Categories for Investigations

Nov 20

2023

License plate readers target minority neighborhoods

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Buffalo police have quietly installed license plate readers at 41 intersections in the city, two-thirds of them located in neighborhoods populated predominantly with people of color.  Buffalo police, in response to a Freedom of Information Law request for the department’s policies on license plate readers, wrote that they’re used for “law enforcement investigative purposes only.” While it’s unclear how the department now is using readers, police in the past used mobile readers to issue traffic tickets, at considerable profit to the city.  Unlike many other cities, neither the police nor Mayor Byron Brown, their commander in chief, have made the[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Oct 19

2023

OTB shells out millions for lawyers and lobbyists

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The Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp. has shelled out nearly $2.2 million for an army of 19 law firms and lobbyists over the past five years in an effort to fend off investigators, lawmakers and plaintiffs. The spending has eaten into the profits sent to the 17 counties and cities that own the public gambling agency, including Erie, Niagara and Monroe counties and the cities of Buffalo and Rochester. From 2019, when expenses started to take off, through last year, spending on lawyers and lobbyists cut OTB’s revenue sharing to municipalities by 10 percent. While some spending could be expected,[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Sep 18

2023

Wastewater from industrial park could violate federal law

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Updated Oct. 4 at 3:02 p.m. Oak Orchard Creek is considered Orleans County’s “lifeblood.” Flowing south to north from Genesee County wetlands to Lake Ontario, it provides trophy salmon and trout a place to feed and spawn. The creek draws fishermen, $30 million in tourist spending and around $100,000 in county revenue each year. “Oak Orchard Creek is a huge — a huge — part of the fishery … it’s gigantic,” Lou Borrelli, captain of a fishing charter boat, told Investigative Post. “Generally speaking, most of the fish are going to be affected by the water quality, because if it does[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 14

2023

City Hall clerk paid not to work

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In February 2016, the City of Buffalo accused a clerk in the fire department of tampering with the payroll in order to pad her checks. Since then the former Jill Parisi — now appearing on city payroll records under her maiden name, Jill Repman — has collected well over a half million dollars while on paid administrative leave, awaiting a resolution to the disciplinary charges against her. For six of those seven-and-a-half years, she has held a second job in the private sector, managing payroll for a local healthcare company. According to the city’s law department, there was never any[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Aug 21

2023

New York lax on wage theft collections

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ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Documented reports on  special interests in politics. Saprina James was hopeful when she received a letter in 2019 about her wage theft claim against her former employer. The letter said the New York State Department of Labor had substantiated her claim and ordered Mugisha F. Sahini and his company, Riverside Line, to pay her more than $70,000 in back wages. “I was feeling good that the government was on my side, and that I would soon get[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Jun 1

2023

The false promises of IDA subsidies

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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

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 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

Feb 21

2023

Allegations of racism at Tesla plant

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Black employees at Tesla’s Gigafactory in South Buffalo have alleged they’re routinely subjected to racist treatment by managers, problems they say have persisted since the plant opened five years ago. Seven current and former Tesla employees, all of whom are Black, told Investigative Post the treatment they’ve experienced has ranged from offensive remarks to being repeatedly passed over for promotions. In one case, five employees recounted instances where groups of Black men were having conversations on the factory floor, only to be told by management they weren’t allowed to do that because “the optics looked bad” and they looked “like[...]

Posted 2 years ago
Investigative Post