OBSERVER Photo by Jo Ward The Dunkirk Common Council listens to a speaker during Tuesday’s meeting.

Concerned citizen Jeanette Delgado brought up the idea of a city-wide landlord registry at Dunkirk’s Common Council meeting Tuesday.

“Fredonia does have a landlord registry, unfortunately Dunkirk still does not,” Delgado pointed out. “It causes an issue when it comes to retaining your residents in the area. If you fall into a category where you’re in need of assistance in order to be rehoused, you have to join a program that requires you to contact five landlords a day. Unfortunately in Dunkirk, we do not have a compiled list of landlords in the area in order to comply with that, so families are actually being talked into leaving their job here and going to where they can find housing and moving a lot towards Westfield and Jamestown.”

Following the meeting, the OBSERVER asked for a response on this and Mayor Wilfred Rosas referred to Glenn Christner, code enforcement officer for the city, as the one who is handling this topic. Christner was not at the meeting and unavailable for comment.

Another point of discussion brought up by another city resident, Kurt Wormbrodt, was the National Grid Substation.

“I would hope that the city would look at the possibility of moving that substation south of Route 5 along the railroad tracks where the existing power lines are,” Wormbrodt stated. “There is future redevelopment of that site and I really feel strongly that the substation would be a hindrance to that rebuilding.” He also stated that with the power plant closed down, there’s no need to have the lines running across Route 5 anymore.

Other issues discussed by the council included a new website for the city, which would modernize it and make everything more secure and also approval of engineering services for repairs to the Lakeshore Boulevard retaining wall.

Following a lengthy executive session the council voted unanimously to authorize the city to execute agreements of services with Revise LLC Software Systems of Troy, Michigan for the website and Greenman-Pederson Inc. of North East, Pennsylvania for the retaining wall contract.