Jim Heaney

Jim Heaney is editor and executive director of Investigative Post. He was an investigative reporter with The Buffalo News from 1986 to 2011 and a reporter and editor with The Orlando Sentinel from 1980-86. His coverage over the years has focused on economic development, local and state government, politics, education, housing and transportation, and he was an early practitioner of computer-assisted reporting. Heaney has won more than 20 journalism awards and was a finalist for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Jun 17

2024

Buffalo needs a hard control board

Mayor Byron Brown made it clear last week he has no intention of resolving the city’s pending fiscal crisis. In an interview with Deidre Williams of The Buffalo News, the mayor said rather than cutting spending, he’s looking for increased revenue from the county, state and perhaps federal governments to close a projected deficit of at least $41 million for the budget year starting July 2025. In fact, the feds have already been bailing him out. In the past three budgets, the city has used $100 million in federal pandemic aid to balance the books. It expects to use at[...]

Posted 11 months ago

Jun 10

2024

Price gouging that makes Terry Pegula look good

If you’re a regular reader of this column, you know I’m not a fan of the way Terry Pegula operates his sports teams. (Personal seat licenses, for staters.) But there is something to be said about how he prices Sabres tickets, although the size of our market probably has a lot more to do with it than his benevolence. The Arizona Coyotes of the National Hockey League are relocating to Salt Lake City for the coming season and the team last week announced its ticket prices. Let’s compare with Buffalo. Season tickets in the lower seating bowl for the Sabres [...]

Posted 11 months ago

Jun 3

2024

Numbers dispute the claims of a WNY renaissance

Some numbers caught my eye in the new edition of the WNY Economic News produced by economic professors at Canisius University. And I quote: National payroll employment has surpassed its pre-COVID peak by more than 7 million jobs while WNY employment is more than 12,000 below its pre-COVID peak. As they have been since the late 1980s, wages for workers in the Buffalo MSA [metropolitan statistical area] are lower than wages for workers in most industries in the United States. Thus, it should not be a surprise that the most recent data for the Buffalo MSA shows that the average wage[...]

Posted 11 months ago

May 27

2024

Americans are horribly misinformed on the economy

Subscribe to WeeklyPost and you’ll receive Jim Heaney’s recommended reading Sunday mornings in your inbox. We’re a nation that watches football, obsessives over Taylor Swift and can’t stop staring at our phone screens. Paying attention to reality, not so much. A poll released last week showed most Americans are horribly misinformed over the state of the economy, which in turn is coloring their views on national politics. Consider: A majority say we’re in a recession; we’re not. Most say unemployment is at a record high; it’s actually near a 50-year low. A majority say inflation is rising; it’s decreasing. Most[...]

Posted 12 months ago

May 20

2024

A Buffalo renaissance? Not with this much poverty.

The most disturbing thing I read last week was a press release from Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli about what he termed the state’s “staggering” childhood poverty rate. Nearly one in five live in poverty, half of them in deep poverty. Poverty is especially pervasive in upstate’s largest cities, according to the comptroller’s report: When compared to other U.S. cities with similar population levels, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo have child poverty rates that are double the average rate of their cohort cities. Between 40 to 46% of children in Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo were living in poverty in 2022, and they[...]

Posted 12 months ago

May 13

2024

Online news outlets are hot, newspapers are not

The awarding of Pulitzer Prizes is about celebrating the accomplishments of newspaper journalism. The latest announcements were made last week, and while there was a lot of good work to salute, there were somber undertones. No regional dailies won a Pulitzer. That underscores how most of them have become shells of their former selves. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t great work being produced on the local level. Four Pulitizers were awarded to online news outlets, three of them based in Chicago and Santa Cruz, California. In all, eight newspapers were finalists for a Pulitzer, vs. 12 online outlets. (The balance[...]

Posted 12 months ago

May 6

2024

An update on the sad condition of Kim Pegula

Tim Graham, late of The Buffalo News, now reporting for The Athletic, broke a story last week on the latest involving Kim Pegula. She’s been declared incapacitated and husband Terry Pegula is now her guardian. Terry has transferred a small portion of the couple’s ownership of the Bills to his daughter from his first marriage, who is starting to play a role in team affairs. (Here’s a version that’s not behind a paywall.) ProPublica reports on the IRS investigating billionaires using the sports teams they own to cheat on their taxes. The governor of Illinois is no Kathy Hochul when[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Apr 29

2024

Applying a heavy hand in Lockport – and elsewhere

Lockport Mayor John Lombardi III generated headlines last week when he ordered all city employees to refrain from speaking with reporters. The Lockport Union-Sun & Journal properly chastised Lombardi for the gag order. Unfortunately, Lombardi is far from the only politician employing such heavy handed tactics. Whether it’s a written policy or not, no one in the sprawling bureaucracy controlled by Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown is permitted to speak with reporters unless authorized to do so. Rather, all press inquiries are funneled through Mike DeGeorge, the mayor’s spokesman, who frequently fails to return phone calls, much less answer questions. Stonewalling[...]

Posted 1 year ago