Investigative Post

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 […]

On June 21, Erie County Comptroller Stefan Mychajliw issued an invitation to Department of Motor Vehicles employees across the state: If you disagree with the new “Green Light” law, under which New York State will soon issue driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, and you suspect such a person is applying for a license, call or […]

On the website of the Buffalo city comptroller, the top tab on the left — the place of pride — is occupied by the word “Transparency.” I guess that’s meant to be ironic. Click on that tab, and follow the prompts to the page titled “Financial Reports,” and you’ll soon discover what I mean. In […]

A couple Sundays ago, Buffalo News politics columnist Bob McCarthy wrote, in essence, that I got it all wrong in my June 19 piece about Lynne Dixon’s push poll. I don’t know that I did. I don’t think McCarthy knows that I did, either. Dixon is challenging incumbent Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz. In early […]

Geoff Kelly has been reporting of late about Buffalo’s growing fiscal problems. He spoke on WBFO’s Press Pass about the poor budget practices of Mayor Byron Brown and the Common Council and the inaction of the city’s fiscal control board. Give a listen.  

To hear Mayor Byron Brown tell the story, the City of Buffalo’s finances are strong and stable, and his finance team has constructed another in a series of sound, responsible budgets.  Two important bellwethers put the lie to that narrative. The first is the depletion of the city’s reserves. In the past decade, the Brown […]