City, school talk shared services
Rick Forgione
Friday, April 30, 2026

You have to spend money to make money.

At least that’s what the Niagara Falls City Council and Board of Education are hoping will happen with their new partnership.

The two elected bodies met Thursday at the Administration Annex Building to discuss ways they could share services.

“We’ve been talking about this since 1996,” Mayor Vince Anello said. “The city and the school district serve the same taxpayers, we owe it to them to try and save money.”

A consensus was reached between the two groups to look into hiring a professional coordinator to identify areas where services can be shared. A cost of a coordinator wasn’t discussed, but all agreed it would be worth it.

“I think that’s an outstanding idea,” School Board member Christopher Brown said. “There’s no question it makes sense. I’m sure we’ll find it’s well worth the investment.”

City Administrator Daniel Bristol said the district and city would share the cost of hiring the coordinator. School board member Carm Rotella pointed out there may be partnership grant money available.

School Superintendent Carmen Granto agreed it would be an investment not an expense.

“Money is always an excuse, never an object,” he said. “If there’s money out there, believe me, we’ll find it.”

A group of officials from the city and school district will draw up a “request for proposal” (RFP) draft detailing what areas they would like a coordinator to focus on. Once the RFP is approved by both the council and school board and sent out, it usually takes about six weeks to get a decent amount of responses, Anello said.

In the meantime, a senior official from both the district and city will be in charge of creating a list of shared services that can be started right away.

“Grant writing services would be an example of something we could be doing now,” Bristol said.

One area of shared services Councilman Robert Anderson said he wants to stay away from is personnel.

“We need to let people know that we’re not doing this to sit around and eliminate jobs,” he said.

Council Chairman Charles Walker agreed shared services shouldn’t mean job cuts.

“On the city side, there’s nowhere else we can cut,” he said. “Our goal is to perhaps save dollars and possibly bring some of those jobs back.”
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