Investigative Post

Western New York’s hospitals were in dire financial shape coming into 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic  — with the attendant costs in equipment, staffing and, perhaps most damagingly, lost revenue — is going to compound their problems.  “It’s going to be ugly,” Kaleida spokesman Michael Hughes told Investigative Post in an email. It’s not just hospitals […]

These are especially difficult days — and nights — for the homeless of Western New York. They share the same fears about COVID-19 as do those comfortably cloistered in their houses and apartments. But they also have fewer options as to where to bed for the night, as some shelters have closed and others have […]

The coronavirus, and the attendant slowdown of the local economy, could not arrive at a worse time for the City of Buffalo’s finances. The likely decline in county sales tax — Buffalo’s share of which is a critical portion of the city’s budget — could contribute to a deficit when the fiscal year ends June […]

On Saturday, as part of the state government’s efforts to suppress the spread of the coronavirus, Gov. Andrew Cuomo used his emergency powers to curtail the petitioning process for candidates aiming to make the ballot in the state’s June primaries. By executive order, that process — traditionally a door-to-door, face-to-face affair performed by a candidate […]

In January, the City of Buffalo launched its long-awaited pilot program to combat lead poisoning. The pilot program is small — much smaller than the problem in Buffalo, which has one of the highest rates of children afflicted with lead poisoning in the nation.  And, as it stands now, the program lacks funding mechanisms to […]

The Buffalo Common Council today approved two measures that will bring 51 new patrol cars to the city’s decrepit fleet. The Council, without comment or debate, approved a contract to lease 31 new police cars from Enterprise Fleet Management for roughly the cost of purchasing 13 cars outright. The Council also approved borrowing $1 million to […]

 On Tuesday, Buffalo’s Common Council authorized one of the largest lawsuit settlements in the city’s history: $4.5 million to Wilson Morales, who was shot by Buffalo police officers in the early morning of June 24, 2012, after a car chase on the city’s East Side. The bullet that struck Morales, then a 17-year-old student […]

 Buffalo police officers have a lot fewer cars at their disposal to respond to 911 calls than their commissioner would have the public believe, union officials say. Buffalo Police Commissioner Byron Lockwood told the Common Council’s Police Oversight Committee on Jan. 14 that the department’s dilapidated fleet had 134 working patrol cars available to […]