Articles for Mark Scheer

May 24

2022

East Side residents “exhausted” by inequities

Boarded-up buildings. Vacant lots. Gun violence. Lack of economic investment and jobs. A single grocery store where residents can buy quality food at affordable prices. These are issues East Side residents have dealt with for years. In the wake of the mass shooting that claimed 10 lives at the community’s lone supermarket — the Tops store on Jefferson Avenue — residents who spoke with Investigative Post last week said they’re hopeful some good can come from the tragedy. Hopeful, but not optimistic. Several residents said they’ve heard the rhetoric about real change coming to the East Side before. They’re still[...]

Posted 3 years ago

May 16

2022

Attorney General’s inaction on OTB

Last fall, an attorney representing New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli asked Attorney General Letitia James to take yet another look at the gold-plated health insurance Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp. is still providing to its part-time board directors. The comptroller’s referral, made in September, called on the attorney general’s Taxpayer Protection Bureau to take “appropriate action,” noting that DiNapoli’s office deemed the practice “impermissible” in keeping with a prior attorney general’s opinion that “unambiguously” stated the same. It’s now been nearly eight months since the referral was made. What has the attorney general’s Taxpayers Protection Bureau done in that[...]

Posted 3 years ago

May 11

2022

Yet another failing Niagara Falls project

A lot of big ideas have been floated for revitalizing the City of Niagara Falls and most of them have ended the same way: in disappointment. Residents are still waiting for Niagara Falls Redevelopment — a company owned by New York City real estate developer Howard Milstein — to do something with the 140 acres it acquired downtown as part of a 1997 Master Redevelopment Agreement with the city. The most-recent effort to renovate and reopen the Hotel Niagara, an iconic 1920s-era building on Rainbow Boulevard that has been vacant for more than a decade, stalled last year amid financing[...]

Posted 3 years ago

May 11

2022

Maziarz sues OTB alleging “fraud”

Updated on Thursday, May 12, at 5:25 p.m. Former New York State Sen. George Maziarz wants a judge to order officials from Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp. to reimburse taxpayers for benefits he says they improperly obtained while using the public agency as a “slush fund, an ATM [and] a piggy bank.” OTB leaders, meanwhile, want Maziarz to shut up. In a lawsuit filed Saturday in state Supreme Court in Erie County, Maziarz alleges that the misuse of public resources by OTB higher-ups has prevented the agency’s “massive revenues” from being “fairly distributed to the municipalities and taxpayers it serves.” [...]

Posted 3 years ago

May 9

2022

Arena project with relevance to Sabres

An NHL arena that opened three years after Buffalo’s KeyBank Center is now in line for a facelift that could cost over $200 million. Members of the public authority that oversees PNC Arena – the suburban Raleigh, North Carolina, venue that has hosted the Carolina Hurricanes since 1999 – last week agreed to pursue renovations inside the facility and explore options for developing the area around it. Before Covid struck, the authority had a plan to use revenue from a tourism tax to pay for upgrades estimated in 2019 to cost as much as $200 million. At the time, the[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Apr 26

2022

Titans’ stadium subsidy surpasses Bills deal

Well, that didn’t take long. A month after Western New York became home to the largest public subsidy in the history of pro sports stadiums, officials in Nashville, Tennessee are preparing to spend even more taxpayer money to build a new riverfront home for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans. Tennessee state lawmakers last week approved $500 million in bonds for a new enclosed football stadium that is expected to cost between $1.9 billion and $2.2 billion. The total public cost for the project could hit $1.2 billion, with officials in the Metro Nashville government considering approval of another $700 million in[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Apr 13

2022

The Poloncarz exchange with stadium critic

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz didn’t talk about a new Buffalo Bills stadium while county and state officials were still negotiating terms of an agreement with the team. With the $1.4 billion stadium deal now approved as part of the new state budget, Poloncarz had a lot more to say this week. Well, he didn’t actually “say” anything. Instead, he Tweeted . On Monday, Poloncarz defended the stadium plan that will cost state and county taxpayers at least $1.13 billion over a 30-year lease term in a series of Twitter exchanges between him and Dr. Ryan Miller, a supporter of[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Apr 7

2022

No tax break request yet for Amazon project

The online retail giant Amazon hasn’t applied for any tax breaks for a proposed $300 million warehouse in Niagara County. At least not yet, anyway. Niagara County Industrial Development Agency Attorney Mark Gabriele said this week that the company has not yet submitted an application for tax break assistance for a five-story distribution center it has proposed for a site on Lockport Road in the Town of Niagara, just outside Niagara Falls. Today is the deadline for submitting items to be considered for the NCIDA’s next regularly scheduled board meeting, slated for Wednesday. The board isn’t scheduled to meet again[...]

Posted 3 years ago