Categories for In-Depth

Jul 12

2021

Transparency, City Hall style

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Editor’s note: Phil Gambini is working on a story about sewage and stormwater runoff that flows into local creeks and rivers. Municipalities are required under state law to track the volume of these pollutants, but data reported by the Buffalo Sewer Authority does not identify discharge points or, in many cases, the amount of wastewater that flows into individual waterways. Gambini has been attempting to reach the Sewer Authority since the middle of May to make sense of the incomplete data. He documents his efforts below.  There’s many ways to reach Oluwole “O.J.” McFoy, general manager at the Buffalo Sewer[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jul 10

2021

Heaney, Arbetter discuss the mayor’s race

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Susan Arbetter, host of Capital Tonight, interviews Jim Heaney on the contest between India Walton and Byron Brown. Heaney told her Brown needs to make the case to voters that he deserves another term in light of his poor track record. Walton, he said, needs to stop talking about Democratic socialism, which he considers a side issue, and instead address concerns about her lack of experience in government. Watch the interview at this link.

Posted 4 years ago

Jul 8

2021

Rich subsidies for low-wage jobs

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Generating business growth in downtown Niagara Falls has proven to be a challenge for years. A state agency charged with job creation has adopted a unique approach, even by Western New York standards. The state-run USA Niagara Development Corp. gave Buffalo-based T.M. Montante Development four properties valued at nearly $1 million in the city’s Third Street business district.  Now, as the company plans to renovate and reopen two Third Street buildings— one as a small event center and the other as a brewery and restaurant— state and county economic development officials are preparing to sweeten the pot with $1.7 million[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jun 30

2021

What the primary vote tells us

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The math of Byron Brown’s loss in the June 22 Democratic primary is simple.  The mayor’s traditional base of voters on the East Side stayed home, while voters on the other side of Main Street — from the Lower West Side and Allentown to the Elmwood Village — turned out in comparatively high numbers and overwhelmingly chose India Walton.  The result: Walton beat the four-term incumbent by 7 percent. Ken Kruly is a political analyst for WGRZ-TV, publisher of Politics and Other Stuff and author of Money In Politics for Investigative Post. In an analysis for Investigative Post, Kruly compared Brown’s[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jun 27

2021

Brown effort to gin up support

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Updated: 5:15 p.m. Mayor Byron Brown told reporters Friday he has received “an outpouring of support” encouraging him to wage a write-in campaign in November’s general election rather than concede his loss to India Walton in last Tuesday’s Democratic primary. According to text messages acquired this weekend by Investigative Post, the mayor plans to repeat that claim on Monday. But the support, rather than being spontaneous, is being orchestrated by his supporters, including associates of Carl Paladino. According to those texts, at least some of that “outpouring of support” is being solicited and coordinated by top Brown lieutenants in City[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jun 20

2021

Wealthy last-minute donors to Brown campaign

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Updated: 1:42 p.m. Maybe the race for mayor of Buffalo is tighter than most believed it would be.  Or perhaps the last-minute flurry of campaign activity by Mayor Byron Brown — who has been running a stealth campaign for the past five months — was forthcoming regardless of whatever internal polls told the four-term incumbent. Whichever the case, the Brown campaign has come alive in the last week. And big donors have poured money into the re-election effort, helping to underwrite a blitz of TV advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts as the countdown to election day approaches zero. Tuesday’s Democratic primary[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jun 17

2021

Erie County a dubious national leader

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 There are 3,006 counties in the United States. Only one has had more of its residents arrested for storming Capitol Hill than Erie County. Six residents of Erie have been federally charged in connection with the Jan. 6 siege, according to data from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. That’s one fewer than Franklin County, Ohio, with a population of 1.3 million that includes the state capital of  Columbus.  Tied with Erie at six defendants apiece were Los Angeles County, California, with a population about 10 times greater than Erie’s, and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia. Cloee Cooper,[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jun 1

2021

Jemal: A salty but savvy operator

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Douglas Jemal is not your prototypical, button-down developer.  He prefers jeans, cowboy boots and baseball caps and isn’t shy about using salty language. Years ago, he taught a pet parrot — a bird he named “Eagle” — to say the mother of all bad words, the one that starts with an F and rhymes with luck. And there was the time — the night before he was to meet with bankers to discuss financing his family’s bid to purchase the Baltimore Orioles baseball team — when he got into a fistfight with a fan sitting in the stands behind him[...]

Posted 4 years ago
Investigative Post