Recipe for secrecy at Niagara County Community College

Niagara Falls Culinary Center (photo provided)

• An editorial from the Lockport Journal

When Niagara Falls Culinary Center opened in 2012, officials at Niagara County Community College were quick to note that not only would it be a place where students could learn about creating and serving culinary delights, it would also offer them the opportunity to receive on-the-job-training at various small businesses inside.

Those operations included Savor, a fine dining restaurant, La Patisserie, a shop offering baked goods and coffee drinks, Old Falls Street Deli, which served deli sandwiches in a casual atmosphere, and The Wine Boutique, which would offer wines from the Niagara Wine Trail and from across New York state. In addition, the center features a bookstore carrying the Barnes and Noble name.

While the establishments made perfect sense given the goal of offering a robust training atmosphere for culinary students, little, it seems, was known about how they would be operated, who would run them and, more importantly, how the income and expenses would be monitored. Well, that’s not exactly true. Some individuals in NCCC administration most certainly knew about the restaurants’ financial operations, but many others, apparently including members of the college Board of Trustees, did not.

After questions about development and oversight of the culinary center were raised over the past few months, it still is not clear just how much NCCC’s higher-ups really know and understand about those businesses.

This newspaper has attempted in recent weeks to obtain financial information pertaining to the operations of Savor and other entities within the culinary center, to no avail. A formal request made on March 8 under the state’s Freedom of Information Law was not acknowledged by the college’s public information officer for nearly two months. When the college staffer finally did acknowledge the request, she issued a denial. ... Robert Freeman, the director of New York’s Committee on Open Government whose office oversees compliance with the state open meetings and freedom of information laws, disagrees. He said there’s “no doubt” the records in question should be made available to the press and the public ... .

Go here for the full editorial.

---

• Go here to visit Dowd On Drinks
• Go here to visit Notes On Napkins
• Go here to visit the Capital Region Brew Trail

---