Categories for Analysis

Jul 19

2021

Brown campaign still violating election law

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After a delay his campaign attributed to “technical difficulties,” Mayor Byron Brown’s July campaign finance disclosure was posted to the New York State Board of Elections website on Saturday. Here’s what the filing revealed: After a flood of donations received the week before the June 22 primary, the mayor’s fundraising has been anemic compared to that of India Walton, who beat him to win the Democratic Party line in the November general election. As previously reported, Brown’s campaign continues to rely on donations from City Hall employees, patronage hires, city vendors, big real estate developers and a variety of well-to-do[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jun 30

2021

What the primary vote tells us

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The math of Byron Brown’s loss in the June 22 Democratic primary is simple.  The mayor’s traditional base of voters on the East Side stayed home, while voters on the other side of Main Street — from the Lower West Side and Allentown to the Elmwood Village — turned out in comparatively high numbers and overwhelmingly chose India Walton.  The result: Walton beat the four-term incumbent by 7 percent. Ken Kruly is a political analyst for WGRZ-TV, publisher of Politics and Other Stuff and author of Money In Politics for Investigative Post. In an analysis for Investigative Post, Kruly compared Brown’s[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jun 29

2021

Geoff Kelly writes for The Nation

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On the evening of last Tuesday’s primary election, I was reporting from Poize, a bar in Riverside where the India Walton campaign was holding a watch party. I’d just called my boss, Jim Heaney, to tell him it looked like Walton would win.  A roar came from the crowd inside as another wave of ballots was reported. I checked my phone: Walton had surpassed 10,000 votes.  An email popped up from the editor of The Nation: “Hey Geoff.  If India Walton pulls off an upset, can you get us 1000 words by Thursday explaining how she did it—and what it[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jun 23

2021

Walton’s campaign outworked Brown

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The night before the Buffalo mayoral primary, India Walton’s campaign made nearly 19,000 calls to Democratic voters in the city, reminding them to vote and making the case for Walton over four-term incumbent Byron Brown. The campaign sent almost 100,000 text messages, too, while more than 150 Walton supporters stationed themselves at polling sites across the city on election day. The campaign fielded enough people, a campaign spokesperson said, to make a last-minute pitch to half the people who showed up to vote Tuesday as they walked in, and to take their temperature on the race as they left their[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jun 1

2021

Jemal: A salty but savvy operator

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Douglas Jemal is not your prototypical, button-down developer.  He prefers jeans, cowboy boots and baseball caps and isn’t shy about using salty language. Years ago, he taught a pet parrot — a bird he named “Eagle” — to say the mother of all bad words, the one that starts with an F and rhymes with luck. And there was the time — the night before he was to meet with bankers to discuss financing his family’s bid to purchase the Baltimore Orioles baseball team — when he got into a fistfight with a fan sitting in the stands behind him[...]

Posted 4 years ago

May 27

2021

The politics of Doug Jemal

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Douglas Jemal may be an unconventional developer in some ways, but he also engages in a practice common to many in the real estate business: giving money, sometimes lots of it, to politicians in position to support his projects. Jemal is unusual in another way: He’s the recipient of a presidential pardon. His political contributions in Buffalo began when he started purchasing local property. Records show Jemal or his company, Douglas Development, have made $39,160 in donations to local Republicans and Democrats alike. Jemal’s WNY campaign contributions Candidate Contributions State Senator Tim Kennedy $11,000 Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul $10,000 Erie[...]

Posted 4 years ago

May 27

2021

Jemal: Big portfolio, unconventional methods

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People in the commercial real estate business look at all the properties Doug Jemal is buying around Buffalo and ask: How is he going to pay for all the work he’s taking on? Jemal isn’t saying. He wouldn’t talk to Investigative Post for this story. But in an interview with WGRZ, he gave what some might consider an unnerving answer to the question. “We’re all going to run out of money. I’m going to die broke. There’s nothing that I’m taking with me,” he said. “Look, needless to say, you know my M.O. I’m a riverboat gambler. I’m a shooter.[...]

Posted 4 years ago

May 20

2021

Buffalo’s abysmal school attendance

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Students missing two classes a month is a sign of trouble.  A lot of students in Buffalo schools are in a world of trouble. They’re simply not showing up for online classes. Only one-third of students had satisfactory attendance from the start of the school year until the first week of March, shortly after the district began phasing in classroom instruction.  Another third of students missed online classes often enough that their frequent absence put their academic achievement at risk — or worse. The last third were severely absent, meaning they typically missed school at least one day a week,[...]

Posted 4 years ago
Investigative Post