Niagara Views

Are there angels all around us?

   
   Editing the story about Monica M. Saltarelli, the Niagara University religion teacher and campus minister who teaches a class called "Angles in our Midst," reminded me of a friend and her sister who took a bus from Buffalo to New York City about a dozen years ago to see a long lost stepbrother dying from a terminal disease.

   They fretted what it would be like to see him, frail and alone, and to try to give him some comfort in the last days of his life.

   Their stepbrother had made some bad choices in the years before he became estranged from his family, had spent time in state prison, and had contracted a fatal disease somewhere along the way.

   They wanted their stepbrother to know they loved him and would help him in any way they could, now that they had found him again.

   As they made their way east, a woman got on the bus in Rochester and sat down near them. She knitted while snow fell hard against the windows and the sisters talked.

   How would they know what to say to their stepbrothers when they got to the hospital? How would their stepbrother receive them? How would they find the hospital in such a big city (remember, this was in the days before mapquest.com)?

   The stranger spoke to the sisters in a Caribbean accent. On the bus, she mostly listened, but told them she knew her way around Manhattan pretty well. She got off the bus with the sisters at Penn Station, even though she said it wasn't her stop, and led them toward the hospital. On the way, she assured them that they would know what to say when they saw their stepbrother.

   As they approached the hospital entrance doors, a sense of gratitude washed over the sisters. They turned to thank the woman from the bus - but she was gone.

   To this day, my friends consider this woman an angel who appeared in a time of great need.

   My guess is Niagara's Saltarelli would think so, too.

   Have you ever been touched by an angel?

- Niagara County Bureau Chief Scott Scanlon

As it bleeds money, Falls Memorial has tough choices to make

   Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center, a victim of ongoing financial pain, is going to cut services.

   The hospital has hired a consultant to help figure out which areas to trim.

   A report is expected by the end of next month, and hospital officials say they can't afford to wait very long to act.

   Cardiac, stroke and renal care are believed to be part of the "core" services that will remain.

    "We can't be everything to all people," said hospital President and Chief Executive Officer Joseph A. Ruffolo, "so we're going to have to skinny back."

   Why is the hospital being forced to cut back on its services?

   The hospital has provided about $12 million in care since the start of last year that it hasn't been paid for.

   Memorial has lost nearly $4 million over the last two years. That's on top of $38 million in losses accrued between 1996 and 2002.

   The hospital serves many uninsured and underinsured patients - more than half of emergency room patients and about one-third of all patients are either on Medicaid or are unable to pay full charges.

   Hospital officials say their situation as a "safety net" facility - one that serves a generally poor community and catches patients who have no other health care options - is being seen throughout the country.

   What kinds of reforms do you think are needed to save hospitals like Memorial?

   - Aaron Besecker

The case of the missing $10 million

   A press release touting former Gov. George E. Pataki's pledge to provide $10 million for the Niagara Experience Center is still available on Empire State Development Corp.'s Web site.

   It's dated March 20, 2002, and it accompanied a visit by Pataki to the Falls in which he committed the state funding to the long-planned grass roots effort to develop a world-class museum in Niagara Falls.

   Pataki's funding announcement gave momentum to an idea that started as a dream of local historian and author Paul Gromosiak.

   So what happened to the $10 million?

   "The money never existed," Gromosiak said he learned recently. "The money was never put aside."

   Although pledged by Pataki as capital funds for the end of construction, the $10 million remained just a commitment. Fund raising for the rest of the estimated $100 million project did not move far enough along before Pataki left office.

   "We looked at Pataki's last executive budget; there was a big flurry of phone calls," Niagara Falls Mayor Paul A. Dyster recalled. The budget had no earmark for the experience center. "The answer always seems to be, there is a fund someplace that we can maybe access."

   Former Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer also pledged to support the project, but the $10 million remained just a concept -- much like the museum itself.

   Now, Dyster is calling on the state to commit to a more substantial investment -- as much as 20 percent of the total project cost.

   "If the government entities got committed to a project like the Experience Center, then I think it would give us the leverage to get a major private sector developer, which you need," Dyster said. "The question is, who goes first?"

   -- Denise Jewell Gee

What the city dumped, should it pay to take away?

   For years, it was a baseball field and city park for children in the North End of Niagara Falls.

   But under the grass and the bases was a layer - 10 feet deep in places - of incinerator ash believed to have been dumped decades ago.

   The ash was discovered this year when the Niagara Falls Housing Authority began digging for a project to build dozens of new homes on the land.

   Now, that ash has stalled the $72 million project to rebuild the Housing Authority's Center Court complex and construct a new neighborhood of townhouses and bungalows.

   The Housing Authority has asked the city to provide as much as $3 million to take the ash to a landfill. An earlier plan called for the ash to be used to build a berm on another nearby strip of city-owned land.

   City Council members could be asked to vote on the additional funding as early as next week.

   What do you think? Should the city chip in to move the ash to a landfill? Who do you think should pick up the tab?

    - Denise Jewell Gee

Silence heats up the Niagara County sheriff's race

   Both candidates for Niagara County sheriff have a lot to say these days about the issue of "silent dispatch."

   Niagara Falls Police Detective Capt. Ernest C. Palmer, the Republican candidate in the race, raised the issue, saying the Sheriff's Department is holding back calls to "protect their turf." He made a state trooper's memorandum public which claims that the trooper could have made it to the scene of several police calls quicker but was never notified because the calls were silently dispatched.

   Palmer said he thinks the department believes it has "ownership over calls," and is putting people in danger, and he will put a stop to it if elected.

   Sheriff's Chief Deputy James C. Voutour calls these claims "ridiculous."

   He said less than one percent of calls are silently dispatched and that Palmer has manufactured this as an issue for political reasons.

   He said calls to State Police have gone up in the past four years.

   So is this a problem - or politics?

- Nancy A. Fischer

'Whites only joke' falls flat, but judge rules it isn't a hate crime

   James R. Curtis, 52, wasn't in a vacuum when he put up a "whites only" sign on a drinking fountain at the Niagara Falls Department of Public Works building in August.

   He was working in a department where racial tensions have been high for years. So high, in fact, that a half-dozen African-American workers filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the city five years ago in a case that remains pending.

   Curtis has admitted putting up the sign Aug. 13 as a joke.

   "No one was ever supposed to see it," he told Buffalo News reporter Nancy A. Fischer of the News Niagara Bureau after a court appearance this morning.

   His comments came after City Court Judge Mark A. Violante dismissed a hate crime charge against Curtis after the Niagara County District Attorney's office recommended it.

    Prosecutors issued a statement that said the office reviewed the case and, after numerous interviews with DPW employees, including Curtis, decided to ask for the reduction in charges.

   A misdemeanor aggravated harassment charge remains - as does a city disciplinary case that could cost Curtis his job.

   Harvey F. Siegel, the defense lawyer representing Curtis, described his client's behavior as "a poor attempt at a joke, a really bad joke."

   Richard Whistler, the lawyer represents the six African-American DPW employees in the racial discrimination lawsuit, said his clients think the Curtis case is "not a joke we can forget about."

   "Something has to be done," Whistler said. "Misdemeanor or felony, it doesn't matter. We just want this to be recognized as a crime by the powers that be. This [kind of behavior] must be stopped."

- Niagara County Bureau Chief Scott Scanlon

Child abuse cases on the rise, but not caseworker numbers

      The Niagara County Legislature had a tough decision last week. 

      Social Services Commissioner Anthony J. Restaino asked the Legislature to create nine new jobs in his department - seven caseworkers, a supervisor and a clerical worker - to respond to a record number of reports of child abuse.

     The state requires every report to be investigated, but it also recommends that no caseworker have more than 12 active investigations per month. Niagara County's caseworkers average 17 cases per month.

     The state also offered money to pay for the caseworkers and the supervisor (not the clerk), but only for the first six months of their careers. Under terms of the county's union contracts, the caseworkers would have been paid almost $19 an hour, the supervisor nearly $24 an hour. After that, the county would have been responsible for paying them, but it would have been reimbursed for 75 percent of the expense later on by the state and federal governments.

     With the county expecting 3,000 or more child abuse reports this year, Restaino said he needed more staff. One legislator called it "an emergency with children," but another said the state's recommendations on caseload per staffer were "bogus."

     County Manager Gregory D. Lewis told a Legislature committee that if it created nine jobs in Social Services, his new 2009 budget proposal might well cut nine other jobs elsewhere, to keep the total payroll from rising.

     The Legislature voted 10-8 against creating the new jobs. How would you have voted?

Falls City Market would like to get fresh

   As the City of Niagara Falls continues to fall on hard times, so does the City Market at Pine Avenue and 18th Street.

   The market has fallen victim to the same ills that have plagued the city - unemployment, the exodus of young people in search of opportunity and good jobs (often in Sun Belt cities), a growing poverty level and an increasing number of elderly people trying to get by on small fixed incomes.

   Victor Muto, whose son, Al, leases the market property from the city, has been coming to the market for 60 years. He has witnessed its steady decline from a bustling mecca with about 75 farmers selling their produce to the current tenancy rate of about dozen vendors.

   In stark contrast is the North Tonawanda City Market, one of the largest and busiest in the state with close to 100 vendors.

   The Niagara Falls market is closer in size and commerce to tiny farmers markets in Barker and Middleport.

   "We need help," Muto bluntly stated.

   Help may come in the form of Mayor Paul A. Dyster's "local foods program." Dyster said he is looking at the City Market revival "in the context of the whole green city initiative." The North Tonawanda market would be the model for his city's market rejuvenation.

   How can the Niagara Falls City Market be revived and the shine put back on the apples - and
every other item of produce that is on sale for about half to a third of supermarket prices?

- Bill Michelmore

Financial failings at Falls school district

   After 16 years running the Niagara Falls school district, School Superintendent Carmen A. Granto has come under fire in a state audit that found almost three dozen problems related to the way the district handles business operations.

   The audit states Granto accepted $10,800 in vacation pay he was not entitled to and used a district credit card to pay for private business dealings he had in Florida. The district also took a number of other criticisms for the way it has conducted business operations during Granto's reign.

   Granto, who has repaid the money in dispute, plans to retire on June 30 after 42 years with the district. Despite his current predicament, the Falls native and lifelong resident has been a popular superintendent who has been able to balance the education of children with the needs of residents in a very poor city school district.

   The district has gone 16 years without raising the property tax levy because Granto says the people in this city can't afford it. He has accomplished that in part with the help of closing several schools and with staff layoffs, and by aggressively going after grant money. But he's also led the way in building three new schools during the past 13 years.

   He admits things got sloppy on the business side of things. He said he has reimbursed the district for any overpayments to himself, such as a credit card reimbursement for an outside consulting trip and mistakenly given vacation pay. He said he also has gone after other
district money that has been accidentally misappropriated, including the extra week of
paychecks for more than $500,000 that were given to 272 district employees during the 2005-06
school year.

   He also said the School Board is tightening up controls to prevent any such mistakes from happening again.

   Meanwhile, don't feel too sorry for the superintendent for his financial predicament.

   Payments approved by the School Board in his contract during his last three years on the job have boosted his salary, normally about $130,000, to just over $200,000, and will be used
to calculate his state pension.

  -- Paul Westmoore

Good news, bad news at Old Fort Niagara

Several weeks ago, supporters of Old Fort Niagara celebrated when they learned that a $650,000 grant from the John R. Oishei Foundation of Buffalo would help the fort ramp up its public programs, improve its marketing and expand the size of its temporary staff next summer.

  For two of the fort's top administrators, the celebration didn't last long. Director of Operations Ray Wigle and Director of Research and Special Programs Douglas DeCroix saw their jobs eliminated last month as the Old Fort Niagara Association sought to cut its administrative expenses.

  "Part of our logic was we're trying to devote much more of our resources to public programs," Executive Director Robert Emerson told The Buffalo News. "So when we're looking to reduce costs, we're primarily looking at the administrative side of things for places we can save. That's basically how we made that decision."