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In Our Opinion

Tough budgets taking a toll on city surplus

News that Jamestown’s unassigned surplus - its savings account, if you will - is on the low end of auditors’ recommended range for a city should catch the eye of city residents. It’s a sign that, while Jamestown won’t have the same trouble paying for day-to-day expenses as Dunkirk, the city’s finances are still worth watching as we head into a budget that Mayor Kim Ecklund has already said won’t be pretty. What should city residents take away from the yearly audit? The fact that the audit was done by mid-September shows Ecklund and Ericka Thomas, city comptroller, ...

Hopefully, no more extensions are needed for Falconer project

Falconer Village Board members did the right thing last week when they agreed to another one-year extension to purchase Main Street property that Peak Development has been working with the village to redevelop since a pair of fires destroyed the properties. The lot has been vacant for nearly a decade since the March 22, 2017, fire that destroyed 29-39 W. Main St. Efforts to redevelop the site have hit stumbling blocks for years, though the receipt of a NY Forward grant in June creates the possibility of additional funding for a redevelopment project. The NY Forward grant application ...

County tax cut is nice, but is the budget realistic?

County Executive PJ Wendel is proposing a 58 cent tax rate decrease and no tax levy increase in his 2027 budget. Not increasing the levy is due, in part, to increased use of the county’s surplus while the county’s tax rate decrease is due, in part, to a 14% increase in the value of property in the county. It’s a good position for the county to be in - because we are pretty sure when we see budget proposals from Jamestown and Dunkirk in a couple of weeks the pictures won’t be nearly that pretty. In addition, the county plans to spend an additional $100,000 on Chautauqua Lake ...

It shouldn’t be this hard to park downtown

Parking meter issues have been a point of consternation over the past couple of years - and they really shouldn’t be. A couple of years ago the city was having issues with batteries failing in some parking meters that caused some meters to stop working at all. In 2023 new parking meters purchased with a state grant in 2021 began to malfunction as their batteries died out. Some of those meters were replaced with coin parking meters until new batteries could be ordered, though some of the meters weren't able to handle the coin payments because of the way they were shaped. Earlier ...

On shopping carts, we agree on the what, disagree on the how

It’s hard to disagree with the city’s proposal to crack down on shopping carts that are littering many city neighborhoods. In many cases, the carts are making it easier for people to steal metal - like the innards from a freezer at the St. Susan Center, markers from Lakeview Cemetery or other items throughout the city - and transport them to scrapyards. So not only are the carts becoming a growing eyesore in some neighborhoods, they are also actively being used in thefts and criminal mischief. A memorandum associated with the ordinance noted that on Monday, Aug. 10, 2026, code ...

City commission is a tree that fell in a forest. No one noticed.

The City Council is poised to remove the Strategic Planning and Partnerships Commission from the City Charter after a lengthy period of inactivity. Most city residents didn’t realize that the commission was still in the charter. After being reinvigorated around 20 years ago during former Mayor Sam Teresi’s administration, and largely driven by Dr. Lillian Ney during her time on the City Council, the commission has fallen back into dormancy. The commission was largely a group that made non-binding recommendations to the mayor and City Council and worked on special projects that ...