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By: Frank Parlato

Robert Restaino has won the General Election and, with his win, the Dyster Era, with an ugly 12 years of depression and decline, rising crime, rising taxes, cronyism, and extraordinary waste, is over.

Now, for the first time in more than a decade, we can expect to see a city hall that favors Niagara Falls and its people over Albany, Buffalo and New York City.

We will now see Robert Restaino, who emerged successful in the General Election by an overwhelming majority, put the city’s best interests ahead of those who have held us down.

Restaino is of that type – a part of this community – without pretensions of being better than the rest of us. He is among us. Now Niagara Falls can come first for a while.

While Dyster was a beggar and a sycophant to the governor and to the Buffalo elite whose shoes he hoped to shine, he always looked down on the people here who paid his salary as a little unsavory, a little too dumb. Too unwashed, too lowly, to warrant serious consideration. He was embarrassed of us. And it showed.

He was a disaster as mayor – blowing through more than $200 million in casino cash and then forgetting to insure that the casino compact was renewed with payments to the city. He cut off his own allowance. 

Yet he always did what the governor or his Buffalo masters told him to do.

By massive, wasteful spending, he plunged the city into a $12 million annual deficit. [Vince Anello, the last mayor, had a $6.7 million surplus.] But Dyster handed out giant gobs of taxpayer money to any and all who would likely find votes for him.

And Seth Piccirillo, seemingly cut from the same spendaholic cloth, and who would have been as bad or worse, has now exited City Hall stage left before his former democratic primary rival could fire him come January 1st, 2020. 

Add all of Dyster’s faults to Seth’s immaturity, his poor temperament, his bad judgment, his willingness to play dirty tricks, all this added to incompetence and a habit of coming up with hare brained schemes, like paying people to live here and painting fire hydrants as leprechauns, it would have been a recipe for further disaster.

Restaino, on the other hand, is a real citizen of this city. Not a boy. But a man experienced in the world.

He can bring us back to where we were when the very competent Vince Anello was mayor. He can take us forward, erasing the terrible Dyster years when our population went down, but our cost of government went soaring up.

The laugh is on Dyster. He sold us out time and again, always expecting Gov. Cuomo to give him some big taxpayer funded job when he retired.  

Restaino, a businessman, is not of that ilk. He will not bend the knee to Albany interests. Rather, he will stand for the residents in a City that needs real leadership now more than ever. 

As of January 1st, 2020, our city returns to the people. This is a good day for Niagara Falls.