Categories for Featured

May 7

2025

Buffalo’s streetlight maintenance “haphazard”

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The streets of Buffalo are illuminated by more than 30,000 streetlights, the majority of them installed decades ago, according to the engineer who once oversaw the entire system.  And every year the city’s 311 citizen complaint line receives hundreds of reports of damaged or missing streetlights, according to city data.  And yet the city’s Department of Public Works can produce no records of the city inspecting, maintaining or replacing any streetlights in the past seven-and-a-half years. That’s according to DPW Commissioner Nate Marton, to whom  Investigative Post in February directed a Freedom of Information request, seeking all documents tracking the[...]

Posted 6 days ago

Nov 13

2024

Cryptocurrency and Financial Inclusion: Bridging the Gap

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Let’s be real — in today’s world, you’d think everyone has easy access to banks, loans, and financial services, right? But that’s far from the truth. Believe it or not, around 1.4 billion adults globally don’t have a bank account (World Bank, 2022). Some folks live too far from the nearest branch, others don’t trust traditional banks, and plenty just can’t cough up the fees that come with keeping an account open. And here’s where things get frustrating: without access to basic banking, people can’t save money safely, get credit, or invest in their future. It locks them out of[...]

Posted 6 months ago

Jun 27

2024

Hochul, Schumer pressured regulators over STAMP

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Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part package. Our second story is here. In the drive to build a massive industrial park in rural Genesee County, the offices of Gov. Kathy Hochul and U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer pressured regulators to issue approvals for the project that ran afoul of environmental laws and policies, ignoring an indigenous nation’s legal rights along the way. Investigative Post found that: Aides to Hochul pushed top officials at the state Department of Environmental Conservation to work more quickly. Schumer aides intervened with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And a string of state[...]

Posted 11 months ago

Jun 26

2024

Erie County Democrats attack challengers

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A Democratic Party mailer supporting favored candidates in party committee races. The Erie County Democratic Party sent a message last weekend to city voters in the handful of election districts where candidates challenged insiders and incumbents for seats on the party committee: Vote for the party’s “endorsed county committee candidates” to ward off “convicted felon Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican Party,” advised a mailer paid for by party headquarters.  Because “democracy hangs in the balance.” You’d think the party’s “endorsed county committee candidates” were fighting a pitched battle against a rabid red wave of Republicans seeking seats of critical[...]

Posted 11 months ago

Jun 6

2024

Charters outperform urban public schools in reading

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The reading skills of young students who attend charter schools in and around Buffalo are slightly better than those attending urban public schools, an Investigative Post analysis has found. The results of 2023’s testing showed 30 percent of third through fifth grade students at the 19 charter schools tested in Erie and Niagara counties could read and write at or above grade level, according to the New York State Education Department.  That compares with 25 percent of students in the same grades in Buffalo public schools. “There’s more we want to achieve for our kids, clearly,” said Fatimah Barker, executive[...]

Posted 11 months ago

May 27

2024

Buffalo’s fiscal reckoning

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  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 12 months ago

Dec 20

2023

IDAs look to dish out housing tax breaks

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This story was produced by Investigative Post and New York Focus and based on interviews with 30 lawmakers, officials, advocates, lawyers and developers, as well as a review of data and historical records. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s push for more housing has been interpreted by industrial development agencies as a green light to ramp up controversial tax breaks for developers. The state’s 107 IDAs have never been explicitly authorized to subsidize housing and some lawmakers say that’s for a reason: Housing creates few permanent jobs compared to the industrial and commercial projects the agencies were designed to support. When IDAs do[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Dec 14

2023

‘A Crazy System’: How arbitration returns abusive guards to New York prisons

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This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on  Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook. The Marshall Project is distributing this story via Investigative Post, the (Albany) Times Union and New York Focus. A guard working at a Hudson Valley prison pummeled a 19-year-old shackled by the legs to a restraint chair. An officer at a facility near the Canadian border denied food to a man in solitary confinement 13 times over a week. Outside Albany, a guard told a prisoner, “That’s how you get dumped on your fucking[...]

Posted 1 year ago
Investigative Post