Fresh off of his failure to block the redevelopment of the former Fallside Inn on Buffalo Avenue in what was perhaps the most blatant attempt yet by city government to aid Comfort Inn at the Pointe owner James Glynn, city Economic Development Director Peter Kay was given a new assignment last week.

He will be working with a "planner" from the state's USA Niagara Development Corp. on ways to solve the nonexistent parking problem in the South End tourist district.

"We need to analyze parking for the whole downtown," Kay told the Buffalo News.

"How come?" somebody asked.

"Right now, parking is not a problem because there's not much here, but if we get even halfway developed, I think we will find that there will be a parking shortage," Kay said.

Kay's study will be the 158th such study undertaken since corrupt former mayor Michael O'Laughlin and the crooked City Council majority he assembled managed to finish up with the rape and pillage of the South End begun by his predecessor, E. Dent Lackey.

Mayors Jake Palillo, James Galie, Irene Elia and Vince Anello all wrestled with the problem of parking in the tourist district prior to current Mayor Paul Dyster taking the bull by the horns and assigning Kay to solve the difficult dilemma.

Kay's approach should be novel in that he has absolutely no prior experience in tourism, parking or anything else that might prove remotely germane to the issue. His previous experience deals entirely with the marketing and development of industrial parks.

"I want to recognize the problems, if we can," Kay said.

The problem, quite simply, is this: In more than 30 years, the city has never made a dime on parking, and in fact the maintenance of public parking lots and ramps has cost taxpayers here millions of dollars.

A case in point is the Rainbow Centre parking ramp, which would have been condemned as a public safety hazard by the city years ago if a private individual owned it. But the city owns it and Dyster wants to keep it operational, ostensibly to serve the customers of the attached Rainbow Centre Mall, which closed nearly a decade ago.

Engineers have put a $5 million price tag on bringing it up to city code, and the ramp loses money every day it is open.

Dyster himself has been publicly mute concerning Kay's new assignment, which the Niagara Falls newcomer was forced to announce himself on a slow news day last week.

But the open hostility Dyster has shown toward the hugely successful parking operation across the street from the ramp run by downtown entrepreneur Frank Parlato may go a long way in explaining his eagerness to keep the crumbling facility open and continuing to throw good money after bad.

Parlato's surface lot, created when he filled the cavernous hole in the ground left by the failed AquaFalls development of the late 1990s, has been filled to capacity most days this summer, while Dyster's ramp continues to serve as a makeshift shelter for homeless bums.

While some might say that the city's economic development director should have better things to do than plan for parking cars that don't yet exist, Dyster's decimation of the city's inspections department, combined with the fact that he hasn't seen fit to hire a licensed city engineer, all but guarantee that there will be little development here -- economic or otherwise -- any time soon.

As he approaches the halfway mark of his term, the mayor seems increasingly unable to make even simple decisions on his own, and the ragtag team he has assembled to assist him have provided little support except to those already jockeying to oppose him in the next election.