Niagara ReporterNiagara Falls NY – As the city’s eminent domain legal fight to take 10 acres of private property from Niagara Falls Redevelopment continues, Mayor Robert Restaino has two messages for his dwindling supporters.
One, above all, the city needs Centennial Park, the mayor’s boondoggle dream – a $250 million plan with a 7,000-seat arena, a 500-car parking ramp and a four acre park crammed with a splash pad, ice-skating rink, zip lines, parking ramp climbing wall, adventure courses, and other amenities.
He calls it Centennial Park.
And two: Since the city does not have the money or manpower to maintain its 35 parks. He wants the public to embrace his “adopt a park” plan. If only other cities could adopt a mayor. His Centennial Park plan is moronic.
Dreaming Big Without a Plan
It’s filled with the word “if.” If Restaino can find a sports team to make the arena its home, and if big name concert acts come to the city like they did in the 1970s, and if he can get the money to build it, and if he wins the lawsuit against NFR, he says Centennial Park will liven the city up as it never has since the days when the City signed off with the state to give its 10,000-seat convention center away to the tax free Seneca Nation to build a casino, hotel, retail stores and tax free gas station to compete tax free with the city.
While most arenas are built with a sports team already committed to playing there, Restaino’s plan is to build it first, then look for a team. At last report, he is looking for little league hockey. Also novel about his thinking is that he chose not to do a land site selection study first or a feasibility study.
Centennial Park is planned to be a 6000-7000 seat arena and a small pocket park.
Restano chose NFR’a land – which the company did not want to sell – right after they announced they wanted to build a $1.5 billion AI digital data center that would put Niagara Falls at the forefront of AI development. Restaino decided to kill the AI center and build Centennial Park on NFR land right next to the casino, which, if he can get the money.
The location is not a good one. Where he wants to put Centennial Park is next to the Seneca casino, and Seneca stores lie between the land planned for Centennial Park and downtown city businesses. An events center there will allow the Seneca complex to get first dibs on the arena if Restaino gets the money to build it, and if he gets anyone to rent the arena for a game or concert, and if the taxpayers can afford another park and an arena too.
Centennial Park would be located away from the downtown busineses and be a feeder for the tax free Seneca Nation, who will pay none of its costs.
But this is where Niagara Falls lucks out in having a backwards looking mayor. Restaino has a plan that is nothing short of genius. To pay for the upkeep of Centennial Park, all we need is the people to pay for the 35 parks we already have. Adopt a park is his brainchild Park costs money to maintain. And he has a doozy of a park planned for Centennial Park.
Centennial Park: A Small Park With Big Problems
Besides the too big arena with no anchor tenant, he wants to build a too small park with too many amenities like rope climbing, zip lines, wading pool, ice rink and other things which will require management and maintenance. My personal favorite is a rock-climbing wall, but not on rocks, but up the sides of a five story parking ramp he wants to build, and at the top of the rock climbing experience – on the roof of the parking ramp will be a beer garden. Climb up, have a few brews, and watch out on the climb down.
In a weekly YouTube address, Restaino asked City residents to “adopt a park” to help keep City his poorly maintained parks better maintained. It is not an unreasonable request. The city budget does not allow the maintenance of the present parks, and they have become dirty and vandalized.
The City has 35 parks with 560 acres, parks ranging from small urban parks usually named after someone in memorial to larger parks – like Hyde Park and Gill Creek. That does not count the state-run Niagara Falls State Park.
Restaino wants to make his Centennial Park a destination park, but at the size of a memorial park – at just four acres. With a current population of under 50,000 and dwindling, the City has 164 acres more parkland than the national recommended standard.
The Master Plan stated that the “existing park acreage in the city is adequate and accessible by all residents; no new parks should be added to the city at this time.”
Despite spending years in his pursuit for NFR’s land, Restaino has not yet determined whether it is the best location for his unfunded, under-planned to be overbuilt events center. This again shows Restaino’s unique way of doing things. In the city’s possessions are three parks with over 20 acres of land, more than enough to build Centennial Park.
If it was anyone other than Restaino, both NFR’s$1.5 billion AI- Niagara Digital Campus and Centennial Park could exist. Centennial Parrk could be built on existing parkland, where the land would cost nothing but maintenance and upkeep for the events center. Even most or all of that would be paid by allowing the Data Center to be built, since NFR has offered to pay an annual $350,000 donation for the next ten years for maintenance and upkeep of Centennial Park if they could just keep their land and develop a giant job-producing AI data center project.
A $1.5 Billion AI Center on the Line
The Niagara Digital Campus is expected to 550 high-paying permanent jobs, with expected annual wages of $30 million. The total economic benefit from the new facility is expected to exceed $250 million annually, with more than 1,700 permanent jobs created in support and ancillary businesses.
A digital center is planned for Niagara Falls and has only one opponent — Mayor Restaino.
But Restaino marches to a beat of a different drummer. He does not want to tap in on the burgeoning growth of AI and the jobs it will produce. He wants more parks.
So what if we already have too many parks?
Like a mother with too many kids, he will put the old ones up for adoption.
He sees it differently than the 2013 Citywide Parks Master Plan – which stated that the existing parks and recreation budget does not meet the needs for ongoing maintenance, security and park upgrades.
According to the Citywide Parks Master Plan, current maintenance personnel allocated to the park system are inadequate to maintain the existing park system. Mayor Restaino has already cost the citizens of Niagara Falls hundreds of thousands in legal fees and other costs. He has to save face. He must force NFR to give up the land – even if these funds squandered on attorneys could have been used for infrastructure, roads, public health, or to support small businesses.
Mayor’s Plea to Residents: Adopt a Park
Here is what Restaino told his audience of about 70 people who visited YouTube to hear him announce his adopt a park.
Mayor Robert Restaino wants us to adopt a park. or two or three!
“We have a little over 35 parks throughout the city of Niagara Falls, and some of them are pretty major parks…. We have, in our Public Works and Parks departments, about maybe 65 people whose job it is to maintain over 65 buildings and over 35 public parks. “You can imagine the challenge. So, when you take a look at the work that the men and women in Public Works are doing, obviously… we could use is some help… I’m looking for groups… to think about the idea of adopting one of the parks, …. I mean, there are over 35 of them.
“There might be one in your neighborhood, in the area that you frequent, and you and the group you may be affiliated with might like to adopt that park …it’s an opportunity for you to do things like just clean up around the park, make sure that the park itself continues to be as attractive as you would like it to be. Obviously, in terms of full-time maintenance, you also provide a set of eyes for our departments in the event there has been damage…. Your group would have eyes on that park… to perhaps prevent vandalism and prevent the kind of damage that, unfortunately, we see from time to time in our parks. … I think we, as residents, all need to pitch in on. After all, there are 65 people who really have the responsibility to do all of those things they normally do…“
Let’s all pitch in and adopt the parks, and get going and clean them, so Mayor Restaino, can build us a new one.
