From Restaurants to City Hall: Three Niagara Business Owners Make the Case for Fiscal Discipline

Run a restaurant or a hospitality business for any length of time, and you learn some hard lessons.

Payroll has to be met. Suppliers need to get paid. Customers want value for their money. And when costs go up, an owner can’t just hand the bill to someone else.

Three Niagara municipal candidates (Noel Buckley in St. Catharines, Chris Rigas in Niagara Falls and Maria Mavridis in Niagara-on-the-Lake) are bringing that small-business outlook into the 2026 municipal election.

They’re running in three different municipalities, but their campaigns keep landing in the same place. They want more fiscal discipline and more accountability, and they believe municipal governments need to pay much closer attention to how taxpayers’ money gets spent.

The most direct version of that message may be coming out of Niagara Falls, where businessman and restaurateur Chris Rigas is running for city council. Rigas owns the Old Firehall restaurant, Greek on Portage and the Delphi Hall.

Fiscal responsibility is at the centre of his campaign, and his position is easy to follow. Property tax increases should be a last resort, not the first option City Hall reaches for when costs rise.

He has pledged not to support a property tax increase unless it’s absolutely necessary. Even then, he says, he wouldn’t support one that goes above inflation.

Rigas wants to do more than hold the line on taxes, though.

He’s calling for independent, third-party value-for-money audits of city procurement and service delivery. It’s the same question a business owner asks every day: what are we getting for the money we’re spending?

That could mean reviewing contracts, purchasing practices, programs, and service delivery to see whether taxpayers are getting reasonable value.

One of the bluntest lines in his platform pretty much sums up his thinking: “Money is better off in your bank account than the City’s.”

Rigas also argues that infrastructure and core municipal services should come ahead of what he calls “vanity projects.” He says major infrastructure work should be planned responsibly across the full four-year council term instead of bunched up around elections.

He grew up around his family’s businesses, and today he runs his own while staying involved in the family operation. He’s a husband and father of four daughters, and he sees fiscal responsibility as a longer-term question, too: what kind of city, and what level of taxes and debt, will the next generation inherit?

In St. Catharines, Noel Buckley is making a similar argument.

Buckley owns Cold Break Brewing and is running in St. Andrew’s Ward. He has more than 35 years of senior leadership experience. He’s managed organizations, worked with boards and spent years in Niagara’s tourism and hospitality sector.

His fiscal pitch is simple. Households and businesses have had to find savings as their costs went up, and City Hall should be expected to do the same.

Buckley wants the operating budget gone through line by line, with councillors asking what residents actually get for each spending increase. Before any new program or position is created, he wants to see a value-for-money case for it. He also thinks council should look for savings within the existing budget before anyone talks about higher taxes.

He also wants clearer reporting on what City Hall promised, what it cost and what it actually delivered.

In Niagara-on-the-Lake, incumbent councillor and restaurateur Maria Mavridis brings her own small-business take.

Her family has run businesses on Queen Street since arriving in Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1991. That’s given Mavridis decades of first-hand experience in tourism, hospitality, and staffing, as well as the pressures small businesses face.

Transparency has been central to her time on council. She regularly keeps residents up to date on municipal issues and decisions, and she’s focused on updating outdated policies and bylaws and improving how the municipality delivers services.

The three don’t have identical platforms, and they shouldn’t. St. Catharines, Niagara Falls and Niagara-on-the-Lake face very different challenges.

What they share is experience in an industry where financial accountability isn’t theoretical.

Restaurant and hospitality operators quickly find out when expenses grow faster than revenue. They know the difference between an investment and an unnecessary expense. And they know every dollar has to come from somewhere.

Rigas, Buckley, and Mavridis argue that municipal government could use more of that kind of thinking.

With taxpayers across Niagara wondering how much more they can afford, these three candidates from three different communities are bringing a small-business question to City Hall: Before we ask taxpayers for more money, are we sure we’re getting the best possible value from the money government already has?