Niagara Falls can’t keep up with the issues facing the Downtown BIA
Published March 8, 2023 at 3:19 pm
The city hall representative for the Niagara Falls Downtown BIA has stepped away from his position amidst chaos within the group.
At last week’s council meeting, Councillor Wayne Campbell told his colleagues that the controversial BIA was facing bankruptcy. Yesterday (March 7), he stepped away from being their city hall representative.
However, the possible bankruptcy is not the reason Campbell is stepping away. It seems he has been inundated with countless angry and conflicting emails from members of the BIA and in the end, it was getting to be too much.
At that council meeting, other councillors expressed frustration in the large number of emails they receive from BIA members and expressed sympathy towards Campbell for facing the brunt of the hostility.
At the end of 2022, city council has to sort through confusion around the Downtown BIA’s Board of Governors election, which sparked a number of complaints from its own members.
During a December 2022 council meeting, Mayor Jim Diodati had more than enough of the bickering.
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“You guys (have to) have a better system downtown, because there’s more problems downtown than all other BIAs combined,” he said in frustration. “So, I’m putting that back on you guys, not on us. We’re not going to referee, you guys referee yourselves.”
At last week’s meeting, Diodati expressed more of the same, saying it was up to the BIA, not city council, to sort out their own mess.
Currently, there are six different BIAs in Niagara Falls and councillors are getting frustrated that five of them run smoothly where the downtown one does not.
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