Categories for News

Nov 24

2021

Downtown Bills stadium could displace 3,000

Published by

Building a football stadium on the edge of downtown could displace up to 3,000 residents, as well as schools, churches and other neighborhood “institutions,” according to a report published by The Athletic.  A downtown facility would impact more residents in and around the Old First Ward than previously reported because the stadium would require more land to comply with a “mandatory Department of Homeland security perimeter,” event staging and game day requirements. In short, a stadium located along South Park Avenue near Louisiana and Hamburg streets would require a much larger footprint than previously believed. The site would need to[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Nov 23

2021

Surprise winner of Samsung plant

Published by

At the beginning of the year, it looked like Austin, Texas, was the frontrunner to land a $17 billion Samsung microchip plant that Western New York officials were hoping to lure to rural Genesee County.  In recent months, a new leader emerged – the City of Taylor, just outside Austin – that agreed to a slew of city, county and school district incentives that would reportedly reduce Samsung’s tax burden by 90 percent during the first 10 years of the plant’s operation.  “I thought this was Austin’s to lose,” said Nate Jensen, a professor at the University of Texas-Austin who[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Nov 23

2021

Report: Samsung building plant in Texas

Published by

The tech giant Samsung has apparently decided where it’s going to build a new $17 billion microchip plant in the United States and a report from the Wall Street Journal suggests the project won’t be landing at a large industrial site in rural Genesee County. The Wall Street Journal reported early Tuesday that the company will build its plant in Taylor, Texas. While representatives from Samsung have not confirmed the decision, the Journal reported that the decision on the selection of Taylor will be discussed at 5 p.m. today when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is scheduled to make an “economic[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Nov 3

2021

Modest turnout for Buffalo’s mayoral election

Published by

The contest between India Walton and Byron Brown looked like it could be close. It wasn’t.  Though it’ll be a while before the write-in votes for Brown are validated and absentee ballots are counted, the outcome is clear: Brown won a fifth term resoundingly, according to unofficial returns from the Erie County Board of Elections. The first hotly contested general election for Buffalo mayor in 16 years — a showdown between ideologies and personalities, drawing national attention and massive infusions of campaign money to both sides — was predicted to drive massive turnout in the city.  It didn’t. In all[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Nov 2

2021

Voters speak out on Brown, Walton

Published by

This story was written by Jim Heaney based on interviews by Investigative Post reporters with 120 City of Buffalo voters. The interviews were conducted at 19 polling places, located in all nine Common Council districts. Three-quarters of the interviews took place on election day, the balance during early voting last week. Participating staff included Layne Dowdall, Mark Scheer, Phil Gambini, Geoff Kelly and Nancy Webb. The election for mayor of Buffalo was not a Tweedledum vs. Tweedledee affair. Byron Brown and India Walton expressed sharp differences of opinions on the issues and about each other. Their supporters did likewise in[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Oct 27

2021

Obfuscation from the Brown camp

Published by

Tuesday, The Buffalo News reported the departure of Byron Brown’s campaign manager, Conor Hurley, earlier this month. Hurley told The News that Brown’s deputy mayor, Betsey Ball — who ran the mayor’s primary campaign — would “carry the mayor across the finish line” as next Tuesday’s vote drew closer. Ball was blamed by many — Brown donor Carl Paladino, among them — for Brown’s primary loss in June. We decided we’d better find out if Ball was taking time off from her job at City Hall to call the shots on the campaign. So, we reached out to the mayor’s[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Oct 22

2021

AOC stumps for India Walton

Published by

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the Bronx congresswoman universally known as AOC — outlined Friday night her reasons for supporting Democratic nominee India Walton in the race for Buffalo mayor. “She is really representative of a positive shift toward working people’s politics here in the United States,” Ocasio-Cortez told Investigative Post in an interview at the Walton campaign’s headquarters in downtown Buffalo. She added that, to advance a progressive federal agenda — climate change legislation, anti-poverty programs, investments in infrastructure — the Democratic Party needs “down-ballot elected officials in executive positions…[who] really are accountable to everyday people.”  Like Ocasio-Cortez, Walton[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Oct 17

2021

Tribe reaches settlement on project

Published by

The Tonawanda Seneca Nation has ended its legal bid to stop the construction of a new hydrogen fuel facility at a large industrial park in rural Genesee County.  The Nation announced Friday that it has reached a settlement with the Genesee County Economic Development Center and Plug Power, a hydrogen fuel firm that is planning to build a $264 million plant at the 1,250-acre Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing Park, located just east of the Nation’s territory in the Town of Alabama.  The plant would be built with subsidies worth $4 million per job. Under the settlement, Tonawanda Seneca leaders[...]

Posted 4 years ago
Investigative Post