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Sep 19

2022

Monday Morning Read

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Here’s what caught Jim Heaney’s eye last week. Subscribe to his WeeklyPost and you’ll receive his recommended reading, along with a recap of the previous week’s reporting by Investigative Post. Updated: 2:10 p.m. Newspaper print circulation is tumbling in Buffalo and across the nation. The hope of the industry is to make up for that lost ground by growing online readership. Now, Rick Edmunds, the media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, reports that, too, is shrinking. He wrote this last week: Pageviews and uniques are not the favored digital metrics they used to be, but as they fell roughly[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 15

2022

Big subsidies for luxury apartments

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State and local governments eagerly offering tax subsidies to a luxury, waterfront apartment project sounds like something out of a developer’s fantasy. But that’s exactly what’s happening in North Tonawanda. The Niagara County Industrial Development Agency on Wednesday unanimously approved — without debate — a $7.2 million subsidy package for a developer building 110 apartments along the Niagara River marketed as “luxurious living in elegant surroundings.” The project is a third phase of developer VisoneCo’s aims for the section of River Road just north of Tonawanda Island. The first, which is finished, features apartments, townhomes and commercial space. The second,[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 14

2022

New York’s Oath Keepers

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New York has more law enforcement officers who are members of Oath Keepers than any other state in the country. That’s according to a study released last week by the Anti-Defamation League, whose analysts examined a list of 38,000 purported members of the militant far-right group, looking for elected officials, law enforcement and military personnel among its ranks. The list was first published last September by the nonprofit journalist collective Distributed Denial of Secrets, along with Oath Keepers emails and other data obtained by hackers.  By cross-referencing the names on the list with public databases, ADL confirmed the identities of[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 13

2022

The tentative return to Tops

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Rose Wysocki’s family pleaded with her to transfer from the Tops Supermarket on Jefferson Avenue after she was trapped in the store during the May 14 shooting. She considered the move until she ran into a customer. “She had hugged me and was very happy to see that I was OK, and said, ‘I can’t wait for you to come back. I can’t get cleaned greens like at your store,’ and that was what helped me make my decision — to know that my community needed me and wanted me to come back,” Wysocki said. It was then she knew[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 12

2022

Harborcenter fails to meet its jobs goal

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When state and county officials agreed nearly a decade ago to give the Buffalo Sabres and the Pegula family $57 million in tax breaks for downtown’s Harborcenter, the money came with a promise. Jobs. In its application for public assistance, a subsidiary of Pegula Sports and Entertainment promised 205 full-time and 160 part-time jobs. In a subsequent press release, the Sabres upped the ante to 350 full-time positions. Those jobs were supposed to be in exchange for $37 million in tax breaks from the Erie County Industrial Development Agency and $20 million from the state to remediate the brownfield the[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 12

2022

Union complaint filed against Geico

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Geico employees attempting to organize a union at the company’s Amherst office have filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. At issue are two emails the company sent to employees that organizers said amount to “union busting.” In the first email, sent Aug. 12, Mindy Seibold, the regional vice president for Buffalo, and Pete Rizzo, a company vice president, warned employees against speaking with Geico United organizers visiting them at home. Because of the pandemic, organizers previously told Investigative Post, many Geico employees are working from home, meaning that union organizers have been knocking on[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 11

2022

Monday Morning Read

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Subscribers to DailyPost received our recommended reading Sunday morning, along with a recap of Investigative Post’s reporting of the previous week. You can subscribe here. Michael Petro of The Buffalo News wrote an informative story on the expected push by the Pegulas for public funding to renovate KeyBank Center. The building is long in the tooth and needs upgrading. The trouble is, after forking over $850 million to build a new stadium for the Bills, no public officials seem interested in subsidizing the Pegulas again. The couple hasn’t helped their case by running the Sabres into the ground since they bought the[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 8

2022

Belatedly, City Hall has an ethics board

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 The city’s ethics board has been resurrected from the dead. Investigative Post reported last month that the ethics board hadn’t met in two and half years because the mayor and Common Council had failed to appoint enough board members to comprise a quorum. Last week, Mayor Byron Brown submitted five nominees for the ethics board to the Common Council for approval. All five were approved Tuesday without debate or discussion, bringing the ethics board to its charter-prescribed membership of seven.  Before Tuesday, it had just three members — one short of a quorum. The five newly appointed members are: John[...]

Posted 2 years ago
Investigative Post