Categories for Published in The Public

Mar 24

2016

Quick Hit: Buffalo Water has no answers on lead

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The Buffalo Water Board’s one-page info sheet about its lead testing program fails to provide much substance, especially for a city that still has a serious lead poisoning problem involving its housing stock. The water board’s online info sheet is in response to the catastrophe with Flint, Michigan’s water supply. What the water board has yet to release is the number of service lines – the stretch of pipe of that connects houses with water mains running under streets – that contain lead. The topic has not surfaced in any of board meeting minutes for at least three years. I[...]

Posted 8 years ago

Mar 10

2016

Quick Hit: State’s questionable “fact sheet”

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Dan Telvock, writing in The Public, comments on the “fact sheet” issued by state environmental officials on a toxic landfill in Wheatfield. The fact sheet downplays the potential of harm for nearby residents, much like bureaucrats did decades ago regarding Love Canal.

Posted 8 years ago

Feb 22

2016

Action to fence off toxic Wheatfield landfill

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A state senator lashed out Monday at the Department of Environmental Conservation for its failure to protect residents living by a landfill in Wheatfield that was recently declared a Superfund site. In responding to a Feb. 10 story by Investigative Post, Sen. Robert Ortt questioned how the state DEC could insist for 25 years that the landfill off Nash Road did not pose a significant risk to unsuspecting adults and children who have been using the property for recreation. The senator said it made little sense when the DEC in December 2015 reversed itself by declaring the landfill a Superfund site, even[...]

Posted 8 years ago

Feb 4

2016

Quick Hit: Heaney on Urban League scrum

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Jim Heaney, writing in The Public, sizes up the brouhaha in county government regarding the Buffalo urban League and concludes the agency’s defenders are ignoring a compelling case of wrongdoing. “We’re not talking honest mistakes involving $20,000 in excessive charges,” Heaney writes. “No, the bogus bills involved, among other transgressions, charging for work never performed. And former employees describe a culture where they were encouraged to “bill creatively”—by inflating the number of hours they worked and charging the county for time spent on things only tenuously related to social work.”

Posted 8 years ago

Feb 3

2016

Quick Hit: Urban League fights back

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After an audit by the Erie County Comptroller’s office bore out whistleblowers’ claims of inflated billing and inadequate training, Urban League President Brenda McDuffie and her supporters say it’s a political witch hunt. But there’s little evidence for that, says Jim Heaney in a Quick Hit in The Public.

Posted 8 years ago

Nov 24

2015

Diversity, but few jobs for African Americans

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Diversity hiring goals set for the construction of the SolarCity plant in South Buffalo have not translated into a lot of jobs for African-American workers. While African Americans make up an increasing share of the project’s workforce, they accounted for only 5.7 percent of those on the job for the quarter ending this September, an Investigative Post analysis found. That’s in a city that’s almost 40 percent African-American and a county with a workforce that’s 11 percent black, according to the state Department of Labor. The project is nevertheless meeting its minority workforce goal of 15 percent, largely through the[...]

Posted 8 years ago
Investigative Post

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