Categories for PoliticalPost

Mar 25

2021

Buffalo mayor’s race is on

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Updated on March 26, 9:27am. India Walton, the long-shot challenger to incumbent Byron Brown in the Democratic primary for Buffalo mayor, passed three milestones in the past month: She won the endorsement of the Working Families Party, providing her a ballot line in the general election, should she fail to beat Brown in the June 22 primary. She picked up the endorsement of People’s Action, a national coalition of progressive activists and politicians, which comes with access to phone banks and fundraising. Most importantly, from a pragmatic standpoint, today Walton filed a nominating petition at the Erie County Board of[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jan 23

2021

Brown’s campaign finance woes

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As he prepares to seek a fifth term, Mayor Byron Brown’s latest campaign finance report illustrates three things: Brown has never been so financially under-equipped entering a reelection year. His donations the past six months overwhelmingly came from folks who owe him their jobs and firms seeking city contracts and project approvals. The mayor’s campaign continues to violate state law governing how donations from limited liability corporations are disclosed. The mayor’s campaign committee, Brown for Buffalo, recently filed its latest campaign finance disclosure with the state Board of Elections, covering donations and expenses from July 11, 2020, to January 11[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Dec 19

2020

Brown a formidable, yet vulnerable candidate

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Since 2005, Mayor Byron Brown has raised and spent more than $5 million to win and hold the mayor’s office.  He spent $1.4 million to fend off Bernie Tolbert, his Democratic primary challenger in 2013. Four years later, he spent another $1 million in his primary race against then Comptroller Mark Schroeder. As of July, however, when his campaign committee last filed a disclosure report, Brown had just $115,568 in the bank. That may sound like a lot of money — and for most Buffalonians it is — but for the four-term mayor of a medium-sized city, it is a[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Nov 18

2020

Missing persons report for city’s control board

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Editor’s note: The original version of this column incorrectly reported on events related to actions by the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority involving the city’s four-year budget plan. The source of the errors: The control board, on its website, incorrectly labeled videos of  special meetings held on June 16 and July 20. Investigative Post based its reporting in part on those videos, which resulted in a conflating of events. The text below has been revised accordingly. A control board spokesman said the agency was attempting to correct the errors on its website. Three times in the past five months, the city’s state-imposed[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Oct 16

2020

He shoved a cop and got away with it – maybe

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Back in June, acting New York State Supreme Court Justice Mark Grisanti shoved a Buffalo cop as police attempted to sort out an altercation between the judge and his wife, Maria Grisanti, and some neighbors. Police body-camera video, obtained and published earlier this week by Law360.com, has drawn considerable media attention. In the video, Maria Grisanti stomps about screaming obscenities at her neighbors and the cops. An officer tackles and cuffs her, prompting the judge — his t-shirt torn and hanging around his waist — to run across the street and try to wrestle the officer away from his wife.[...]

Posted 4 years ago

May 22

2020

Quintana’s political social distancing

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In this season of social distancing, Robert Quintana, candidate for the 149th District Assembly seat, may have set a new record last month. Quintana, the former two-term Niagara District councilman, is attempting a political comeback by running for the seat held by Sean Ryan, who is running for state Senate. One of his opponents, Jon Rivera, challenged the validity of Quintana’s nominating petition.  Among the allegations, Rivera’s campaign accused Quintana’s daughter of fraud — of faking signatures. Quintana’s response: In a court hearing last month, Quintana claimed not to know his daughter, Keila Sabala, had been collecting signatures for him.[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Sep 30

2019

Buffalo’s budget woes get real

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A Wall Street bond-rating agency recently delivered bad, if unsurprising, financial news to the City of Buffalo: The agency had downgraded the city’s credit rating. The reasons for the downgrade: a consistent pattern of inflating projected revenues in budget proposals, then raiding reserve funds to balance budgets when those revenue projections proved false. That is to say, exactly the problems — what the agency, Fitch Ratings, described as “the city’s weak operating performance in recent years” — that we’ve been reporting for the past six months: here, here, here, and here. Meet and mingle with Geoff Kelly and our other[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Sep 19

2019

Assessing Buffalo’s property reassessment

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If you’re a homeowner in the City of Buffalo, you received a love letter from City Hall this month: your new property value assessment and an estimate of your new tax bill in 2020. Rarely have residents demonstrated so much interest in their neighbors’ mail: Whose values went up? Whose went down? By how much? How did the value of my house go up but my taxes go down? Who determined these numbers and how? It is the first citywide reevaluation of city properties since 2001, a period in which real estate values in some city neighborhoods have doubled or even[...]

Posted 6 years ago
Investigative Post