Categories for PoliticalPost

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 5 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 5 years ago

Sep 3

2019

Turning a blind eye to environmental risks

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You’d think that the construction of a million square feet of manufacturing space on a brownfield along the Buffalo River would warrant a thorough environmental investigation before shovels bit into the soil. And you’d be wrong. The Tesla plant in South Buffalo was built on a former Superfund site — once home to Republic Steel, Donner Hanna Coke and Feine Steel, among other historic industrial polluters. The site borders the environmental debacle that was (and is) the Hickory Woods residential development, which was poisoned by the use as fill of toxic materials created by those plants. Prior to its purchase[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Aug 11

2019

A problematic downtown development project

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The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason. —T. S. Eliot When one Western New York developer sues another, the motive — no matter the arguments presented in court, however they may be presented in the media as a pursuit of the public good — is of course money. It has to be: To have standing to sue, a petitioner must demonstrate a financial or quality-of-life interest to the court. So, when Rocco Termini sued Ciminelli Development in mid-June to stop Ciminelli’s latest plan for 201 Ellicott Street, naturally Termini had a financial motive:[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Aug 6

2019

Comptrollers behaving badly, Part 2

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On June 21, Erie County Comptroller Stefan Mychajliw issued an invitation to Department of Motor Vehicles employees across the state: If you disagree with the new “Green Light” law, under which New York State will soon issue driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, and you suspect such a person is applying for a license, call or email the Erie County Comptroller’s Whistleblower Hotline. Mychajliw promised he would forward anonymous tips gathered therein to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Two weeks earlier, at the request of Erie County Clerk Mickey Kearns, Mychajliw issued a report “regarding the consequences of granting licenses[...]

Posted 5 years ago
Investigative Post