Categories for Investigations

Jul 6

2017

City Hall slow to enforce lead measures

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Buffalo continues to have a lead poisoning crisis – hundreds of children were diagnosed with dangerous lead levels again last year – but you wouldn’t know it by City Hall’s slow rollout of its plan to deal with the problem. Mayor Byron Brown announced his plan in May 2016 and the Common Council passed companion legislation in October. But an Investigative Post analysis shows there’s been little progress in executing the initiative. Consider: Not a single landlord has submitted a required compliance letter with the city to confirm that they and their tenant are aware that lead paint is presumed[...]

Posted 7 years ago

May 23

2017

Perks of LPCiminelli’s Buffalo Billion contract

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It was an expensive dinner after a long day of meetings on the SolarCity project. A senior executive at LPCiminelli, the company building the factory, ate at an upscale Italian restaurant in Albany, joined by two architects working on the project. The cost of the meal topped $120 each. That night, LPCiminelli picked up the tab. But, ultimately, state taxpayers footed the bill. A few months later, the company listed the meal as a reimbursable expense under its contract to build the vast solar panel factory, the marquee project of the governor’s Buffalo Billion initiative, and was paid back, in[...]

Posted 7 years ago

May 17

2017

Regulators at cross purposes at 18 Mile Creek

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Eighteen Mile Creek in Niagara County is so polluted that the state Department of Health doesn’t want people to eat the fish caught there. It’s one of only six waterbodies in the state with such a warning. This hasn’t stopped another arm of the state, the Department of Environmental Conservation, from stocking the contaminated creek each year with an average of 160,000 of what are considered among the most desirable of fish: salmon and trout. As a result, a section along Eighteen Mile Creek in the Town of Newfane has become a fishing hotspot, part of the Lake Ontario watershed’s[...]

Posted 7 years ago

May 16

2017

Police rifle purchase triggers concerns

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Community activists, echoing community distrust of law enforcement, have been advocating for change in the Buffalo Police Department. Better training to avoid situations like police using a patrol car to strike a suspect. Answers about the recent deaths of Wardel Davis and Jose Hernandez-Rossy during encounters with police. And more oversight of a department that clears officers of wrongdoing almost every time they are accused of using excessive force against civilians. The change activists are seeing involves not reform but rifles. And they’re alarmed by it. Buffalo police are buying approximately 115 semi-automatic rifles and 450 protective vests through a[...]

Posted 7 years ago

May 12

2017

Most new jobs in low wage sectors

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The good news: Buffalo Niagara is adding jobs at a faster clip than it has in a long time, albeit at a slower pace than the nation as a whole. The bad news: three-quarters of these new jobs are in sectors that generally don’t pay well. The biggest job creator across the region is restaurants and bars. The problems don’t end there: There’s been precious little growth in middle-income jobs and the region is actually losing technology jobs that tend to pay well and spin off a lot of business activity. Experts say the biggest economic challenge facing the region[...]

Posted 7 years ago

May 11

2017

Buffalo Niagara’s middling job gains

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To hear Gov. Andrew Cuomo tell it, the Western New York economy is a “national success story.” Indeed, there has been improvement during his six years in office, including the addition of 29,500 jobs and a drop in the unemployment rate. But while Buffalo Niagara is faring well against its sorry history, the region’s recovery is modest by national standards, an Investigative Post analysis found. Its job growth during the Cuomo years is one-half to one-quarter the national average, depending on which statistics you use. And half the drop in the unemployment rate can be attributed to a shrinking workforce,[...]

Posted 7 years ago

Apr 28

2017

A threat to Scajaquada Creek – and neighbors

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It’s not the view from Virginia Golden’s front porch of the former General Motors plant that bothers her. It’s the toxic gunk – up to 110,000 gallons of it – that’s underneath the plant. Neighborhood residents have been waiting – and worrying – for a decade since state environmental regulators declared several acres of the plant on East Delavan Avenue a significant threat to public health. The contaminant of concern are PCBs – so toxic that the federal government banned the manufacturing of them in 1979. The residents want the property cleaned up, but have instead endured inaction from state[...]

Posted 7 years ago

Mar 29

2017

Lack of scrutiny for subsidy programs

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This is the final part of a series that began Sunday. The full lineup of stories, columns and radio interviews can be found here » State and local economic development agencies in New York give away billions of dollars in subsidies to businesses every year but do little to assess what taxpayers are getting for their money. “What politician doesn’t want to stand there with a shovel in their hand and a hard hat on their head to announce new jobs coming to their district?” said Ron Deutsch, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, a labor-backed think tank. “The[...]

Posted 7 years ago
Investigative Post

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