Restaino’s Main Street Plans Echo Lackey’s Disastrous Urban Renewal

The City of Niagara Falls, NY has been plagued by poor development deals since time immemorial. Mayor Restaino promises to keep that tradition alive by marching our city into the development business and right off a fiscal cliff. 

First is his abysmal dream of Centennial Park, which appears to be nothing more than a monument to himself. It should be noted that the City of Buffalo is converting the former LaSalle Park into the Ralph C. Wilson Centennial Park; so Restaino’s choice of name lacks originality. 

Now Mayor Restaino has his sights set on 39 soon-to-be foreclosed properties on Main Street; 38 of which are currently owned by Blue Cardinal with the outlier being the Rapids Theatre. 

There is a laundry list of reasons why it’s a bad idea for a municipality to start doing business as a real estate developer. At the very top of that list is the fact that the city being a developer means unjust competition for actual developers hoping to do business in our community. This puts the city in the tyrannical position to deny permits and railroad processes for developers looking to build here. It’s also bad for municipal finances because Mayor Restaino will effectively be taking properties off of the tax rolls, which adds another competitive advantage or disadvantage depending upon how you look at it.

For a fair comparison, just look at Empire State Development (ESD); the development arm of New York State. Last week, the Niagara Gazette announced that USA Niagara (the Falls based real estate arm of Empire State Development), has failed an audit with the state comptrollers office.

The reason? Empire State Development “failed to meet statutory requirements to provide accurate, annual reports of its real estate holdings.” USA Niagara’s board of directors purchased 31 individual properties in downtown Niagara Falls in 2019 for $14.7 million (derived from the catastrophic Buffalo Billions scandal).

As of June 2023, “the state agency disposed of seven of those properties, which they said were acquired at a total cost of $1.36 million and later sold to a trio of developers who paid $1 apiece, or $3 in total.” Among those developers was Montante Group, LLC which purchased four properties on Third Street for $1.

TM Montante also received a sweetheart deal for 616 Niagara Street with the lucrative lease it has with Niagara University, where TREC and the Niagara Global Institute used to reside until its demise (which has yet to be explained to the general public).

Niagara Falls entrepreneurs would undoubtedly jump at the opportunity to purchase prime property for such a sweetheart deal. Yet, that option never seems to be on the table for those who aren’t politically connected.

Now, Mayor Restaino hopes to follow in ESD’s footsteps with his grandiose plan for Main Street. He has already convinced the Niagara Falls City Council to authorize the transfer of $1.5 million in tribal revenue funds to the city’s Urban Renewal Agency for the purchase of the 39 properties. Ironically, the Seneca Nation must feel slighted because originally, the City of Niagara Falls (together with NYS) promised to invest the casino funds around the downtown Tourist District to redevelop what Urban Renewal had destroyed.

Mayor Restaino’s next big scheme is to “negotiate with Niagara’s Choice Federal Credit Union and CNB Bank” which hold the mortgages on the properties, to “obtain those properties by negotiating with the financial institutions.” He says that this will be done through the city’s Urban Renewal Agency, but as of right now he has been vague regarding the actual cost of his scheme; he’s also failed to reveal how he plans to secure the properties since buying the notes from the banks doesn’t necessarily secure the title to the properties.

This can only mean that more funds will be expended for outside counsel to finalize this real estate entanglement; which, more than likely, will result in the city being taken back to court once again.

One of Mayor Restaino’s goals is to purchase these properties and then sell them to developers, just like Empire State Development did. It is unknown as to whether or not Mayor Restaino will then sell the Main Street properties to developers for $1 apiece (or whatever other incentives he’ll offer, a-la the Rod Davis fiasco Restaino concocted just before his reelection bid). 

In both government and real estate circles, it is widely known that the aforementioned Davis deal was an absolute train wreck which left ESD and the governor both embarrassed, and resulted in the state withdrawing its million dollar grant. Meanwhile, the properties are still stuck in limbo and off the tax rolls as another failed Restaino project corrupted by its own lack of proper due diligence. 

The recent audit by the NYS Comptroller’s office found that only 1 out of 28 vacant properties owned by USA Niagara in the City of Niagara Falls was reported by ESD to have a “definitive” development plan.

In 5 years, New York State has failed to sell or develop the properties in our community. How does Mayor Restaino propose to succeed where ESD and USA Niagara have failed? These subsidiaries of NYS have funds at their disposal and yet they couldn’t get their development projects off the ground.

Mayor Restaino’s house of cards is a flimsy plan at best: He plans to partner with Niagara University to develop the properties on Main Street and create student housing. Go take a drive down Main Street and you will see that it’s a ghost town. Aside from the police station, everything else seems to be boarded up, vandalized and falling down with zero amenities in sight. So unless Niagara University is planning on having its art department specialize in Banksy, I don’t see this plan materializing.

The audit clearly shows that NYS has been unsuccessful in revitalizing Third Street, which is a plan that has been in action by ESD for over 20 years! Plus, Third Street has way more to offer than Main Street and it is a lot closer to the Falls, the Tourist District and Canadian traffic. Despite all of this, Third Street still continues to struggle.

Mayor Restaino’s Urban Renewal initiative echoes Mayor E. Dent Lackey who is infamous for building the now defunct Rainbow Mall and bulldozing much of our city’s historic structures. The Rainbow Mall has been closed now since the year 2000 and it stands as a reminder to taxpayers on the failures of Urban Renewal. Unfortunately for us, history tends to repeat itself and egomaniacs like Restaino never seem to learn from past mistakes. He may as well ride around town on a white horse just like Lackey did.

In 2019, Blue Cardinal paid $3.2 million for the properties which are now facing foreclosure. This was right at the end of Mayor Dyster’s administration and many local onlookers knew intuitively that nothing would transpire from this deal. Dyster famously squandered the $250 million windfall from the settlement with the Seneca Nation; pouring tens of millions into the city budget and bloating the legacy costs of city workers which, in the ultimate end game, is another reason for our rising real estate taxes and the infamous garbage fee.

Some locals were just happy to see the Main Street properties wrestled free from the icy death grip of Dick Hastings, but it was out of the freezer then into the proverbial frying pan before being tossed into the fire.

Now Mayor Restaino wants to take these properties out of the fire and stick them into the incinerator where we’ll all watch our money burn. More wasted tax dollars that could be spent towards literally a million other useful ideas for our community.

The Niagara Falls Democratic Party seems to love electing mayors who recklessly spend hundreds of millions of tax dollars on absolutely nothing. The end result is always the same: More crime, more poverty and no new jobs with livable wages. In fact, the only jobs here that seem to pay a livable wage are all union affiliated voting blocks mostly tied to the city and its inflated legacy costs.

Mayor Restaino’s plan to create student housing for Niagara University on Main Street is unrealistic. He told WBEN: “When you’re talking about 100-150 students in an area, there’s really an interest in bringing things like lounges or coffee shops. So we’ve had a number of regional developers come in and take a look at it, and see the possibilities. If that should happen and when – we’re very, very hopeful that happens – I think what we do is we stretch the city. It no longer becomes just that six-, eight-, 10-block area right down in the Entertainment District. We start stretching the interest all the way up Main Street. And ultimately, with some of the other development that we’re bringing to the City Market area, we start stretching it out more into the city, which is really the goal of our administration.”

If you’re a parent, take a walk down Main Street and ask yourself if you’d allow your college-aged kids to live in a dormitory surrounded by so much filth and crime. Hey, I’d love for Main Street to miraculously come back to life. Unfortunately, Mayor Restaino hasn’t showed the taxpayers that he possesses any common sense and I have zero faith in his ability to be the one to save our city.

The Rapids Theatre was unable to stay in business on Main Street, but Restaino believes he can convince developers to build coffee shops and lounges on a block littered with homeless people. In all likelihood, many of those properties have sat in a state of such disrepair that they will have to be demolished. For instance, the city held a hearing in 2022 for the possible demolition of the old Hart to Hart furniture store at 2018 Main Street (a Blue Cardinal property where the Polly King art installation is currently on public display).

Damages to that building include a massive hole in the rooftop, and former Director of Code Enforcement Corey Baskerville stated, “You can paint all the paint you want on there to make it look nice, but that’s not going to work.”

As for Mayor Restaino, his true intentions and actual cost projections are (as always) murky. Us taxpayers are being strong-armed into donating our money to “sink hole” projects we did not ask for, but our City Council leadership goes along with it anyway because they don’t seem to have much of a choice. Restaino does whatever he wants to do, and the taxpayers are left holding the bill. Whether or not we ever see any benefit from Restaino’s projects remains to be seen, but he still hasn’t accomplished anything noteworthy after his nearly five years in office.