When last I read, more than 480,000 acres of California chaparral had been burned by the Golden State's latest invasion of wildfire. In the Southeast, Georgia and Alabama have begun discussing how to share the region's freshwater, a resource that is evaporating because of too many of Skynard's bragged about blue skies.


If you live in Niagara Falls, or greater Western New York, such disasters are the flint for conversations that usually end with the consensus that there are obvious advantages of calling this area home: our communities generally aren't required to assemble around piles of sandbags, or tuck-in its children in end zones. We have winter, yes, but that season's infamy and the reputation it has given us, like so many other great things, was endured and built, respectively, by an earlier generation.


And yet, as generously as the gods seemed to have spared us from flood, famine and fire, have they perennially afflicted us with another variety of disaster, the unnatural disaster--a hoard of politicians, lawyers, elected officials, developmental agencies, community leaders and parasitic developers whose acumen for greed and incompetence, were it measured in decibels, would register on Pluto (which, by the way, readers, was somewhat recently redefined as a dwarf planet, Hgwy 62R would have you know).


See, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/planets/plutopage.html


Evidence of this disaster was this week observed in Niagara Falls City Hall, where city officials once again failed to finalize plans that would allow for the construction of a new $45 million public safety complex to begin--plans that have been in the works for more than two years. If a deal isn't reached last week (Albany set an October 23rd deadline), the Cataract City could be hit with sanctions--a loss of state aid that would, according to councilman Lewis "Babe" Rotella, force the city into bankruptcy.


It's true.


Western New York and the City of Niagara Falls, in particular, seem somehow always incapable of accomplishing those elusive final details --the critical link between plans and progress. Final approval for anything--even municipal projects--isn't granted until "officials" have first maximized the political capital of each and every project dollar. While such realities are part of every city's political landscape, here in New Appalachia they occur on a scale that rivals the Creation.


Hurricanes? No. Tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions? Not here, thankfully--not, anyhow, with force enough to scatter Totos and Main Streets into headline-snatching multi-acre mosaics. We don't live with those disasters. We live instead with the daily disaster that is imagining what Niagara Falls might have be were it somewhere else.

Labels: ciminelli, courthouse, mayor anello, niagara falls, niagara falls city council, public safety building