we thought, Anello and company must have accomplished something meaningful on their own over the past year. You be the judge.

JANUARY: Through the transition period after Election Day 2003, Anello and City Administrator Dan Bristol vowed to bring the best and the brightest to City Hall. They formed not one, but two "blue-ribbon" transition teams and flew in big shots from Washington, D.C., to help with the search.

Remarkably, the very best and brightest just happened to fall almost exclusively into two camps: those who worked on Anello's campaign, and Elia appointees who allowed Herroner to fall on her electoral sword in exchange for continued cushiness.

Besides making sure that every two-bit elected official, former elected official and political hack he knew had a job, Anello spent much of his first month in office complaining about Elia. Her people had changed computer passwords, changed locks and just been downright mean to their incoming replacements, Anello bleated.

Later in the month, a snowstorm clogged city streets. They remained clogged for days, with some getting freed up by warming temperatures before they ever saw a plow.

In what was quickly becoming a trend, Anello blamed Elia.

FEBRUARY: A lawsuit filed by six city Department of Public Works employees heated up as the men filed an amended complaint in State Supreme Court, alleging that a pattern of racial harassment had continued after Elia's DPW chief, Paul Colangelo, was shifted to a grant-writer's position.

Anello blamed Elia.

Then he gave an ill-fated television interview with a Buffalo station on the topic. When asked whether there was a pattern of institutional racism in city government, as the lawsuit alleged, Anello could have, and should have, said, "No. Absolutely not. And there never will be on my watch."

Instead, he decided to play sociologist, attempting to explain that the tightly knit ethnic neighborhoods that used to dominate Niagara Falls sometimes encouraged, or at least tolerated, intolerance.

Or something.

Whether that's what he meant or not, that's how it came out on television.

MARCH: Niagara Falls Reporter Editor in Chief Mike Hudson mentioned the above interpretation of Anello's televised comments in a column and Anello went ballistic.

He stomped around the city for days with a copy of the videotape, demanding that any number of people who had much better things to do stop and watch it. What that was supposed to prove was anyone's guess.

(Editors' note: While Sports Editor David Staba is too much of a gentleman to bring it up, it was also in March that Anello challenged him to a fistfight in an alleyway outside of a Third Street saloon. "It was pretty funny and nobody got hurt," one bemused witness told the Reporter.)

APRIL: After months of tough talk regarding the stalled AquaFalls development, Bristol told The Other Paper, "Stick a fork in it. It's done," in late March.

A couple weeks later, after meeting with the alleged project's terminally optimistic front man, Gilles Assouline, Anello removed the fork.

Assouline praised Anello and vowed that the long-awaited funding needed to build the underground aquarium was all but finalized, and work would resume in weeks.

Of course, it wasn't. And it didn't.

Then, realizing that he'd need to find revenue streams to pay for all those patronage jobs he had so eagerly filled, Anello dusted off Elia's ill-fated plan to dot the downtown landscape with parking meters, whether anyone else wanted them or not.

The resistance from business and home owners was almost identical to that which rose up against Elia's effort, with one notable exception. It didn't include Anello.

As a councilman and mayoral hopeful, Anello railed against the plan and its sponsor, citing the potential harm to a business district still waiting to get the promised boost from the arrival of the Seneca Niagara Casino.

As mayor, Anello effectively told the same people whom he had supported, and vice versa, to pound salt. Installing meters on the streets near the casino would force visitors to pay $8 to park in the city's crumbling ramp at Third and Niagara streets. This, even though the casino offered free parking to thousands of customers every day, and construction had already started on a ramp that would accommodate thousands more.

To Anello's dismay, though, the plan's foes didn't shut up when ordered to do so.

MAY: With tourist season beginning, Team Anello unveiled their idea of "economic development" -- forgiving the enormous debt run up by the former operators of the Adelphia Golf Dome at Hyde Park, and throwing in operation of the city's two nine-hole golf courses and the right to eventually build a hotel on city land to a company with no experience in either business for good measure.

For its part, the city got some vaguely worded payment promises that even a State Supreme Court judge would have trouble figuring out. But more about that later.

In the last Council meeting of May, two Council members -- Jim Stewart and Candra Thomason -- changed their minds and voted to approve the sweetheart deal between the city and Greater Niagara Sports, rather than tabling it.

JUNE: The month opened with a threatened strike by the city's taxi drivers. It ended with Anello, who had prattled on and on about Elia's hiring of high-priced Albany attorneys to fight the city's unions, hiring high-priced Rochester attorneys to fight the six African-American city employees suing the city.

In between, Anello took a stab at the sales business, not-so-subtly telling local business owners it would be a good idea to advertise in something called "Spotlight on Niagara USA." The purported glossy publication would highlight "the positive" in Niagara Falls, and cash-strapped local entrepreneurs could take part for only $1,250 per ad at the low end of the scale, or pay up to $5,600.

At press time, "Spotlight on Niagara USA" remained nothing but an awkward title.

JULY: Frank Amendola, the Reporter's friend and landlord, showed that you can indeed fight City Hall, particularly if the likes of Anello are manning the defenses.

State Supreme Court Justice Richard Kloch ruled the city's deal with Central Parking Systems of New York to be illegal, effectively snuffing Anello's meters-and-ramp scheme.

The judge also decreed that the meterless poles lining downtown streets had to be taken down within 30 days, saying, "They are a nuisance and could cause injury."

Add judges to the list of people on Anello's pay-no-mind list.

Kloch's order was issued in mid-July. The deteriorated ramp has mercifully been leveled, but the poles remain.

AUGUST: A citizen's group called Save Hyde Park formed to fight the Great Hyde Park Golf Course Giveaway, enlisting the services of former Niagara County attorney Ned Perlman.

Anello, meanwhile, briefly advocated exposing the area around the old SGL Carbon plant to untested, unregulated emissions in order to create a whopping 30 jobs. He also continued wailing about the city's share of casino revenues. Or, more accurately, who got to decide how to spend the cash.

He hasn't actually been able to wring one more fraction of a percentage point from Albany, but he's spent a lot of time and effort demanding that he and he alone should decide how the money gets spent.

Thankfully, Anello got his way before he turned blue, making sure that reason and consensus had no place in the discussions.

Thanks to such vision and leadership, the lion's share of the city's share from the casino's first year in operation remained moldering in a bank vault 10 months after the check arrived.

And if such brilliant initiatives as pumping millions into the Center Court housing projects typify Anello's plans for the money, we can't wait to see how he wants to whizz away next year's even larger share.

SEPTEMBER: Political novice Glenn Choolokian delivered a gut shot to the Anello administration's credibility, knocking off incumbent Councilman and endorsed Democratic candidate Jimmy Stewart in a primary race.

Choolokian, a city water and sewer department worker, campaigned more against Anello than Stewart, painting the Councilman as a yes-man for the mayor, particularly on the golf-course deal.

Fair or not, the perception stuck, and worked. Choolokian won handily and did the same against Republican George Lodick in November's general election, guaranteeing a vocal Anello critic on the Council and putting what had been a solid working majority in jeopardy.

OCTOBER: Anello spent much of his first year in office bemoaning the budget Elia saddled him with before leaving office. Then he introduced his own, and everyone else started crying.

Financial demands dictated raising taxes by nearly 6 percent and funding the city's libraries for only half a year, he insisted.

Yet there was plenty of money available to keep funding all those new patronage jobs he created and give Bristol a 37-percent pay hike, to boot.

NOVEMBER: Council members nixed the raise and cut enough spending to shrink Anello's tax increase, but the money for libraries is still slated to run out in June.

DECEMBER: Parlato put a new twist in the AquaFalls saga by obtaining the mortgages on the property and announcing plans to fill the pit as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, Anello responded to growing criticism of his plan to close the city's libraries in order to balance the books while keeping his inner circle gainfully employed by, you guessed it, yelling a lot.

He yelled at the taxpayers who showed up for an "informational meeting" at St. John de LaSalle on Nov. 9, his "debate" with Ken Hamilton sending people who had shown up for the meeting fleeing for the exits. He yelled at a library board member in another church.

And he most likely yelled when he heard that State Supreme Court Justice Vincent Doyle, the jurist now overseeing the taxpayers' suit over the Hyde Park Golf Course scheme, wondered aloud in open court whether asking the City Council to reconsider the deal might be the right thing to do.

With Choolokian joining Bob Anderson and Lewis "Babe" Rotella, both opponents of the deal, on the five-member Council, such a ruling by Doyle would almost certainly kill the deal.

That would leave Anello's administration with as many accomplishments on Jan. 1, 2005 as it had on Jan. 1, 2004.

Which is to say, none.

Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com Dec. 28 2004