By Frank Parlato
A Little Arena and a Lot of Pain
Niagara Falls NY —
The tax money of the people is not money. Not in the way a man thinks of coins in a jar or a dollar in his wallet. It’s something different. It is hours. It is sweat. It is bent backs and sighs in living rooms where a father pretends he is not tired. It is a mother doing math on the backs of envelopes to make the light bill disappear for one more month. It is old men eating beans. It is children in hand-me-down shoes.
That’s what tax money is. And Mayor Robert Restaino wants to build an arena with it. Not a hospital. Not a way to keep people from leaving this city in long cars with out-of-state plates.
He says it will be transformative. They always say that. He says it will bring people together. But the people are already together in tiredness, in trying, and in doing without.
He says, “It’s for the future.” But the people already give up pieces of their future whenever they pay their property taxes – the second highest in the nation in proportion to the low market values of thier homes.
They gave it when they paid the water bill late, so the boy could have shoes. When they walked to save gas. When they worked that extra shift. The future is spent in paying for the past. And to spend it again, for something no one asked for, no one needs, is a peculiar kind of cruelty.
Mayor Restaino’s arena will have a name: Centennial Park. It will never have the name of the woman who stood in line at the grocery store putting things back one by one. It won’t have the name of the man who fixed the sidewalk for a living and paid the tax for a seat he’ll never sit in. They won’t be there. But they will have paid for it.
That is the way of things. The rich and vain dream, the poor pay. And somewhere, in a quiet kitchen, someone folds another envelope and does the math again.
The Last Light Left On
None of this is new.
They built a train station. Mayor Dyster’s gift to the city that never asked. Grand and echoing and as hollow as a lie. The trains didn’t come, not like he said. But he took us back to the 19th century. “He said build it and they will come by train. ” But they did not come. The tax bill came for an empty train station. The benches stay cold. The ticket windows have no buyers. But it cost what it cost. Millions.
Oversized Courthouse
And the courthouse. Big enough to put every person still left in Niagara Falls on trial that will send them to prison. Mayor Anello said it would transform Main Street. But the people didn’t ask for it. They asked for jobs. For safety. For mercy. The courthouse gave them nothing but the shadow of justice, a bigger tax bill, more vacanies on Main Street.
The current mayor thinks that building an arena for a declining population will transform the city. An arena without a team, without a concert, without a feasibility study on whether the city needs an arena or a site selection study – to determine if the location he selected is even the right place for an arena- if there is a need for an arena.
So we have a proposed 7000-seat arena. Mayor Restaino’s glimmering promise. Another building that will save us. Another dream that’s really a bill.
They forget that people are leaving. Niagara Falls’s population has dropped from 100,000 to 48,000. They go to Florida, to Arizona, anywhere they don’t have to pay for someone’s fantasy. They don’t leave angry. They leave tired of paying for buildings they never enter – or would want to enter willingly.
Just like a new train station, sitting empty, or a grotequesly-oversized courthouse, tuanting the vacant buildings surrounding it, the city doesn’t need an arena. Mayor Restaino will build it anyway. Because a mayor needs something to point at when his time is up. Something to say, “I did this.” Even if nobody asked him to. Even if it’s empty. Even if it breaks the people a little more.
And so the tax bills come. The grocery lists get shorter. The envelopes thinner. Streetlights flicker. But blueprints shine. The drawings never get tired. They don’t need to eat. They don’t have rent. They don’t leave. Just the people do.
The Last Thing You Hear Before the Lights Go Out
It’s got to make you wonder. Niagara Falls. A name famous enough to be printed on keychains and honeymoon postcards. A name that ought to sparkle like the waterfalls it was named after.
And here, in this city, the people are among the poorest in the country. And yet—out of this poverty —someone finally came with something. Not an empty hall to clap in. A digital campus. A billion and a half dollar project. Five hundred fifty jobs that won’t vanish when the tourist season ends. Hundreds of millions in taxes. In fact a financial study shows it will actually save the average resident thousands of dollars per year in taxes because of the hundreds of millions in taxes the Niagara Digital Campus will pay.
And what does Mayor Restaino do?
He wants to bury it. He has stopped the project for years by demanding the entranceway where the developers want to build this mammoth project so he can place his taxpayer-funded arena there.
For ten acres of land that he wants, he will kill a 60-acres project. He wants to tax the poor to pay for his arena – and throw away hundreds of millions in taxes the digital data center will pay. He doesn’t just want applause—he wants a monument.
The data center could change the city. Centennial Park could chain it.
One gives jobs. The other sells nachos.
The people wait not for speeches. But for someone to remember that cities are not made to serve the vanity of a mayor.
They sit on porches with chipped paint and talk about the old factories.
About cousins who moved away. They work two jobs. They fix the roof one patch at a time. They walk their kids past shuttered storefronts and say, “Someday, this street will shine again.”
Maybe—and it could because of the data center. Not the kind of thing that makes for ribbon cuttings and cheerleaders. No halftime shows. No mayors in suits waving from the fifty-yard line.
But a place where a kid from 19th Street could one day walk into a job that didn’t exist the year before. A place where fiber optic wires and lights hum behind walls, sending signals to the world, and where a city learns to stand a little straighter because it has jobs again.
It won’t be loud like an arena. But it could be the thing that keeps the school from closing. That brings back the cousin from Ohio because there’s a job worth coming home for.
Maybe one day, some kid with shoes two sizes too big and a notebook full of questions walks past the humming building, past the chain-link fence, and wonders what’s inside. And maybe someone opens the door.
Maybe that’s how it begins. With one kid. One job. One reason to stay. Not flashing lights or ticket sales, but something better. A life that doesn’t have to be borrowed.
And for once, Niagara Falls doesn’t lose what it loves. It grows it.
