City Hall Morale Plunges As Dyster Misses Own Deadline For Reevaluation

Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster suggested last week that employees might perform better with a veritable sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.

Despite running on a platform that touted his leadership skills in assembling a team of the “best and the brightest” during last year’s election, once he was safely returned to office Dyster turned around and told all exempt [non union] employees that he’d praised for over 8 years that they needed to resubmit their job applications and write a letter explaining why he should keep them on.

Dyster campaigned on his successes and his “moving forward”.

The reevaluation, he said, would be complete by the end of January, but here it is April and there’s still been no word.

“There’s some people who believe that that’s an incentive to throw at you the best they have because they’re being evaluated,” he told the Niagara Gazette last week when asked how long the process might ultimately take.

A few things are certain. The mayor’s secretary, Nick Melson, who worked on the Dyster campaign after performing in a similar capacity for former state Rep. Francine DelMonte and running a losing campaign himself for the county Legislature, will be elevated to some as yet undescribed “leadership position” within the administration and get a raise said to be in the $20,000 a year range, which will bring his salary above $60,000 a year.

It raises the question: will Melson’s new job description be the same as the City Administrator? If so, why does the city need both positions?

Also due for raises are two other Dyster loyalists, city Council Secretary Bridgette Myles and Cynthia Ransom, who serves as secretary to the nearly invisible City Administrator Donna Owens.

When asked why the process is taking so long, Dyster hemmed, then he hawed.

There will be “one announcement that covers a variety of different topics, rather than information dribbling out,” Dyster said.

Talking openly about his plans now would “create more problems than advantages.”

But in the vault that is his mind, he knows what he is going to do, the mayor added.

“That doesn’t mean I haven’t long since made decisions about these things,” he said. “We’re working intensely on this and it’s not done.”

All of this mysterious intrigue strikes many as strange, given that the mayor has had two terms in which to assemble his administration and, during the November election campaign, told anyone who would listen what a great job his people were doing.

The sudden turnaround has some in City Hall concerned. What about those in the administration who have actually been candid about the dire conditions in the city? Whose job is safe and whose is not? Some are worried about being let go.

Dyster’s four month “reevaluation” does nothing to address the most glaring problem the administration faces, the lack of a city engineer. Sources say the paranoia at City Hall is palpable, and add that morale has never been lower.

It’s business as usual for Dyster, who has thus far been unable to reach an agreement with Amtrak to use the new $44 million railroad station he built, or to convince campaign contributor Mark Hamister that his stalled hotel project downtown is making the administration look ridiculous. Or how will Dyster plug the $12.5 million spending gap with dwindling casino cash?

It’s tough to hold others to deadlines when you can’t even keep the ones you put on yourself.