Categories for PoliticalPost

Aug 5

2019

Comptrollers behaving badly, Part 1

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On the website of the Buffalo city comptroller, the top tab on the left — the place of pride — is occupied by the word “Transparency.” I guess that’s meant to be ironic. Click on that tab, and follow the prompts to the page titled “Financial Reports,” and you’ll soon discover what I mean. In the last week or so, Barbara Miller-Williams, the interim comptroller who is running unopposed for a full term in November, wiped that page clean of critical reports created and published by the staff of her predecessor, Mark Schroeder. Buy tickets now to iPost benefit featuring[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Jul 24

2019

Dixon’s push poll, continued

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A couple Sundays ago, Buffalo News politics columnist Bob McCarthy wrote, in essence, that I got it all wrong in my June 19 piece about Lynne Dixon’s push poll. I don’t know that I did. I don’t think McCarthy knows that I did, either. Dixon is challenging incumbent Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz. In early June, her campaign commissioned a poll of 1,325 likely voters. I first read about the poll in McCarthy’s June 16 story, which touted the Dixon campaign’s conclusion that the race was a statistical tie — a good sign for the underdog. Naturally, I wanted to[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Jun 26

2019

Apathy, Democratic HQ winners in primary

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Back in January, this looked to be a dynamic election cycle for Buffalo Democrats.  There were two long-time incumbents vacating their seats on the city’s Common Council and two more leaving the Erie County Legislature, creating the potential for wide-open races.  That doesn’t happen often. In response, a host of candidates signaled their intention to run and began circulating nominating petitions in the bitter grip of midwinter.  Many of these prospects were entering electoral politics for the first time, driven by a variety motivations: a wish to elect women to the all-male Council, for one example; for another, a desire[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Jun 19

2019

Lynne Dixon’s misleading push poll

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If you follow local politics, and bless your heart if you do, you might have heard about a poll showing incumbent Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz in a statistical tie with his challenger, Erie County Legislator Lynne Dixon. The top-line conclusion of the poll, which was commissioned by Dixon’s campaign: Of the 1,325 respondents, 42 percent said they’d vote for Poloncarz if the election were held today; 40 percent said they’d vote for Dixon; and 18 percent said they were undecided. The margin of error is listed as 3.5 percent — thus, a statistical tie. The race might be that[...]

Posted 5 years ago

May 30

2019

Troubling signs from Buffalo’s comptroller

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Well, she went ahead and did it. There was no good reason to do it, but she did it anyway. Interim Buffalo Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams has issued an amendment to her own office’s critical assessment of Mayor Byron Brown’s projected 2019-2020 budget. The initial comptroller’s response was released on May 10, the deadline for the comptroller’s office to issue its response to the mayor’s annual budget proposal, according to the city charter. This new, amended response is dated May 15 and wasn’t submitted to the Common Council until a week after that — too late to count. But let that[...]

Posted 6 years ago

May 20

2019

City Hall’s looming fiscal reckoning

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A malfunctioning fire alarm rang shrill and unrelenting on the 13th floor of City Hall last Thursday morning, contributing to an hour-and-a-half delay of the Common Council’s special session to adopt its amendments to Mayor Byron Brown’s proposed 2019-2020 budget. Maybe the universe was trying to tell the Common Council something about that budget. If it was, they weren’t listening. Once it began, the meeting took about 10 minutes. The result: The Council moved some money around various budget lines in order to fund projects and purchases dear to each member’s heart, but left Brown’s budget essentially intact. This, despite[...]

Posted 6 years ago

May 10

2019

Mayor Brown’s risky budget assumptions

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There is little fat in Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown’s proposed 2019-2020 budget, as befits a city where, despite aspirational talk of a renaissance, population is stagnant and job growth and real wages trail national averages. However, that word aspirational also applies to some projected revenue streams on which Brown’s budget relies. Other words and phrases come to mind, too, such as tentative, maybe, never going to happen, and zombie. Below is a quick look at some of those revenue projections, totaling about $20 million of the $508 million budget. (Today, the office of  interim City Comptroller Barbara Miller Williams released its[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Apr 30

2019

A bad week for female candidates in Buffalo

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State Supreme Court Judge Tracey Bannister on Monday expressed “some regret” in upholding the disqualification of three candidates for Buffalo Common Council, based on what she called a “material” and “substantive” defect in the form of their nominating petitions.   Indeed, there is much to regret in this imbroglio, from its beginning to its conclusion. The case now moves to the 4th Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court. “I’ve done what you’ve done and I know it’s hard,” Bannister told the three women — Melanie McMahan, Bernice Radle and Antoinette Craig — who were knocked from the June 25[...]

Posted 6 years ago
Investigative Post