Articles for Geoff Kelly

Jun 18

2024

Lawsuit: Radioactive waste killed Lewiston woman

Six months after his wife died from breast cancer, an environmental remediation team digging underneath Philip Palmeri’s Lewiston home uncovered “black fine grain radioactive sand, refractory brick, ash slag, and what appears to be lime.” That’s not all they found. Over the course of a three-year, $7 million cleanup operation, the team removed 4,800 tons of waste from Palmeri’s and an adjacent property, some of it emitting radiation 50 times beyond what’s considered a safe or normal level. The workers also found among the waste eight “index card sized metal plates.” Printed on the metal plates was the name of[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Jun 11

2024

Buffalo lawmakers’ side gigs

Buffalo Common Council Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope, President Pro Tempore Bryan Bollman, and University District Council Member Rasheed Wyatt. Photo by Garrett Looker. The Buffalo Common Council’s majority leader, Leah Halton-Pope, was sworn into office — and onto the city’s payroll — on Jan. 1. But she was collecting more than a city paycheck during her first four months in office. Halton-Pope continued to work as a part-time policy consultant for Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes — the woman she has called her “forever boss” — until the end of April, making about $3,000 a month. And she continues to[...]

Posted 1 year ago

May 27

2024

Buffalo’s fiscal reckoning

Buffalo Common Council President Christopher P. Scanlon. Photo by Garrett Looker. Buffalo’s Common Council took some of the sting out of the mayor’s proposed property tax hike last week, at least for residential homeowners. Legislators knocked Mayor Byron Brown’s 9 percent tax increase to 7.5 percent, with most of the relief directed to residential homeowners. But city dwellers shouldn’t rest easy. Taxes likely will continue to rise in the years to come. “This tax increase is nothing compared to what’s going to happen in the future,” Niagara District Council Member David Rivera said last week. “We should have been[...]

Posted 1 year ago

May 22

2024

Who’s running for Buffalo school board

Three at-large seats on Buffalo’s school board will be on the ballot this November. Two incumbents, Larry Scott and Terrance Heard, are running for reelection. The other, Ann Rivera, won’t seek another five-year term. So far there are at least four other candidates, three of whom are working together to make the ballot: Ed Speidel, president of the District Parent Coordinating Council and a former co-chair of the district’s Special Education Parents Advisory Committee. He’s the parent of two current Buffalo Public Schools students. He recently held a meat raffle fundraiser at the South Buffalo Moose Lodge. Raziya Hill, founder[...]

Posted 1 year ago

May 9

2024

Tom Bauerle’s family feud

WBEN talk radio host Tom Bauerle’s siblings claim in a lawsuit that the right-wing pundit cheated them out of their share of their late mother’s nearly $1 million estate. The lawsuit, filed May 3, alleges that Bauerle moved in with his mother, Dorothy, during the last two months of her life. Dorothy Bauerle died March 6. During that period, his siblings claim, Bauerle convinced their mother — “through duress, undue influence, fraud, and exploitation of [her] infirmity” — to make himself her principal beneficiary. They claim that prior to their brother’s “fraudulent and wrongful conduct,” their mother intended the three[...]

Posted 2 years ago

May 3

2024

Buffalo’s precarious budget

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown struck a pragmatic tone Wednesday as he introduced his budget proposal for the coming year, which is balanced with a 9 percent hike in property taxes and nearly $15 million in reserve funds. The mayor’s $618 million spending proposal, however, suffers from some of the same unrealistic revenue projections that led to shortfalls in the past, before the city’s treasury was bursting with federal pandemic aid to conceal the difference. Consider just three revenue sources the Brown administration has frequently overestimated in past budget cycles: parking meters, parking tickets, and traffic fines. Parking meters are forecast[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Apr 30

2024

Buffalo tax hike coming

This column was excerpted from Investigative Post’s weekly “PoliticalPost” newsletter. Subscribe here and get “PoliticalPost” in your inbox every Wednesday morning. How much more will Buffalo property owners pay in taxes in the coming year? Much will be revealed when Mayor Byron Brown unveils his budget proposal Wednesday during his State of the City speech at Shea’s 710 Theatre. But we know a tax hike will be part of the bargain. The mayor and the Common Council for months have been discussing it as an inevitability, given that federal pandemic aid, which has kept the city’s precarious finances above water[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Apr 18

2024

Stefan Mychajliw, beat reporter

Editor’s Note: Today, we’re sharing Geoff Kelly’s weekly Political Post for everyone to read. If you’d like to receive it every week, sign up at the bottom of this newsletter. Last week I reported that Stefan Mychajliw is part of a slate of Republican committee candidates looking to take control of the party apparatus in Elma, where the former county comptroller moved a year-and-a-half ago. Mychajliw has been making his living as a political operative since leaving office at the end of 2021, including a stint as a flack for Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s now-defunct presidential campaign. The former TV news reporter’s new career[...]

Posted 2 years ago