Dec 30
2025
Geoff Kelly’s year in review
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This year my plate was full with Buffalo politics, as city voters were asked to elect the city’s first new mayor in 20 years.
I kicked off the year, fittingly, with a three-part profile of Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon, who was at the time competing for the Democratic Party endorsement in June’s primary election.
This month, to ring out the year, Jim Heaney and I interviewed the guy who won the endorsement, the primary and November’s general election — incoming Mayor Sean Ryan. We did the interview in front of an audience at the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
I also covered a lot of interesting stories in between.
In March, I broke the story of D.J. Granville, the Erie County Sheriff’s narcotics chief who late at night plowed his county-owned pickup truck into seven parked cars on the city’s West Side in April 2024. Other reporters were hot on the trail, too — notably WGRZ’s Charlie Specht and Sean Mickey — but we got their first. Few stories this year attracted more media coverage. I added a few wrinkles to the story here and there.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomI wrote about developer Doug Jemal falling millions behind on his bills to contractors. “There’s cash flow issues, no doubt,” Jemal told me, describing the economic conditions as “a pandemic of real estate.”
I covered the costs of settling police misconduct lawsuits, which pushed Buffalo’s budget into deficit last year and threaten to do the same in the current budget year.
I wrote two stories about the city’s decrepit street lighting system. The first was occasioned by the city paying $650,000 to a man who was hit in the head by a falling light standard in 2019. The follow-up story revealed that the city’s Department of Public works had no maintenance and inspection records for the system more recent than 2017.
It also provides me an opportunity to re-publish this video submitted by a man whose car was wrecked by a falling light pole:
I continued to write a lot about the city’s financial woes, as I’ve been doing since I joined Investigative Post six-and-a-half years ago.
Back then, the Brown administration heatedly denied the city was barreling toward a fiscal cliff, even as the mayor and the Council adopted budgets filled with fictitious revenue and cost projections, then spent down the city reserves to balance the inevitable shortfalls.
Scanlon, the acting mayor, in April presented a somewhat more honest 2025-2026 spending plan. For one thing, he proposed an 8 percent hike in the tax levy, to begin to make up for Brown’s stubborn insistence on keeping taxes low, even as the price of providing city services increased year after year.
Still, Scanlon’s budget — which Ryan will inherit in January — shares many of the flaws that plagued Brown’s financial stewardship, including overestimating revenue streams, underestimating police and fire overtime, and relying on one-shot sources of cash to make up the difference.
Anyway, I wrote a lot about the city budget and will stay on that beat in the year to come.
Part of my work was in support of my colleagues’ reporting, as I leaned into my new role as associate editor here. That job — helping open up new angles in a story, buttoning up the reporting and analysis, polishing the storytelling — has been as satisfying as any other work I’ve done this year. I look forward to more of that in 2026.
I also continued to write a weekly newsletter, every Wednesday morning, offering lots of stories, big and small, about local government and politics.
Some of it is inside baseball. Not everyone cares that Scanlon hired the same campaign strategist who led Byron Brown to defeat in the 2021 Democratic primary.
Or about the Lackawanna City Court judge forced to resign for ethics violations — twice.
Or about the Evans town board voting in secret to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by a former supervisor.
Still, I do my best to keep the newsletter light, to cover enough ground to engage a wide readership, and to break news when I can. If you’re already a subscriber, you’ll hear from me in the new year. If you’re not, sign up today.
It’s free, though tax-deductible donations to keep our nonprofit newsroom going are always appreciated — especially now, as all contributions made by Dec. 31 will be matched, up to $1,000.
