Articles for Geoff Kelly

Oct 10

2023

Fire clerk still not working, but getting paid

Jill Repman was called back to her job with the Buffalo Fire Department last month after seven and a half years on paid leave that cost taxpayers nearly $600,000. She immediately went on vacation, according to city payroll records. Repman used four days of her accumulated vacation time to extend the paid Labor Day holiday to a full week. The following Monday, she called in sick. Then she took a couple personal days, followed by another sick day, followed by another personal day. All told, Repman — formerly known by her married name, Parisi — didn’t work a single day[...]

Posted 7 months ago

Oct 3

2023

Buffalo’s stonewalling city government

Mayor Byron Brown’s administration has long been hostile to requests for public documents from journalists. In recent months, that hostility has grown worse. Since this summer, the mayor’s law department and several of his commissioners have broken state law time and again in their responses — or failures to respond — to document requests by Investigative Post reporters. Brown’s administration has failed to abide by the state Freedom of Information Law’s most basic requirements to respond to requests in a timely manner. The city’s top attorney, Corporation Counsel Cavette Chambers, has refused to answer our reporters’ formal appeals when Brown’s[...]

Posted 7 months ago

Sep 27

2023

Lawsuits have commenced in blaze that killed firefighter

The owner of 743 Main Street — the site of the fire that killed Buffalo firefighter Jason Arno in March — is suing the contractor that investigators blame for starting the blaze. The plaintiff is 743 Main Street LLC, a limited liability company with the same address as Avalon Development, former U.S. Rep. Chris Jacobs’ development company. Jacobs used the LLC to purchase the building in December 2022 for $1.3 million. The defendant is JP Contracting of WNY, whose workers used a propane roofing torch and a leaf blower to melt ice on the exterior masonry of the building the[...]

Posted 7 months ago

Sep 26

2023

How many City Hall employees being paid not to work?

The comptroller’s office has launched an investigation to determine how many city employees are on paid leave, why and for how long, and how much it costs taxpayers, according to the city’s chief auditor, who testified Tuesday before the Common Council’s Civil Service Committee. The comptroller’s inquiry is a response to Investigative Post’s report on Jill Repman, formerly Jill Parisi, an administrative assistant for the Buffalo Fire Department who was on paid leave for seven and half years. The city has paid Repman nearly $600,000 since suspending her in 2016, when she was accused of tampering with the department’s payroll[...]

Posted 7 months ago

Sep 25

2023

City to pay $255k to victims of police raid

The city of Buffalo is poised to pay more than a quarter-million dollars to a family whose Parkside home was raided by a police SWAT team hunting for crack cocaine. Officers armed with guns and a no-knock search warrant found no drugs at the home of Maisha Drayton, then a senior director of staff development at the Evergreen Association, a nonprofit health care organization. Neither she nor her two children nor her husband, Trevor, who wasn’t home when police broke through the door shortly after 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 11, 2014, had any criminal history. The city law department last[...]

Posted 7 months ago

Sep 23

2023

Monday Morning Read

Read on for nuggets you may have missed, and subscribe to WeeklyPost for a heads up every Sunday. The editors of Time magazine inveigh against “alarming efforts to politicize and defund libraries,” particularly by right-wing activists. The Time magazine piece reflects the fears Buffalo and Erie County Public Library Director John Spears spoke of in a recent Buffalo News article, saying “If people think this couldn’t happen here, they’re wrong.” In an earlier interview with Investigative Post, Spears spoke of the importance of libraries in society, suggesting that they are one of the few remaining community spaces people can use freely. Time’s editors[...]

Posted 7 months ago

Sep 20

2023

Erie County sheriff wants $10 million helicopter

Erie County Sheriff John Garcia wants to double his department’s helicopter fleet with a new chopper that would cost more than $10 million. “It’s a matter of safety,” Undersheriff William Cooley told Investigative Post in justifying a new Airbus H135 helicopter that would take two years to build and outfit. “We see an absolute need for a new machine.” The sheriff’s office boasts that its current helicopter helps nab suspected car thieves and controls traffic at Buffalo Bills games. The department says that its 22-year-old chopper, often grounded for maintenance and repairs, has saved lives. The department once considered replacing[...]

Posted 7 months ago

Sep 19

2023

Council member requests audit of workers on paid leave

A Buffalo legislator wants to know how and why a clerk in the city’s fire department was kept on paid administrative leave for seven and half years, collecting nearly $600,000 not to work. Fillmore District Council Member Mitch Nowakowski also wants the city’s comptroller to find out how many similar situations are hidden in the city’s payroll. Nowakowski, chair of the Council’s Civil Service Committee, filed a resolution Monday asking Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams to perform an audit to find out how many city employees are being paid to stay at home, why, and for how long — and what the[...]

Posted 7 months ago

Articles for Geoff Kelly

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