Categories for Co-produced with WGRZ

Jul 19

2019

State comptroller to audit OTB

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The state Comptroller announced Friday his office is going to take a close look at how the Western Regional Off Track Betting Corp. does business. The audit will consider not only the routine aspects of the OTB’s operation, but several questionable business practices exposed by Investigative Post and the Niagara Gazette. They include deluxe health, vision and dental insurance provided to part-time board members and the distribution of tickets to concerts and sporting events. “Questions have been raised about the Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corporation that warrant a deeper look,” Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said in a statement. “Our audit team[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Jul 15

2019

Brown denies Buffalo’s fiscal woes

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 Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown refused to talk with Investigative Post about the city’s fiscal plight for a story published last week, but he couldn’t dodge WGRZ’s Dave McKinley. The mayor’s response, included in a story that aired Monday, was a mix of arguing semantics and making misleading statements about city reserves. And, as if to underscore her lack of independence from the mayor, City Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams issued a press release intended to assure the public that all is well with city finances. This wasn’t the first time she attempted to cover for Brown during her brief tenure in office.[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Jul 9

2019

Buffalo’s in shaky fiscal shape

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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 5 years ago

Jun 6

2019

Buffalo comptroller flip flops

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 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 5 years ago

May 21

2019

The cost of suspending driver’s licenses

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 A “staggering” number of motorists across the state, including Western New York, lose their driver’s license every year. The state suspends more than a half-million annually; the count in Erie County approaches 26,000. Drivers can lose their license without violating traffic laws. Failure to pay state taxes or make child support payments are among the offenses that can result in a driver losing their license. Still, nearly two-thirds of suspensions result from the failure to pay traffic tickets or show up in court in response to getting one. In theory, losing a license keeps drivers off the road. But national studies[...]

Posted 5 years ago

May 16

2019

Another Buffalo Billion project is struggling

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There were supposed to be almost 500 jobs created by now. Instead, there are just 51. An ambitious economic development project at the University of Buffalo, intended to bolster the region’s biotech sector and create high-tech jobs, is years behind its original schedule and coming up short on its hiring goals. The Buffalo Institute for Genomics and Data Analytics, funded with almost $50 million in state grants as part of the Buffalo Billion initiative, was launched five years ago and remains a work in progress. The project was originally supposed to create 490 jobs by January of this year. That[...]

Posted 6 years ago

May 8

2019

OTB slow-walking information requests

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 The obfuscation of the Western Regional Off Track Betting Corp. was on full display Tuesday night when its president, Henry Wojtaszek, spoke at a meeting of the Niagara County Legislature. Wojtaszek had been asked by lawmakers to address several issues, including his refusal to release the names of those provided tickets and Sabres and Bills tickets purchased by the OTB. Former State Senator George Maziarz has charged that OTB employees and board members are improperly helping themselves to tickets. Wojtaszek insisted that the tickets are given out to high rollers at the OTB’s casino at Batavia Downs, but he has refused[...]

Posted 6 years ago

May 1

2019

Buffalo lags on addressing lead poisoning

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 Hundreds of young children living in Buffalo’s inner-city neighborhoods continue to be diagnosed every year with lead poisoning. And City Hall continues to do next to nothing about it. “Buffalo has not made as much progress as other communities have and not as much progress as perhaps they could,” said Andrew McLellan, president of Environmental Education Associates, which trains contractors and others to recognize and remediate lead hazards. Thirteen months ago, the Center for Governmental Research, a consulting firm in Rochester, developed an action plan with 19 recommendations for the city, county and state to adopt. The county has[...]

Posted 6 years ago
Investigative Post