Published: July 02, 2009 09:21 pm      

NIAGARA STREET: Alternatives sought for sex offenders

Top parole official promises action on Midtown Inn problem

A top official with the New York State Division of Parole told community leaders and residents on Thursday that his office will work harder to find alternative living arrangements for a group of supervised sex offenders who live within walking distance of an elementary school in Niagara Falls.

During a meeting at Niagara Street Elementary School, Parole Division Regional Director Eugenio Russi said his office wants to be a good neighbor and appreciates the community’s concerns about the proximity of the school building to the Midtown Inn, a building at 22nd and Niagara streets that is currently home to 14 registered sex offenders and 15 non-sex offender parolees, according to Russi’s department.

“We will make every effort to start to look at places to relocate these individuals,” Russi said. “It’s not something that is going to be done overnight. It’s going to take a little work.”

Residents have been hard at work trying to draw attention to the number of Level 2 and 3 sex offenders — the most dangerous classifications — living near the elementary school. The Midtown Inn, formerly the Zodiac Lounge building, houses the largest concentration of individuals convicted of offenses involving children between the ages of 6 and 13 in Niagara County.

Community concerns increased following a recent decision by Supreme Court Justice Richard Kloch who assigned registered sex offender James A. McKinney to live at the Midtown Inn, even though the majority of his sex crimes occurred in North Tonawanda. The 51-year-old McKinney is completing a seven-year prison sentence for having sex with four girls under the age of 14. He is considered to have a mental abnormality that makes him more likely to be linked to such activity again in the future.

State Assemblywoman Francine DelMonte, D-Lewiston, organized Thursday’s meeting between parole officials and concerned residents and community leaders in hopes of finding a solution to the problem.

Russi and other officials from his department made it abundantly clear that they too would prefer to move the sex offenders under their supervision to a different location, but continue to run up against a recurring problem that put the parolees at the Midtown Inn in the first place: the lack of suitable alternative sites within the county.

“We can’t make them disappear,” Russi said. “They are here. They are residents of the county whether we like it or not.”

As for McKinney’s placement in the Falls, Russi and his colleagues said their department had no choice but to follow the court’s order.

While the state Attorney General’s Office can file a formal appeal to the judge’s decision, on Thursday DelMonte said officials from the office told her they would only do so in the event there were errors in the legal proceeding. DelMonte said the Attorney General’s staff did not believe such an appeal had merit and did not intend to file one at this time.

Officials from the Division of Parole indicated that it may be possible for the Attorney General’s Office to make a different sort of request, one encouraging the judge to modify the terms related to McKinney’s place of residence. To do that, they argued, the parole division and the community would need to present the Attorney General’s Office with a suitable alternative location.

“You can’t go to the judge with a blank sheet of paper,” said Marc Coppola, the Parole Division’s director of legislative affairs.

Residents and school district officials attending the meeting suggested the Parole Division should accept more responsibility for allowing a home for sex offenders to continue to operate so close to a school building.

“It’s not the location for that,” said Ron Anderluh, revitalization coordinator for the Niagara Street Business Association. “They should be in an industrial area or someplace else.”

The distance between the school building and the Midtown Inn varies depending on how the measurement is taken, but it is generally accepted by all parties that tenants living at the Inn are violating state and local laws creating buffer zones between areas where children congregate and places where people who commit sex crimes live.

School District Superintendent Cynthia Bianco said there’s no need to measure the distance between the two buildings to the inch because the sex offenders are too close to the children no matter how you look at it. Bianco suggested the parole division find a suitable alternative elsewhere in the county, preferably a rural area away from young people.

“It’s something that really cannot be tolerated,” Bianco said of the current arrangement.

School Board member Carm Rotella said the presence of the sex offenders detracts from the appeal of the district’s $20 million school building and the surrounding neighborhood. She took exception to the judge’s decision to place a man in Niagara Falls who committed his sex crimes in North Tonawanda.

“You’re not going to ruin a nice neighborhood in North Tonawanda, but you will ruin a nice neighborhood in Niagara Falls,” she said.

Russi said there are challenges related to finding other locations in the county, including the lack of willing landlords and concerns about how paroled sex offenders would obtain drug treatment, counseling and other services that are generally located in urban centers. Russi also said it is preferred, from a safety standpoint, to concentrate groups of sex offenders in central areas to allow for better supervision.

“It’s a lot more difficult and a lot less safe if you have to go out into the county and try to keep on eye on these guys,” he said.

Mary Osborne, director of the parole division’s Sex Offender Management Unit, said paroled sex offenders face tight scrutiny when they are released back into the community following incarceration. She said they are subject to regular personal surveillance by probation officers, polygraph testing, tight travel restrictions, frequent address and personal information updates and, as of a new law passed in 2008, are limited in their activities on the Internet and must register all screen names as well as service providers with the state. In addition, Osborne said Level 3 offenders are subject to curfews and monitoring of location through GPS.

“Strict and intensive management in our agency is strict and intensive,” she said.

All parties agreed to work together to find another home in another community for McKinney and to consider submitting a request to the Attorney General’s Office to lobby the judge to accept the transfer.

“I think it was a bad decision me made putting him here,” said Legislator Dennis Virtuoso, D-Niagara Falls.

Officials also agreed to work harder on a longer-term plan for developing additional housing sites for sex offenders elsewhere in the county.

“The central issue, obviously, is to find another location,” DelMonte said.