Articles for Geoff Kelly

Jul 24

2019

Dixon’s push poll, continued

A couple Sundays ago, Buffalo News politics columnist Bob McCarthy wrote, in essence, that I got it all wrong in my June 19 piece about Lynne Dixon’s push poll. I don’t know that I did. I don’t think McCarthy knows that I did, either. Dixon is challenging incumbent Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz. In early June, her campaign commissioned a poll of 1,325 likely voters. I first read about the poll in McCarthy’s June 16 story, which touted the Dixon campaign’s conclusion that the race was a statistical tie — a good sign for the underdog. Naturally, I wanted to[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Jul 23

2019

Kelly talks Buffalo budget woes on ‘Pressroom

Geoff Kelly has been reporting of late about Buffalo’s growing fiscal problems. He spoke on WBFO’s Press Pass about the poor budget practices of Mayor Byron Brown and the Common Council and the inaction of the city’s fiscal control board. Give a listen.  

Posted 6 years ago

Jul 9

2019

Buffalo’s in shaky fiscal shape

To hear Mayor Byron Brown tell the story, the City of Buffalo’s finances are strong and stable, and his finance team has constructed another in a series of sound, responsible budgets.  Two important bellwethers put the lie to that narrative. The first is the depletion of the city’s reserves. In the past decade, the Brown and the Common Council have used $107 million in reserves to close budget shortfalls. As a result, the city has no reserves left to plug future deficits. The lack of reserves has contributed to a second problem — poor cash flow — that resulted in[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Jun 27

2019

Lawsuit seeks to stop downtown project

Developer Rocco Termini and several businesses that operate out of his company’s downtown properties filed a lawsuit last week against the City of Buffalo and Ciminelli Real Estate Corp., seeking to hit pause on Ciminelli’s most-recent plan to develop a city-owned surface parking lot at 201 Ellicott Street. The Ciminelli plan entails 200 apartments and condominiums, plus a grocery store and food distribution terminal run by Braymiller Market, based in Hamburg. Braymiller is also named in the lawsuit.  The 2.5-acre site is across Ellicott Street from Termini’s Hotel @ The Lafayette. The downtown public library is to its north; the[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Jun 26

2019

Apathy, Democratic HQ winners in primary

Back in January, this looked to be a dynamic election cycle for Buffalo Democrats.  There were two long-time incumbents vacating their seats on the city’s Common Council and two more leaving the Erie County Legislature, creating the potential for wide-open races.  That doesn’t happen often. In response, a host of candidates signaled their intention to run and began circulating nominating petitions in the bitter grip of midwinter.  Many of these prospects were entering electoral politics for the first time, driven by a variety motivations: a wish to elect women to the all-male Council, for one example; for another, a desire[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Jun 19

2019

Lynne Dixon’s misleading push poll

If you follow local politics, and bless your heart if you do, you might have heard about a poll showing incumbent Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz in a statistical tie with his challenger, Erie County Legislator Lynne Dixon. The top-line conclusion of the poll, which was commissioned by Dixon’s campaign: Of the 1,325 respondents, 42 percent said they’d vote for Poloncarz if the election were held today; 40 percent said they’d vote for Dixon; and 18 percent said they were undecided. The margin of error is listed as 3.5 percent — thus, a statistical tie. The race might be that[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Jun 6

2019

Buffalo comptroller flip flops

 On Tuesday morning, the Buffalo Common Council’s Legislation Committee expected a visit from interim Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams. Miller-Williams had been invited to explain why she had issued a second, amended evaluation of Mayor Byron Brown’s proposed budget for the fiscal year 2019-2020. She didn’t show on Tuesday morning. Instead, Miller-Williams sent a deputy and her special assistant — newly hired out of the mayor’s budget office — to tell the committee that she had decided, upon further review, to withdraw the second budget response and go with the first one. You can read about the first report here and here, and[...]

Posted 6 years ago

May 30

2019

Troubling signs from Buffalo’s comptroller

Well, she went ahead and did it. There was no good reason to do it, but she did it anyway. Interim Buffalo Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams has issued an amendment to her own office’s critical assessment of Mayor Byron Brown’s projected 2019-2020 budget. The initial comptroller’s response was released on May 10, the deadline for the comptroller’s office to issue its response to the mayor’s annual budget proposal, according to the city charter. This new, amended response is dated May 15 and wasn’t submitted to the Common Council until a week after that — too late to count. But let that[...]

Posted 6 years ago
Investigative Post