Niagara County

Today, Assemblyman Angelo Morinello (R,C,I,Ref-Niagara Falls) took his oath of office and was sworn in as a member of the New York State Legislature. Morinello was elected on November 8, 2016, defeating the incumbent of six years. Morinello will represent

BY TONY FARINA Uber and Lyft have blanketed Albany with money as they push state lawmakers and the governor to legalize expansion of their ride-hailing services to upstate cities, including Buffalo, but they don’t want to operate under the same

BY LOU RICCIUTI Aside from the heart-string-tugging stories of the veterans, their families, their lives and sacrifices, Michelle Ann Kratts’ Niagara Falls in World War II is technically a historical fiction at best. Single-sourced references scream that this book was rushed, or

BY TONY FARINA It is hard to know where to begin when trying to capture the essence of a much-honored and accomplished professional who is retiring after a long and very distinguished career in the criminal justice system who, by

The unsurprising news broke late Tuesday night: the chairman of the Niagara County Legislature, Keith McNall, R-Lockport, would be keeping his job. In the annals of Niagara County’s political news, this wasn’t exactly an earth-shattering announcement; after all, save for

BY TONY FARINA “The citizens of Niagara Falls would be hard-pressed to find a better candidate for a seat on the City Court bench than Alan Roscetti,” says longtime pharmacist Robert Kendzia when asked about the young man’s plans to

BY FRANK PARLATO Earlier this year the Niagara Gazette announced that a group of locals organized something called “Reclaim Niagara” – formed to “get Albany out of our pockets.” To combat the “exploitation of our resources by public authorities and

Virtuoso slams GOP for Peck, Tamburlin raises, as he enjoys pension ala Dyster Some of us here at the Niagara Falls Reporter had to laugh when we saw the story that Dennis Virtuoso was complaining about pay raises for Niagara

BY TONY FARINA A last-minute budget amendment giving hefty pay raises to two appointees of the GOP majority of the Niagara County Legislature is coming under heavy fire today from Minority Leader Dennis Virtuoso of Niagara Falls. Virtuoso told the

BY JAMES HUFNAGEL Gov. Andrew Cuomo, through his associates at State Parks and the New York Power Authority, sometime over the past week perpetrated an act of such petty vindictiveness and blatant contempt for Niagara Falls that we thought it

Mayor Paul Dyster’s 2017 final budget for the city of Niagara Falls, approved by the city council last week, is a document based more on political calculation than fiscal responsibility. After the vote, councilmembers nearly sustained injuries patting themselves on

BY TONY FARINA The Explore & More Children’s Museum planned for Buffalo’s Canalside received a much welcome $1 million capital gift from the Paul A. Saffrin Foundation this week for the planned museum’s Play It Forward capital campaign. Groundbreaking is

BY JAMES HUGNAGEL This summer the city of Hamilton, a prosperous Canadian city of over a half million inhabitants located just over the border in Ontario, renamed a portion of its heavily-traveled Burlington Street, “Nikola Tesla Boulevard”. According to the

BY TONY FARINA Is  former State Senator George Maziarz out of the woods nearly two years after he left office under the cloud of a federal investigation?  While Maziarz left office denying he was being chased out, it appears the

BY ANN WILLIAMS Mayor Paul Dyster deceived the taxpayers by waiting until five days after the mayoral election to tell us that he was planning to do a citywide reassessment. He plans to raise our assessments on average from between

BY TONY FARINA Gov. Andrew Cuomo came to Niagara Falls on Tuesday to officially break ground on the long-awaited Hamister hotel project in downtown Niagara Falls and he used the occasion to praise his state development team led locally by

BY MIKE HUDSON State and local officials were looking sheepish and Buffalo developer Mark Hamister was spinning excuses at Tuesday’s long delayed groundbreaking for a small, midmarket hotel project that was first announced four years ago. Niagara Falls Mayor Paul

BY MATTHEW RICCHIAZZI If we could ever put the interests of institutional advancement over the prissy sensibilities of cynics, we may be able to make something spectacular of the Albright Knox, which barely earns 200,000 attendees annually at its Delaware