Time for Niagara Politicos to Seek Federal "Bailout"

Niagara County is an ecological and economic disaster. The wheels of state government are turning much too slowly and don’t seem to be turning in Niagara’s direction when it comes to caring for the health of our people, restoring the integrity of our environment and maximizing the potential of our location and natural resources for economic success. The time for patience and trust in state bureaucracy, which includes the elected officials, and especially the DEC, is over. The time is now and the time is ripe for any politician who dare calls him- or herself a leader to look beyond the provincial indifference, likely incompetence and stifling inertia of established representation in Niagara County and turn to Washington for help. The help we need is in restoring and creating an “infrastructure” that makes us maximally competitive as a world class tourist destination

Barack Obama has made it clear that he wants to “rebuild” the “infrastructure” of America. The heart of Niagara’s infrastructure as a potentially world class tourist destination is the Falls and the surrounding water and land. Surely included in Obama’s project could be work on restoring such contaminated land and waterways and terminally dysfunctional and decrepit cities such as Niagara Falls to healthily habitable space, safely utilizable resources and possibly most importantly aesthetically attractive and thus economically productive destinations. If someone could lead the local politicos to assess our needs in doing such a comprehensive restoration and document the number of jobs that could be created in cleaning up Niagara County’s dump sites totally and permanently and reinventing our geography as such a destination, this would serve as the data needed to acquire funding from the Obama administration.

Surely the legislature with the aid, let’s say, of the recently hired Public Information Officer, the County Manager and whomever else they must hire who might be required to carry out such a task, could create such a “grant proposal” and execute such a study post haste and have it on Obama’s doorstep the evening just after the inaugural. Surely they could do this. It’s time to forget that the good will and creative concern of NY State career politicians will ever turn in our favor.

Surely a case can be made that as a potentially major tourist destination, Niagara’s infrastructure must have a pristine environment and a properly integrated geography which at present is lacking. Only such an environment can rightly consider itself a world class destination if in fact it is going to “work” to its own greatest advantage economically. It seems to me there is little good reason for us to not be at the top of the list of those needing and deserving help from the Federal infrastructural restoration project if some such case can be made.

Whoever here might lead such a project probably cannot count on the backing of a demoralized and depoliticized populace which has lost its sense of entitlement to self-respect, good health and equal treatment by State government. Hopefully not all of our poltical “leaders” have also not fallen into the groupthink of such second class non-citizenship, victimization and pathological civic passivity. Someone must step forward and take our case to Washington.

Niagara should be the jewel resort area of the Great Lakes region and not the dump site of first "resort" of the Eastern Seaboard.