City website silent on state of the city, waxes eloquent on Easter Egg Hunt
Doing a story on Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster’s 2016 State of the City speech is one thing. Sitting through it is quite another.
For one thing, it involves sitting in a room with Dyster and listening to him. He is notorious for his ability to go one and on about the minutiae of city government in a voice that guarantees he will not follow his predecessor – former mayor Vince Anello – into a career in radio when and if he ever leaves office.
For another, his nose fails to grow like Pinocchio’s as he distorts the truth, spins yarns and pollutes the air with outright whoppers. This is the third year in a row, for example, that he’s talked about the imminent groundbreaking on Rainbow Boulevard for his friend Mark Hamister’s imaginary hotel.
No, it’s far better to read Dyster’s tortured syntax, with its’ misplaced modifiers, mangled metaphors and clumsy constructions in print. That way, the conscientious reporter can be sure the words were actually the mayor’s and not some long suppressed memory of a Professor Backwards comedy skit he saw as a child.
In the past, Dyster has religiously posted the entire texts of his lengthy State of the City speeches on the city’s official website. In fact, the text of the speech is the first thing a visitor to the website sees. There is even an archive, so you can go all the way back to 2008 and read his promises about things that never happened.
Taken together, the annual State of the City speeches could be bound in book form.
So imagine our chagrin when, with deadline looming, we visited the page, only to discover that the stemwinder Dyster delivered in 2015 had not been replaced with this year’s model.
News accounts of this year’s address were sketchy at best, mostly published days after he’d actually delivered the speech.
But despite the inability of the administration to post what is generally considered to be the most important speech given by its fearless leader in the course of a year, they did manage to post something of value.
There was an entire section devoted to the city’s 2016 Easter Egg Hunt!
This is the 17th annual running of the event, to be held this year at the Conference and Event Center of Niagara Falls on Old Falls Street, the website informs us. The event will take place at 9 a.m. on Saturday, March 19, and is limited to children age 12 and under. Prizes, a candy village, an appearance by the Easter Bunny – hopefully not a convicted heroin dealer – and arts and crafts displays promises to make this year’s event the best Easter Egg hunt ever, the official city website declares.
Pre-registration is required and a printable form is included.
Normally, the Niagara Falls Reporter might ask whether the city should even be in the Easter egg hunting business, whether the event is an appropriate use of tax dollars and so on, but quite frankly, we were so overjoyed about not having to read the mayor’s State of the City speech we are grateful.
