The World According to Bob

Great Day for golf

It was a great day of golf for kids 7-17 at Hyde Park. Then tournament was a big success.

Music everywhere

Gill Creek Wednesday; Thursday at Columbus Square 15th and Pine Friday Old Falls Street. Food Truck Thursdays are ongoing.

Pools and splash pads would open more if we could find workers

“It is really important people get the facts of what is happening. “Too often public officials will rush to make comment just to try and be popular. We had a little bit of that this week when it came to pools and splash pads.

“Many communities around Western New York have requirements from New York State to provide a certain number of lifeguards and or park attendants for their facilities. Without that, you can’t open these facilities.

“And in our situation, our recreation aides, the average age of our aides is 16 and the average age of our lifeguards is 17. In order to factor this part time into their work or their own private schedule.

“They’ve got things they want to do, sports they want to play, they may be working a second job that they enjoy and so public officials, rather than talking about the city should be able to find this and appropriate this, where we can really use help is to continue to recruit. Maybe they have a young person in the family who can get certified as a lifeguard or continue to participate as a recreation aide.

“Obviously, the more people that we have, the more we can expand the program but when you struggle to get young people who are going to participate in this, it makes it difficult. You can’t say ‘you are going to work a 40-hour week’. It just doesn’t make sense. These are young people, 16 or 17 on average, and they are going to have other things that they are going to want to do.

“Those really are the facts of the situation and I would just hope that public officials would work toward helping to recruit rather than just rushing quickly to make comment. That requires, obviously, information gathering which gets back to the idea of, you know, working. You have to work a little bit to understand what is going on and then respond clearly with that knowledge to any of these circumstances that may come up.

About City Hall staffing

“That’s the other side, too, of staffing here at city hall, you know you have and you can go to the Website and see it yourself, when you have over a dozen jobs it is just difficult to fill employment and we are not the only ones. I don’t want to make it sound like this is a unique situation. I talk to business people all the time about the fact that it is hard to fill positions. But in government when that is difficult it impacts the level of service. I mean, service is still provided, but the difference between having 6 members in a department as opposed to 2 members in a department, I think you can figure out what happens there. Those are the facts of the situation, the challenges that we have here. Obviously, again, whenever I am out and around, I will tell people if they are talking about needing employment, file an application. We are always happy to review applications and see if we can’t add more people to our workforce.”

(Editor’s note: If you are interested in applying, do so here. https://niagarafallsusa.org/residents/employment_opportunities.php)

Milstein wants to build Berlin Wall

“I also want to talk today a little bit about history. A few days back, maybe a couple weeks now, there was a hearing in front of the planning board on the Milstein Development for a data center. And as a part of their presentation, they talked about sound attenuating walls and I think they mentioned that they would be 3-stories high along the development. You are talking about a 30-foot wall to buffer the sound of what is supposed to be a very quiet data center. You need a 30-foot wall. It is funny because the Milstein Group was talking about these sound-attenuating walls and about two weeks after that, this past Wednesday in fact, we celebrated, well not celebrated, we remembered that it was on Aug. 13, in 1961, that the Berlin Wall started to get constructed.

“Now I think anybody, who knows anything at all about history knows about the Berlin Wall and the funny thing is the proposed walls in this project are more than double the size of the Berlin Wall and that is what is being proposed along John B. Daly Boulevard, Falls Street, it is just something to remember that we remembered that this past Wednesday, that was the beginning of the construction of the Berlin Wall 64 years ago and now we are talking about the building of 30-foot walls along John B. Daly Boulevard and Falls Street. It is just something to think about as that particular topic continues to roll around.

Hot weather continues

We are expecting that the weather is going to stay seasonably summer hot so if you are going to be out and round and you are going to be exercising, hiking, biking or just being outside, please be make sure you hydrate yourself and also make sure you tend to young kids and seniors because they also need our help in making sure they stay safe in the heat. Again, lots of entertainment going on out there in community this week get out there and enjoy it.