Categories for DailyPost

Jan 9

2024

How the Council presidency was won

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Last Tuesday South District Council Member Chris Scanlon won the Council presidency in an 8-to-1 vote. But if the Council’s reorganization meeting had taken place two weeks earlier, it might have been Niagara District Council Member David Rivera instead. The Council presidency is a powerful role — appointing committees, overseeing Council operations, signing off on nearly all the legislative body’s actions. The post was held since 2014 by former Ellicott District Council Member Darius Pridgen, who announced a year ago he would not seek a fourth term in office.  The race to succeed him has raised particular intrigue because Mayor[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Jan 8

2024

Monday Morning Read

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WeeklyPost has a new look, but the some old price: free. Subscribe today. And coming Wednesday, another email newsletter, PoliticalPost, written by Geoff Kelly. Mark Sommer of The Buffalo News has been doing a really good job of bird-dogging developments involving the Kensington Expressway.  At the behest of Gov. Kathy Hochul, the state Department of Transportation is pushing a project to cover a portion of the Kensington Expressway. Last week, Mark reported someone with ties to the DOT and the engineering firm in line for business if the project proceeds  distributed prewritten letters of support for the work at a[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Jan 4

2024

Poor attendance fuels low reading scores

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There’s a reason most younger pupils in Buffalo schools can’t read very well. They aren’t showing up for class. Only 18 percent of all students last school year had what the district considers a satisfactory attendance rate. That is, they miss school less than roughly one day a month. More than three times as many students – 61 percent – missed school at least once every other week, according to Buffalo Public Schools attendance data. The district considers that degree of absenteeism chronic or severe. Educators say absenteeism is taking a toll on the district’s youngest learners, who are struggling[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Jan 3

2024

Deadline looming for alleged rock thrower

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A federal judge in Buffalo says he’ll dismiss charges against an accused vandal if the Department of Justice doesn’t get him into a psychiatric facility by the end of January. The ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Roemer is the latest in a series of decisions from federal judges nationwide who’ve grown impatient with ballooning wait times for defendants deemed mentally incompetent. Instead of receiving treatment in psychiatric hospitals, mentally ill inmates presumed innocent are languishing in jails. Prosecutors have said there isn’t a bed available for Jones Woods, who’s been jailed for nearly a year after being arrested for[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Jan 2

2024

Major changes are afoot at Investigative Post

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Susan Schulman has been appointed associate editor of Investigative Post and will manage the newsroom on a day-to-day basis. Her appointment enables Jim Heaney, editor and executive director, to focus on plotting our continued growth and raising the funds necessary to make it happen. Schulman joined Investigative Post in June as a part-time editor and assumed full-time duties this week. She worked as an editor and reporter at The Buffalo News for 34 years before retiring in 2020. She headed the paper’s investigative reporting team from 2003 to 2012. “Sue is an editor par excellence and we’re very fortunate to[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Jan 2

2024

Readers select iPost’s top story of 2023

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Geoff Kelly’s story on the Buffalo fire department clerk paid nearly $600,000 over seven years while on suspension was the runaway winner of Investigative Post’s best story of 2023. Kelly’s investigation garnered nearly 40 percent of the votes cast by readers, the widest margin since we instituted our story of the year balloting in 2013. The story was also the most-read story on our website for 2023. Kelly documented how Jill Repman, known as Jill Parisi at the time of her suspension in 2016, kept collecting her city paycheck while working another job in the private sector.  Between 2016 and[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Jan 1

2024

Monday Morning Read

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Start out your year by subscribing, for free, to WeeklyPost. A recent op-ed in The New York Times contrasted policies in red and blue states. It noted that in states controlled by Republicans there is an ongoing assault on the rights of people to live their lives unencumbered by government. It noted the limitation GOP lawmakers have placed on everything from voting and abortion rights to what books are stocked on library shelves and curriculum taught in schools. And, of course, there’s the obsession with gay and transgender people. Taken all together, you could say that Republicans are engaged in a[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Dec 29

2023

I’Jaz Ja’ciel’s reporting on Buffalo housing

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While I’m proud of the work I did for Investigative Post in the early part of 2023, including my myth-busting story about lootings during the Christmas Blizzard of 2022 and the launch of ‘East Side Stories’, I feel that my most impactful work came at the end of the year, when I started looking into Black homeownership in Buffalo and Erie County. Buffalo has a history of inequities in housing, from segregation to redlining. They have resulted in barriers to homeownership for the city’s Black residents. In fact, the number of African-Americans who own their homes in the city has[...]

Posted 1 year ago
Investigative Post