Will Taxpayers Foot The Bill For Dyster’s Personnel “Surprise”? Dyster Secret Plan To Give Raises To Appointees Requires Council Support

By Emma Gibbs

Nowhere in either his proposed or adopted 2016 Budgets did Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster have the courage to introduce the plan he now wants to ask the City Council to approve sometime in April.

You read it here first.

Niagara Falls’ Chief Executive has plans to present an agenda item asking the Council to sanction additional spending not authorized in any municipal spending plan.

According to city hall sources, Dyster plans to create a new job title for his current secretary, Nick Melson, purportedly relieving Melson of the traditional duties assigned to a Mayor’s confidential secretary. The third ­term Mayor wants to name Melson as “Special Assistant to the Mayor” and give him a substantial raise.

Melson, currently earning about $42,000, boasts a resume long on political campaigning and highlighted by a stint as an assistant to  former New York State Assemblywoman Francine DelMonte.

The plan is expected to face little opposition to this “out ­of ­the ­blue”appointment.

It is safe to assume that Dyster owns the votes to have the Council fund this plan.

With Nelson’s salary moving above $50,000 annually, one is left to ask, what about the daily clerical, communication and reception duties handled in the past by the Mayor’s right hand?

Dyster, in his own version of ‘financial musical chairs’, plans to assign Melson’s old duties to , Cindy Ransom, the secretary of City Administrator Donna Owens.

Accepting the fact that many in this community have questions as to what Owens actually does, it seems to follow that her subordinate, Ransom, might have a free moment or two.

Don’t fret, the Administrator’s girl Friday will be justly rewarded with a raise in excess of $6,000 bringing her salary close to $50,000.

. Then keeping up the plan to raise salaries of secretaries higher than managerial positions in the private sector, Dyster also plans to raise the Council secretary, Brigette Myles pay so that there is no inequality among the $50,000 secretaries at city hall.

Think about it. The mayor plans to have three city employees, each an appointee,  being awarded unauthorized pay raises.

City union employees must be having a kitten.

There remains little question that the Dyster regime will conveniently identify a budget line from which to draw down gratuities to these three of the Mayor’s ‘friends’.

City Hall ‘watch dogs’ know the decision to fund or not fund rests in the hands of our City Council. But with the “hush money” in place and both sides giddy from drinking the same Kool­ Aid, sadly, to the tune of $30,000 annually, the taxpayers will once again take it on the chin.