The City of Niagara Falls has a new mayor today, and although it is not the candidate I was supporting, it is time for us as a city to move forward.

Many people have called this election a landslide, I would call them to the fact that voter turnout was well below 40%. We did not get a true consensus and that is truly a problem. In a city like ours, where we need every voice working together to make a difference, we need every voter to turn out. We should work on getting out more people to vote, and work on voter education also. Educated voters will make the smart decisions, and I have a feeling if more people payed attention to the races, more people would vote. Of course, this is only my opinion.

So,with only 30% of the city's registered voters supporting him, our new Mayor is charged with making big decisions, and bringing and end to the economic blight in this city. I believe that what we need now, are tax cuts, more than anything. A tax cut will spur economic development, and will bring more people here. How can we expect people to move here when we have a reputation as the Highest Taxed City in the world? The truth is you can't. If we lower taxes, we can build up our tax base, and make up the lost money through more property on the tax rolls. We will then be able to cut taxes more, and the process will repeat itself.

It's called simple economics, and we need to realize this in our city. We also need to stop our unfair practices of reassessments. We punish those who fix up their properties by raising their assessments, and for those who let their properties fall into disrepair, we lower their assessments, and give them no reason at all to invest in their property. No wonder why our city has gone down the drain, and is looking like it does. We punish those who take the time and money to invest here. We all need to tell Mayor-Elect Dyster to stop the reassessments, and tell him that we want our city to become taxpayer friendly once again.

The campaign is over, and we will wait for January 1, 2008 to see what happens. Until then, we can only pray that we did not make the wrong choice. If we did, our chance will be in four years, when we will be able to take our city back for the taxpayers.

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