Conspiracy to Drive One Niagara Out of Business? Looks Like!

Niagara Falls State Park has placed signs on light poles around One Niagara directing traffic away from One Niagara.

Are the USA Niagara Development Corp., the New York State Parks Commission, Delaware North, and Maid of the Mist magnate Jimmy Glynn gang banging Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster into going to war with the owners of One Niagara, the parking and tourism operation located at the foot of the Rainbow Bridge?

If evidence left all around the place last week is any indication, they most certainly are.

Signs posted last week on light poles surrounding the One Niagara property directs motorists, tourists and derelict bums of every stripe towards the state parks system's parking lot.

Every dime collected in parking fees at the state park is shipped directly to Albany, where it is used to promote tourism in New York City, among other things, while the money taken in by the locally owned One Niagara operation stays right here on the Niagara Frontier.

Furthermore, parking in the One Niagara lot is cheaper, even though the signs surrounding the property don't mention that.

Imagine, if you will, some nightmarish Orwellian 1984 sort of state where, say, you save money you make working at a factory for years in order to realize your dream of opening up a pizza parlor on Pine Avenue.

Now imagine that the state, controlled by some Big Brother-like figure named, say, Cuomo, opens up a tax free pizza parlor three blocks down, uses taxpayer money to besiege your humble pizzeria with taxpayer funded signs directing business to your competitor and then sends all of the money generated by the operation to some faraway place in order to guarantee that neither you nor anyone you know will benefit from it.

That's the obscene scenario One Niagara CEO Paul Grenga faced last week as he came into work one morning right here in Niagara Falls.

Not a week earlier, Dyster argued unsuccessfully to the City Council that foreclosure proceedings should be brought against One Niagara because Grenga and his partners were purportedly late on a tax payment. The council wisely elected to give One Niagara a little more time, rather than be responsible for putting the more than 100 Niagara area residents who work there onto the unemployment rolls.

Did Dyster's dopey demand come at the urging of Jimmy Glynn, or USA Niagara Development Corp.– that has already made an offer to buy the One Niagara property – or the state Parks Commission?

We may never know. What we do know is that all of the above named individuals and organizations have a vested interest in seeing downtown's biggest and most successful private business shut down and shuttered for reasons of their own.