Niagara Gazette
COLUMN BY KEN HAMILTON —
Some may say they are hypocrites. Others may say, “Well, that’s just the way they are.”
Pastor Jesse Scott tries to teach his Word of Life congregation to follow the rules and live a good, pure life, but there are others — not among them — who take their money and literally make them “walk on water.”
Scott says he has both called and has even written a letter to them explaining the problem with the flooded sidewalk upon which his congregation has to walk.
That was a month ago, and still the Niagara Falls Water Board has not come out to fix the leak between the sidewalk of his Hyde Park Boulevard church and the city street. Since then, an estimated 30,000 cubic feet of water has poured over the curb and into the sewer.
That’s some 243,000 gallons! It is the minimum billing rate of some 25 senior citizens’ homes. Their water consumption is usually low, but their bills are always high. High, because somebody has pay for all of those leaks — leaks that create holes in the ground that buckle the sidewalks and put sinkholes the streets. That’s if we’re lucky. If not, then it erodes building foundations and fills basements.
Oh, yeah; the seniors and the rest of us have to pay to fix the sidewalks and the streets, too. That’s in addition to the flooded cellars.
That’s why some may say that the Water Board is a bunch of hypocrites. After all, don’t they threaten to turn off the water to those same seniors when they send out notices for late payments? At the same time they are giving penalty and volume use rate breaks to so-called big developers whose bundled water consumption yields them more favorable rates-per-unit than those seniors have to pay. My opinion is that it is hypocritical.
When Norstar Development got breaks from the Water Board that qualified them to raid our dollars at the New York State Dormitory Authority for the purchase of Apple Walk, one Water Board member exclaimed, as if it was a good thing, “Do you know how much money we can make on this?” The questions asked by everyone else are: “Do you know how much water is leaking out of the system? How much coin is leaking out of ratepayers’ pockets and purses? And how much the widows are again subsidizing the cigar-smoking big guys?”
Well, to look at the little falls that continues to pour over the curb at Word of Life church, one could easily conclude the disciples of dereliction on our Niagara Falls Water Board has us over a proverbial barrel and they just seemingly don’t care. Believe me, it’s not their only leak;. But after all, didn’t they also part that Dead Sea on 56th Street and Frontier Avenue by having their Moses-like lawyers raise a rusty pipe wrench?
In the meantime, both before and after church, it has Scott’s congregation and neighbors walking on water.
I suppose, in a religious way, that that’s a good thing!
Ken Hamilton is a Niagara Falls resident. Contact him at kenhamilton930@aol.com.
