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It's football season, and Dunkirk Councilman-at-large Nick Weiser and former Councilwoman Nancy Nichols are playing defense.
Mayor and City Hall quarterback Kate Wdowiasz lofted some bombs downfield at the Common Council a couple weeks ago, holding it responsible for Dunkirk budgetary woes. Councilmen Frank Torain and Mike Civiletto, who just took the field for the council in January, sought a penalty flag -- noting they have not yet worked on a budget. They agreed past council members are partially responsible for the city's financial problems.
Weiser and Nichols responded at this week's council meeting. Wdowiasz reportedly attended the meeting in the audience, not sitting at the mayor's seat.
Nichols spoke first, during the public comments portion of the meeting. "This is not so nice but I'm not going to be mean about it," she said.
"Before our current elected council throws past councils under the bus, I just want to ask, where were you when we had all our budget workshops? They were open to the public. We asked questions, sometimes we got answers, sometimes we didn't," Nichols said.
The former Fourth Ward representative, defeated by Civiletto last November, noted that the Common Council managed to shave about 24% off a Wdowiasz-proposed property tax increase a couple years ago. The tax increase still wound up at about 84%
"It's just very hard for me to sit back after six years and listen to getting bashed now," Nichols said to the council. "I just hope you have faith, you have patience and understanding, when you go to review a budget. It is not like anything you ever imagined. Sometimes you have to question yourself, what am I looking at, what is this for?"
Nichols also defended herself over a Civiletto side comment that she had supported an end to Independence Day fireworks. Nichols said she was not against the fireworks show, she was against spending $45,000 without explicitly stating what it was for.
Weiser later used his report to defend the council against Wdowiasz, and fired back accusations of his own.
"I don't think it's productive for this council to engage in a back and forth with the mayor every time we disagree," he said. "But I also don't think we should allow an inaccurate impression of how this council has approached the city's finances to go unchallenged."
Weiser continued, "The suggestion that this council has simply chosen to underfund the city, or that we have arbitrarily set the city's budget without regard for its actual needs, is not an accurate description of what has happened. As I've said before, the council’s budget work does not happen in a vacuum. We begin with a proposed budget from the mayor, we receive information from the administration and from department heads, and we’ve relied extensively on guidance from the state Comptroller's Office in establishing personnel,services, fringe benefits and other budget lines.
"When the council has made substantive changes to the mayor's proposed budget, those changes have been made deliberately... We have not simply gone through the budget and arbitrarily cut funding because we wanted to reduce spending. Quite the opposite. We have been trying to thread a very difficult needle maintaining essential services while dealing with a structural fiscal problem that has been developing for years, and that was dramatically worsened by loss of NRG revenue."
Weiser went on to note that three of the five current council members have not worked on a city budget, and pointed out Dunkirk's failed attempt at a New York state-backed Fiscal Recovery Act.
Weiser stated that while the council took necessary steps to seek funding under the act, Wdowiasz did not pursue it, and acknowledged as such in an interview. "The mayor was entitled to make that judgment, but she also has to accept responsibility for the financial consequences of that decision," he said. "We cannot now pretend that the resulting financial constraints are solely the product of council decisions or inaction."
City Attorney Elliot Raimondo later attributed Wdowiasz's decision to wariness among bankers over the arrest of former city Treasurer Mark Woods on fraud charges. "Unfortunately, that made getting a good interest rate under the Fiscal Recovery Act almost impossible," Raimondo said.
Councilman-at-large Weiser also complained about the recent slew of worker grievances against the city, under Wdowiasz and her administration, stating that they cost Dunkirk money.
The council is ultimately accountable for the budget, "but the same standard of accountability has to apply to the executive branch," he said.
Weiser said that while the council has an interest in talking about financial problems honestly and completely, "we are not going to solve it by pretending responsibility only runs in one direction."