The mayor of Niagara Falls presented his executive budget for the 2020 fiscal year Tuesday night. It came as the city continues to face financial problems because of lost casino revenue.

“I believe it’s a budget that presents the most reasonable alternative to these stressful circumstances,” said Mayor Paul Dyster.

Niagara Falls continues to play catch up as the city faces a budget deficit largely caused by the loss of casino revenue.

“The major problem that we’ve run into is that precisely because we did have casino revenues at least hypothetically available to plug holes into the budget it prevented us from taking hard decisions sooner,” Dyster said.

The city is trying to make those decisions now. Mayor Dyster presented his executive budget, which includes the implementation of a garbage user fee that would cost Niagara Falls residents $218 a year (roughly $4 a week), a more than 2 percent increase in the tax levy, and a city staff reduction of 18 positions, including three vacant fire department and two vacant police department positions.

Mayor Dyster said alternative proposals could have been worse.

“If you look at the alternative of massive tax increase that takes us up to 95 percent of our constitutional taxing limit or large scale layoffs to public safety by comparison doing the user fee seems to be the more reasonable and moderate alternative,” the mayor said.

Niagara Falls City Councilman Chris Voccio said he’s not surprised with the budget and the city has to start facing its financial challenges head-on.

“There’s got to be a way for us to work with our friends in the municipal union and restructure our expenses so we can operate the city of Niagara Falls more efficiently than we currently do,” said Voccio.

With Mayor Dyster not running for re-election, Councilman Voccio is hoping new leadership could tackle the ongoing problem.

“My hope is with a new mayor in January whomever it is, with a new council because we’ll have one new councilmember, that we can begin that process, not at this time next year but on January 1, we can begin that process of looking at our expenses and figuring out a way to compress city expenses,” he said.

Now that the mayor has proposed his budget the city council will have budget and public hearings this month. A final vote on the budget is scheduled for December.