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.

Apr 8

2012

Sabres fans get poor return on investment

It turns out Joe Friday is a hockey fan. Who woulda thunk it, Joe being from Los Angeles and all. Detective Friday realizes that while Terry Pegula owns the Buffalo Sabres, the team’s fan base pays the bills. What kind of return on investment did they get this season? When you consider the Sabres ranked No. 2 for payroll and No. 18 for points, the ROI was among the worst in the league. Only two teams spent more per point. Here are the facts: Team Team payroll for 2011-12 season: $69,830,000. Rank in league: Second highest after the Philadelphia Flyers[...]

Posted 13 years ago

Apr 6

2012

Weekend News Cafe: Hydrofracking, muckraking & rock ‘n’ roll

A muckraking columnist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times is both thoughtful and provocative. Consider two recent columns. First, his take on a couple of studies of all the chemical junk fed to the animals that are the source of our meat. My topic today is a pair of new scientific studies suggesting that poultry on factory farms are routinely fed caffeine, active ingredients of Tylenol and Benadryl, banned antibiotics and even arsenic … To me, this underscores the pitfalls of industrial farming. When I was growing up on our hopelessly inefficient family farm, we didn’t routinely drug animals.[...]

Posted 13 years ago

Apr 5

2012

Lessons for Buffalo from a boomtown

Buffalo is not Austin, Texas, and never will be. They bake. We freeze. They have Lance Armstrong. We had OJ. They don’t pay state income taxes. We do. Oh boy, do we. But I’ve come away from two visits to Austin since last summer thinking there are lessons to be learned. The Texas capital is booming. Austin proper added some 160,000 residents between 2001 and 2010, up 20 percent. Only one major metro area grew at a faster pace. The region also added jobs at a faster rate than any major metro area in the nation over the past eight[...]

Posted 13 years ago

Apr 3

2012

Urban Wasteland

Central Park Plaza opened in 1958, started going downhill in the 1980s and shuttered the last of its stores last summer. City inspectors repeatedly cited the plaza for violations, triggering a state probe and a subsequent agreement by its owners to sell the 27 acre parcel east of Amherst and Main streets. Blight in the plaza and adjacent neighborhood feed off each other, as this Investigative Post photo essay shows.

Posted 13 years ago

Apr 2

2012

Older but wiser, or at least better educated

After a couple of editions about political contributions, we decided to mix things up a bit, so Joe Friday this week deals with the change in population characteristics in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metropolitan area between 2000 and 2010, according to the Census. Two trends jump out: The drop off in population is most pronounced among school-aged children and there’s a dramatic increase in the number of college graduates. Here are the facts: Population as a whole is down 34,402, or 3 percent, We’re still over 1 million, at 1,135,509. We’re older, with median age climbing from 38 to 40.6. Why[...]

Posted 13 years ago

Mar 30

2012

Weekend News Cafe

Toles the blogger You call know Tom Toles the editorial cartoonist. Tom, a member of the Investigative Post board of directors, also blogs for the Washington Post. Which is to say, he’s a busy guy. Tom’s blog post on Friday takes on what he sees as the right wing’s end game. The time bomb is about to go off. Over the years the conservative movement has generated a whirlwind of wacky, but it has had its ruthless sober side as well. That ruthless sober side has had a plan. Actually the plan has more or less been complete for some[...]

Posted 13 years ago

Mar 27

2012

Hotel discounts that cost taxpayers

It seems local IDAs still haven’t come across a hotel subsidy deal they don’t like. The Amherst IDA in January approved $1.9 million in tax breaks for a hotel and retail shops on Main Street in Williamsville that Carl Paladino plans to develop on the former site of Stereo Advantage. On Monday, the Erie County Industrial Development Agency voted to grant $275,000 in tax breaks to the Millennium Hotel adjacent to Walden Galleria in Cheektowaga. Benderson Development recently announced plans for a hotel in the former Donovan state office building it is redeveloping at Canalside. They’ll no doubt be asking[...]

Posted 13 years ago

Mar 26

2012

Sobering stats for Hochul

A reader forwarded a post from the Daily Kos that lays out all sorts of interesting voting patterns in the New York’s reconfigured Congressional districts that underscore just how amazing Kathy Hochul’s victory was last year in the old 26th District and how difficult a repeat performance will be in the new 27th. Press accounts have reported the edge in Republican enrollment has inched up from 6 percent over the Democrats in the old 26th to 7 percent in the new 27th. Not all that much movement and hardly insurmountable, given that Republicans do not hold a plurality. But then[...]

Posted 13 years ago