Mayor Kate Wdowiasz

Dunkirk Mayor Kate Wdowiasz said Tuesday she will no longer attend Common Council meetings. Wdowaisz suggested Wednesday she might call her own city meetings.

The council bid her farewell with an executive session focusing on the finances behind her lawsuit against former city dog officer Jennifer Sasso.

“This will be the last meeting that I will be attending, as I am not required by the charter to attend the Common Council meetings,” Wdowiasz began her mayoral report at Tuesday’s council meeting. “I just want to put that out there.”

She offered no further comment on her decision Tuesday. However, she had a few things to say to the OBSERVER Wednesday morning. “Council has not taken any meaningful actions at their meetings and have been failing the residents with their lack of decisiveness,” Wdowaisz texted.

“I am currently looking at options to exercise my executive powers to call special meetings at least two times a month to actually discuss issues in City Hall, instead of the horse and pony show they keep trying to put on for the public,” the mayor added. “But of course I will also make my meetings open to the public and provide an agenda.”

Wdowaisz has had a tense relationship with council at times, even though every current member is a fellow Democrat. Councilwoman Natalie Luczkowiak has been particularly critical of Wdowiasz and her administration in recent months.

Luczkowiak pressed the mayor some more on Tuesday. She unleashed a response to Wdowaisz’s lawsuit against Sasso.

“Today I will seek an executive session to review itemized legal billing” in the lawsuit, she said. “We’ll focus on whether the charges distinguish city matters from claims involving an individual capacity. The lawsuit’s funding was never appropriated by the council, and only the council may appropriate public funds, which must be used for public purposes.”

Luczkowiak continued, “Personal legal claims by an official are not city business under New York State law. I will request the invoices separate city-related work from individual capacity work, and I took a note to safeguard taxpayer funds.”

She concluded that “this request is for fiduciary oversight of billing transparency and not direction of legal strategy.”

The council meeting ended with the executive session that Luczkowiak requested.