Geoff Kelly’s very busy year

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What did I do in 2024?

For starters, I began writing a weekly newsletter called PoliticalPost,  jam-packed with items about local government and politics — patronage hires, electoral maneuvers, the misbehavior of public officials, and much more.

It’s free every Wednesday morning. (Though donations to support our nonprofit investigative journalism center are always appreciated.)  If you don’t get it already, you should sign up for it.

If you’ve been a subscriber from the get-go, you found out in January — six months before anyone else — that Byron Brown was looking to ditch Buffalo City Hall for the job he took in October as head of the Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp.

You learned in April that Stefan Mychajliw, the former Erie County comptroller who lives in Elma, is now editor of a conservative weekly paper in Long Island that publishes a column by George Santos, the disgraced former congressman.

You got regular updates on Buffalo’s descent into fiscal crisis — a subject that has been a specialty of mine since I joined Investigative Post in 2019. 

Many of the items in the newsletter became full-blown stories on our website, including:

• A look at how Chris Scanlon won the Buffalo Common Council presidency, setting up his ascension to the mayor’s office when Brown resigned in October to take the reins at OTB.
• A story about elected officials’ side gigs, featuring the revelation that Erie County Clerk Mickey Kearns for a while was a delivery guy for DoorDash.
• A piece about a scurrilous attack mailer the Erie County Democratic Party sent out in June, suggesting that a vote for non-endorsed candidates for party committee seats would handicap the party’s efforts to combat Trumpism. A bunch of the non-endorsed candidates won anyway.

Back in July, I wrote about Byron Brown’s latest scheme to drum up revenue for the city government he’d led into a financial quagmire: an ill-considered ticket tax on music venues. Our coverage — which included a discussion of the issue with Michael Wooten on Channel 7, Investigative Post’s new television affiliate — contributed to the administration backing off from the plan.

It probably helped that two weeks prior to reporting about the proposed ticket tax, I’d done a story about the skyrocketing cost of Brown’s executive office: Last year his staff comprised nearly three times as many people, at nearly three times the cost to taxpayers, than when he took office in 2006. Scanlon, Brown’s successor, has vowed to reduce the size and cost of the mayor’s staff.

I also wrote about the ever-burgeoning costs of overtime for city employees, especially firefighters and cops. During 2024 I contributed about a dozen stories to the category best described as “Buffalo is broke,” most recently about the revelation that three months into the current fiscal year the city’s budget was already running nearly $18 million in the red.

Occasionally I ventured out of Buffalo City Hall to cover the shenanigans of public office-holders in Cheektowaga, Hamburg, Lackawanna and Evans.

I was surprised by the stories that attracted the most readers:

• Several analyses of November’s election results, including the rise in the number of voters unaffiliated with a major political party. 
• The story of right-wing radio host Tom Bauerle’s legal battle with his siblings, who claim he cut them out of their late mother’s estate. (Case status: unresolved and active.)
• A piece on a study of Buffalo’s wealthy and well-connected power elite, called “Who Rules Buffalo?”
• And a story about a Niagara County man suing the company he claims produced the radioactive waste under his house, which he says caused the cancer that killed his wife.

It was also a year of shared bylines.

I teamed up with my colleague J. Dale Shoemaker to cover Brown’s departure from city government to take the reins at OTB from Henry Wojtaszek. I also lent Dale a hand from time to time on his excellent coverage of the continuing Braymiller Market fiasco. 

I joined my colleague Garrett Looker to report a wild tale about the son of the Buffalo school board president breaking into Bennett High School to hold an unauthorized basketball practice. I pitched in where I could to help my colleague I’Jaz Ja’ciel, who produced terrific stories this year.

Vote for our top story of 2024

Geoff Kelly