Articles for Geoff Kelly

Nov 19

2019

New cop cars fall short of need

 The Brown administration is touting its plan to purchase new police cars to replenish its depleted fleet, but the move leaves the police department short on vehicles. Thirty-five new cars are in the pipeline. But it could be up to a year before they’re all on the road, and their number falls short of the 50 to 60 new vehicles needed annually to keep the fleet in good order. John Evans, president of the Police Benevolent Association, recently sent a letter to the Common Council complaining that officers directing traffic at the events downtown do so without patrol cars[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Nov 6

2019

Toxins at Niagara Falls airbase

The Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station has landed on an ignoble list. The facility ranks seventh on a list of the 100 U.S. military sites most contaminated with PFAS, or per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances. That’s according to a report issued in early October by the Environmental Working Group, based on data procured from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense. PFAS is a family of chemicals linked in animal studies to infertility, birth defects, developmental disorders and cancer. PFAS compounds have been used commercially in a wide variety of products since the 1950s. They include the[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Sep 30

2019

Buffalo’s budget woes get real

A Wall Street bond-rating agency recently delivered bad, if unsurprising, financial news to the City of Buffalo: The agency had downgraded the city’s credit rating. The reasons for the downgrade: a consistent pattern of inflating projected revenues in budget proposals, then raiding reserve funds to balance budgets when those revenue projections proved false. That is to say, exactly the problems — what the agency, Fitch Ratings, described as “the city’s weak operating performance in recent years” — that we’ve been reporting for the past six months: here, here, here, and here. Meet and mingle with Geoff Kelly and our other[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Sep 19

2019

Assessing Buffalo’s property reassessment

If you’re a homeowner in the City of Buffalo, you received a love letter from City Hall this month: your new property value assessment and an estimate of your new tax bill in 2020. Rarely have residents demonstrated so much interest in their neighbors’ mail: Whose values went up? Whose went down? By how much? How did the value of my house go up but my taxes go down? Who determined these numbers and how? It is the first citywide reevaluation of city properties since 2001, a period in which real estate values in some city neighborhoods have doubled or even[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Sep 16

2019

City Hall stuck on budget bailout

For the fourth straight year, the City of Buffalo must tap reserves to balance its budget. The question is: What reserves? Where will the money come from this time? The books are just about closed on the financial year that ended June 30. The bottom line: The city finished around $10 million in the red, according to preliminary numbers published at Open Book Buffalo, an online portal that publishes city financial data and is updated weekly. Those numbers are unaudited and likely to shift somewhat over the next month or so. However, sources at the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority and[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Sep 3

2019

Turning a blind eye to environmental risks

You’d think that the construction of a million square feet of manufacturing space on a brownfield along the Buffalo River would warrant a thorough environmental investigation before shovels bit into the soil. And you’d be wrong. The Tesla plant in South Buffalo was built on a former Superfund site — once home to Republic Steel, Donner Hanna Coke and Feine Steel, among other historic industrial polluters. The site borders the environmental debacle that was (and is) the Hickory Woods residential development, which was poisoned by the use as fill of toxic materials created by those plants. Prior to its purchase[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Aug 28

2019

Kelly discusses cop cars on WBFO

Geoff Kelly has recently reported on a shortage of working police cars in Buffalo (here and here). He discussed his findings this week on WBFO’s Press Pass.  

Posted 5 years ago

Aug 22

2019

Cop car shortage sidelines new officers

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 affairs. The police department has too few patrol cars, we found, and many of the cars that are in service are in poor repair. The situation, said John Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, is “dire.” “There aren’t enough cars for the patrol[...]

Posted 5 years ago
Investigative Post