Categories for DailyPost

Dec 28

2023

J. Dale Shoemaker’s subsidy reporting

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Another year coming to a close. Another 525,600 minutes (almost) expired. As Jonathan Larson asked three decades ago: How do you measure a year? It’s an especially tough question for a reporter like myself who writes about the economy and economic development. There’s any number of metrics — interest rates are up, now steadying; inflation is up, now slowly coming down; wages are up slightly; so is rent — but all of those numbers tend to miss the big picture. Are we in a recession? Or is the economy doing great and we’re just in a “vibe-secession,” caused by our[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Dec 27

2023

Geoff Kelly’s reporting on Roswell, City Hall

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Buffalo’s firefighting fleet Last year’s Christmas blizzard, which killed 47 people, exposed weaknesses in governmental capacity to navigate emergencies. The storm compelled the City of Buffalo, in particular, to confront numerous shortcomings, including inadequate investment in equipment for first responders. As it happened, we’d been investigating the condition of the city’s firefighting fleet in the weeks before the storm hit.  We published our findings in January: Over the past dozen years, Mayor Byron Brown and the Common Council failed to invest in new fire trucks as they aged out. The result was a ramshackle fleet that sometimes failed firefighters even[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Dec 26

2023

Garrett Looker’s reporting on literacy

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Over the past year, parents, school district officials, education experts, and a smattering of others have told me – either directly or off-hand – that literacy is the key to a child’s future.  It’s not necessarily surprising, nor is it a revelation.  But after a year unpacking the state of reading in Buffalo, there’s at least one conclusion that can be reached: learning to read is complex. At the core of it is a battle for a fair, equitable education for all of Buffalo’s children, education experts have said. “Our district has a commitment to improving the literacy rates of[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Dec 25

2023

Monday Morning Read

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Merry Christmas! If you don’t already subscribe to WeeklyPost, give yourself a gift right now! Christmas has been effectively cancelled in Bethlehem. Alden Global Capital is the worst of the worst chain owners of newspapers. Here’s what they’ve done to the paper in Joe Biden’s hometown since buying it, and here’s what they’re doing to Greyhound bus stations. Yeah, there’s a connection. Lee Enterprises – owner of The Buffalo News, or what’s left of it – reported a disappointing year. The past five years haven’t been so hot, either.  The current issue of The Nation, much of it focused on[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Dec 22

2023

Buffalo barista alleges illegal firing

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A trendy new coffee shop near the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus has been hit with a lawsuit alleging the owners illegally fired a barista after she fainted due to being overworked. Angel Krempa, the barista, worked at Penny’s from June through August. Her lawsuit alleges that the owners of Penny’s Coffee Shop — located near the corner of Main and Allen streets — forced her to work eight to 12 hour shifts without breaks or overtime pay in violation of New York Labor Law. The workload exacerbated a pre-existing medical condition that caused  her to pass out on the job,[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Dec 20

2023

IDAs look to dish out housing tax breaks

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This story was produced by Investigative Post and New York Focus and based on interviews with 30 lawmakers, officials, advocates, lawyers and developers, as well as a review of data and historical records. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s push for more housing has been interpreted by industrial development agencies as a green light to ramp up controversial tax breaks for developers. The state’s 107 IDAs have never been explicitly authorized to subsidize housing and some lawmakers say that’s for a reason: Housing creates few permanent jobs compared to the industrial and commercial projects the agencies were designed to support. When IDAs do[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Dec 17

2023

Monday Morning Read

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A subscription to WeeklyPost is free. Need I say more? Politicians have pointed to the creation of 50,000 good paying jobs to justify the massive $6.4 billion subsidy of a planned microchip factory north of Syracuse. The Syracuse Post-Standard put those claims under the microscope and found direct employment would be a lot less. A whole lot less. The biggest chunk of new workers would be government employees – great – and many others would be waiters, bus drivers and hotel and day care workers – not necessarily full-time and certainly not good paying. Mind you, a lot of direct jobs will be created.[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Dec 14

2023

Lawsuit: Radioactive slag at affordable housing project

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A developer claims subcontractors used radioactive slag as construction fill at an affordable housing project just north of Buffalo’s medical campus. Now the developer wants the subcontractors, and the company that sold them the contaminated material, to pay $1.6 million for the cleanup, and other costs. The allegations were made in a lawsuit filed last week in federal court by the Buffalo-based McGuire PV Holdings, LLC. The company is in the midst of a years-long effort to revitalize the Pilgrim Village affordable housing complex, located between Michigan Avenue and Ellicott Street, across the street from Gates Vascular Institute. McGuire claims[...]

Posted 1 year ago
Investigative Post