NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. — New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released the latest fiscal stress scores for municipalities across the state.
DiNapoli releases fiscal stress scores on municipalities (excluding New York City) twice a year. The latest round of scores announced Wednesday identified 19 local governments designated in fiscal stress, including six counties, four cities, and nine towns.
In the top tier for being under "significant fiscal stress" is the City of Niagara Falls.
"The overall and the obvious one is they have a challenge in aligning recurring spending with recurring revenues," DiNapoli said. "For Niagara Falls, what we continue to see is a very low fund balance that's one of the key indicators of a level of fiscal stress."
Mayor Robert Restaino said in 2020, when the city was first dealing with the COVID pandemic, the city was headed toward a $4 million deficit.
"Through some work that we did internally, we were able to turn that around to a $500,000 surplus by year's end, cash-flow wise," Restaino said. "The biggest key to all of this is to create reserves and build reserves, and unfortunately for some of the portion of 2020, we had to use those."
Restaino said he was able to avoid that deficit by reducing city expenses.
"We went to core responsibilities of local government. The pandemic, to the extent that it affects us in terms of revenue, it also provided us with an opportunity to pare back some things -- youth programming, senior programming -- because so much of it was prohibited based upon state mandates," Restaino said.
Restaino also said the city took advantage of programs that were available to municipalities to defer social security tax payments for a couple of years.
Niagara Falls City Council Chairman Kenny Tompkins said he agrees with Mayor Restaino's efforts to beef up reserves in the city.
"In talking to the mayor and the city comptroller, I can tell they are going to use the American Rescue money in ways that will definitely help the city build financially," he said.
