“Magic” Money: Mayor Restaino Pulls Millions “Out of Thin Air”

Picking Up Where We Left Off: Another Round of Smokescreens

Last Thursday the Niagara Falls City Council voted in approval of Mayor Restaino’s $9 million+ budget items during a special meeting. After city council originally tabled these items several weeks ago due to a lack of information from the administration, Mayor Restaino released an unsettling video boasting about how he tricked the council members into voting against an RFP for the scandalous dog kennel contract.

Three days before the special meeting, the Reporter exposed the smokescreen tactics Mayor Restaino was using to confuse city council into voting against their better judgment. Indeed, his budget smokescreen caused confusion once again, this time during the special meeting. Other council members were so focused on the so-called “Pit Chic” contract (and rightfully so), that the only elected official to catch the Mayor’s shell game was Councilman Donta Myles, who spoke out to publicly challenge the contract on record. Then there’s Council Chairman Jim Perry who apparently doesn’t need to review any information to know how he’s going to vote. Apparently if Mayor Restaino supports it, Jim Perry supports it. The Mayor says jump, Perry says “how high?” 

On the agenda for the special meeting was an $8 million allocation of American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds for a new Department of Public Works (DPW) building. According to Mark Scheer of the Niagara Gazette, during the special meeting “Councilman Donta Myles asked the same question he asked earlier in the month about whether the DPW building to be financed with more than $8 million in federal funds was the same as the building listed in the capital plan of the city’s 2025 budget at a cost of $4.5 million.” Instead of giving Myles (and the rest of the council) an honest answer, Corporation Counsel Tom DeBoy suggested that Myles should have sought that information prior to the council meeting.

The problem here is that DeBoy knew the answer to the question, but DeBoy is another unscrupulous puppet for Mayor Restaino. It appears as though DeBoy didn’t want to draw attention to Mayor Restaino’s smokescreen and sleight of hand tactics. Had DeBoy answered Myles’ question instead of playing petty politics, council may have voted differently knowing that the cost of the proposed DPW building suddenly jumped from $4.5 million to $8 million overnight.

Council Chairman Jim Perry “Slips Up”

Scheer reports, “Immediately following the meeting, Perry told two reporters that Myles was mistaken about the building listed in the capital plan being the same as the building being covered by the contracts awarded on Thursday.” Scheer’s next sentence is a bombshell, “After reviewing the budget, which lists ‘New Road Corporation Yard — New Parks Building’ in the capital plan section for a cost of $4.5 million, Perry conceded that it was the same structure.” (Bold lettering added by the Reporter for emphasis).

Perry often scolds and chastises Councilman Donta Myles and sometimes Councilman Brian Archie for being mistaken or confused. Here we see how Perry rushed to confront the reporters at the Niagara Gazette, hoping to control the narrative of what’s happening to our tax dollars. He rambled off the same talking points he always does but this time he stuffed his foot firmly into his own mouth as it turns out Donta Myles was correct all along. 

A “useful idiot” may be defined as “a person who thinks they are fighting for a cause without fully comprehending the consequences of their actions, and who does not realize they are being manipulated by the cause’s leaders or by other political players.” Mr. Perry, you sir have allowed yourself to become Mayor Restaino’s useful idiot. The term can be traced back to an article in the October 1946 issue of “The Reader’s Digest”; Written by Bogdan Raditsa and titled “Yugoslavia’s Tragic Lesson to the World,” Bogdan detailed his experience as communist dictator Josip Broz Tito’s “Koristne Budale”, or useful idiot. 

As we know, history often repeats itself. Bogdan served as the chief of the foreign press section of the Ministry of Information under communist rule. He was dumbstruck as he watched the imprisonment and execution of Tito’s tyrannical administration. To quote Bogdan, “In the Serbo-Croat language the communists have a phrase for true democrats who consent to collaborate with them for ‘democracy.’” That phrase is “useful idiot”; and since Jim Perry was just reinstated as Council Chairman on Wednesday night (3 to 2 vote, with No’s from Archie and Myles), it behooves him to learn from Yugoslavia’s tragic lesson to the world. Does Perry serve the people or does he serve the petty tyrant Robert Restaino?

DPW Building Costs: Where is this Money Coming From?

Why did the cost of the DPW building suddenly jump from $4.5 million to $8 million, manifesting as a budget item proposed by Mayor Restaino while the city council was put on the hot seat to vote on ARP funds just before the December 31st deadline? As so often rings true, the equation includes the solution. Mayor Restaino waited until the very last minute of the eleventh hour to propose the allocation of these funds, knowing full well that the funds would be returned to the federal government if they weren’t officially allocated before January 1st.

Instead of using the $3.5 million to improve the quality of life for Niagara Falls residents, Mayor Restaino chose to add that “unallocated” amount to the cost of the DPW building without providing any explanation whatsoever why the cost of the budget item nearly doubled. When Myles asked about this, he was denied information by DeBoy who knew the answer but apparently didn’t want to discuss it on record. How could that amount have been unallocated? The original 2025 budget contained an item for $2.25 million for the Beech Avenue Project which has now mysteriously disappeared. According to Mayor Restaino’s own logic, the additional $3.5 million for the DPW building must include the $2.25 million from the Beech Avenue Project.

Allow me to explain: In his weekly address on December 13th, Mayor Restaino said “There is little, if any that the administration and the council can debate at budget time. Substantially, it could be, I mean it’s in excess of 80% of the budget is personnel related, controlled by collective bargaining agreements. There are other balances in the budget that are contractual based upon contracts that we have with vendors, for services and supplies. So it seems kind of bizarre that a council member would think there are these holes or these pockets in the budget that are holding funds for which there’s no legitimate purpose. So again, be on… beware that kind of message. It’s really a message of disharmony. It’s a message that’s looking to separate members of the city and it’s really not productive and beneficial for us moving forward.”

Mayor Restaino’s Downfall: The Beginning of the End

During his address, Mayor Restaino was telegraphing his agenda and trying to get ahead of local investigative journalists to do exactly as Jim Perry was doing to the press at the special meeting – control the public narrative. This becomes obvious when we consider that Mayor Restaino literally said to “beware” the message that he has allegedly created a slush-fund using ARP tax dollars (weeks before the special meeting). Considering the firestorm happening right now in Buffalo surrounding the misuse of ARP funds, we should be encouraging our council to call for a federal investigation into the same problem here in the Falls. 

According to WGRZ, Buffalo common council representative Zeneta Everhart said “Money that was supposed to be used in marginalized communities where people can’t afford to pay their water bills … that money was stolen from them,” Everhart said, “The information we received is insane. Where I’m from, in the ‘hood, it’s called robbing Peter to pay Paul. Who are we robbing? The least of us. And it’s not OK.” Does this sound familiar?

The issue is that Mayor Restaino explained how there is really no wiggle room or room for debate between the administration and the council once the former has prepared the budget. The reallocation of $3.5 million from elsewhere would leave a pretty obvious hole somewhere in the budget, unless the overall amount was pulled fractionally from many different sources (which, again according to Mayor Restaino’s logic, just can’t be done). A $2.25 million item has disappeared from the original budget, so that accounts for most of the $3.5 million. Where did the remaining $1.25 million come from? A side-by-side comparison between the original budget and the final budget for 2025 is warranted, and should be included in an audit and/or investigation.

During his December 13th weekly address, Mayor Restaino also said “This past week, as you may be aware, we have finalized the budget for 2025. And, um, I was encouraged by the conversation that I had with the council chairperson [Perry] particularly on the issue of how executive and legislative relations really need to be in the preparation of a budget. We’ve been here now for five years and we’ve created five budgets. And none of those budgets have in there hidden funds, or trap doors, or anything else that’s secret.”

It’s interesting that Mayor Restaino says that he and Perry discussed how the relations between Mayor and council “really need to be in the preparation of a budget”, because clearly Perry was unaware of the information regarding the DPW building that he voted on (despite feeling confident that he knew what he was voting on, he “conceded” to the Gazette that he was wrong). This is made evident when he tried to gaslight the reporters from the Niagara Gazette, only to accidentally prove that Donta Myles (whom Perry said was mistaken and confused), was in fact right all along. Meanwhile, DeBoy was complicit in this Kabuki theater. The irony does not escape us as obviously it was Chairman Jim Perry who was confused on how to spend $8 million in tax dollars; but it’s fine because he professes his undying confidence that the administration has a perfectly good reason as to why millions of dollars in ARP funds continues to slush from project-to-project with zero accountability from Mayor Restaino.

Also worth noting is that Perry told the Gazette that the city has spent $800,000 on the first phase of the Beech Avenue Park project. The original budget spreadsheet lists $150,000 for the Beech Avenue Park project in 2022, another $150,000 in 2023, and $180,000 in 2024. When added to the $180,000 the city initially spent on designs, the total is $660,000 not $800,000. 

Regarding this mathematical anomaly, Councilman Donta Myles recently told the Reporter “That’s $300,000 that’s been spent and it’s unaccounted for. Where did it go?” We can expect the smokescreens and gaslighting to continue into 2025, since the Restaino administration shows no signs of stopping or slowing down with their improprieties and political corruption.

The public is being defrauded.