Investigative Post

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 […]

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? […]

For the fourth straight year, the City of Buffalo must tap reserves to balance its budget. The question is: What reserves? Where will the money come from this time? The books are just about closed on the financial year that ended June 30. The bottom line: The city finished around $10 million in the red, […]

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, […]

Geoff Kelly has recently reported on a shortage of working police cars in Buffalo (here and here). He discussed his findings this week on WBFO’s Press Pass.  

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown and the Common Council have shortchanged the Buffalo Police Department’s police fleet in recent years. They’ve replaced cars at less than half the rate the police department has lobbied for, and which is considered best practice by experts in fleet maintenance. Last week, Investigative Post reported on the sorry state of […]

On any given shift, Buffalo police have just half the patrol cars they need to do the job. “I would describe [the situation] as dire,” John Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, told Investigative Post. “There aren’t enough cars for the patrol officers to patrol the streets and get to the calls.” The […]

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 […]