Categories for DailyPost

Jun 2

2023

Tickets on sale for our summer benefit concert

Published by

Circle your calendar, buy your tickets, a popular summer concert tradition is returning after a pandemic hiatus!  Tom Toles and the Junkman’s Choir will play the Sportsmen’s Tavern the evening of Thursday, July 13, to benefit Investigative Post.   Toles, of course, is the Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist, late of The Washington Post and Buffalo News. (He presently serves on Investigative Post’s board of directors.)  “It’s exciting to restart the iPost Sportsmen’s summer concert series,” Toles said.  “It’s always a crazy fun gathering of great local musicians and a guest drummer/singer who is a joyful and unpredictable wild animal.[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Jun 1

2023

The false promises of IDA subsidies

Published by

In order for Western New York’s economy to remain stable, economic development officials argue that industrial development agencies need to grant tax breaks and other incentives. “People just aren’t going to build here unless they have incentives to help them to do that,” Mark Onesi, chair of the Niagara County Industrial Development Agency, told Investigative Post last year. “It’s expensive to do business here so we help as many people as we can.” Research, however, refutes those assertions. Economists have found between 75 and 90 percent of jobs created with tax breaks would have happened without the help.  “The system[...]

Posted 2 years ago

May 31

2023

IDA tax breaks cost schools millions

Published by

 Editor’s note: This is the first of two stories on industrial development agencies. Tomorrow, we report on “perverse incentives” and other shortcomings in IDA programs. Any time Susan McGee’s children want to join an activity outside of the classroom — be it sports, music or other extracurriculars — it means one thing: a fundraiser. Raising money for extracurriculars may seem routine for a small, struggling Rust Belt city like Dunkirk, where McGee’s children attend school. But there’s another factor at play: The Dunkirk City School District loses out on an average of $5 million in revenue every year thanks[...]

Posted 2 years ago

May 30

2023

Lawsuit seeks millions from OTB officials

Published by

Earlier this month a federal court issued summonses to a host of current and former board members at Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp., as part of a lawsuit seeking to hold the directors liable for the agency’s alleged misuse of millions of public dollars. The lawsuit aims to compel those 21 board members to pay back to OTB — and thus to the 15 counties and two cities that own the agency — money “improperly used” to purchase health insurance for board members, expensive tickets to sporting events and concerts, and contracts for politically connected firms. Specifically, the lawsuit claims[...]

Posted 2 years ago

May 28

2023

Monday Morning Read

Published by

Below is half of what you’ll get in your inbox Sunday mornings if you subscribe to WeeklyPost. Mike Desmond might be the longest tenured reporter in Buffalo. At least he was until WBFO fired him without notice, in the process stripping him of health insurance while he was recovering from a broken back. His dismissal prompted Mark Scott, who was synonymous with the station for four decades, to lambaste the station Friday in a Facebook post. He derided station management for not only firing Desmond, which he termed “unconscionable,” but for what he said was a move a year ago to “severely[...]

Posted 2 years ago

May 24

2023

Introducing ‘East Side Stories’

Published by

Editor’s note: This is the first installment of an occasional series we’re calling “East Side Stories.” In the series, we examine issues that affect the residents of the East Side, told through the lens of people working to address the problem. Companion stories will air on Channel 2. Today, we focus on violence and the work of John “Tubbs” Smith and his colleagues in Buffalo Peacemakers. John Smith became a Peacemaker the hard way. Born in a prison — his mother was an inmate — he was given a generic name because his parents weren’t available to name him or[...]

Posted 2 years ago

May 22

2023

Podcast: iPost reporting on Michael Joseph

Published by

Two weeks ago, Investigative Post’s Geoff Kelly reported on allegations of “racist and illegal practices” by one of the region’s biggest real estate development and management firms. In a federal lawsuit, a former employee accused the company of racially profiling communities where it was thinking of building senior housing complexes.  Clover executives were caught on audio discussing the practice, using the code word “Canadians” to refer to Black people and “the Canadian factor” to describe the company’s reluctance to build in communities where the population was more than 20 percent Black. We followed with a profile of Clover’s civically and[...]

Posted 2 years ago

May 21

2023

Monday Morning Read

Published by

Subscribe to WeeklyPost and you’ll receive it, free, in your inbox Sunday mornings, including a summary of Investigative Post’s reporting of the previous week. The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that reports on gun violence, marked the one-year anniversary of the Tops Massacre with a story that notes the lack of progress addressing systemic problems on the city’s East Side. Local foundations have directed some money east of Main Street. The state, too. City Hall? Not really. In fact, the response from Mayor Byron Brown and the Common Council has been tepid. Geoff Kelly is looking over the mayor’s proposed budget[...]

Posted 2 years ago
Investigative Post