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Nov 5

2019

iPost event features Spotlight reporter

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Western New York has learned, sadly, that scores of Catholic priests have sexually abused children over the past 60 years. It’s a scandal that has hit diocese after diocese across the nation, indeed, the world and it was first exposed by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team in a Pulitzer Prize winning investigation in 2002. Matthew Carroll was one of four reporters on the Spotlight team and he will headline an Investigative Post event on Wednesday, Dec. 4. Investigative Post Editor Jim Heaney will interview Carroll about the Globe’s investigation, the Academy Award winning movie it inspired, and the ongoing scandal[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Oct 31

2019

Locked, loaded and stuck in storage

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More than half of the 125 rifles Buffalo police bought two years ago to use in the event of a mass shooting sit unused because the department has yet to train most officers in their use. And police say it’s probably going to be another two years until all the necessary training is completed. “For some reason, unknown to us, the training ceased,” said John Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association. As a result, the rifle purchase ”seems like a colossal waste of money.” The police attribute the slow rollout to factors including training requirements and the time[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Oct 23

2019

Heaney talks data centers on ‘Pressroom

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Susan Arbetter and Jim Heaney discuss two Investigative Post stories that published this week regarding a proposal to build state-subsidized data centers in western and central New York. The interview aired on The Capitol Pressroom.  

Posted 6 years ago

Oct 23

2019

Questionable data center assumptions

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An alliance of environmental, community organizations and local governments support a plan to build massive data centers in two upstate towns, including Somerset in Niagara County.  Project backers contend the data centers would help the environment, provide jobs to displaced workers and replenish the tax coffers of local governments.  “It really is a win-win-win for the community, the environment and for workers,” Lisa Dix, senior New York campaign manager for Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, told Investigative Post. There is reason to question those assumptions, however. The project calls for new steel structures to be built on the near-defunct coal[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Oct 22

2019

Data centers: Big subsidies, few jobs

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Subsidized data centers can be expensive propositions for taxpayers. They typically require hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer assistance for every job created — and the price tag is sometimes much steeper. The cost of subsidizing data centers built over the past decade in Lockport, for example, worked out to $1.9 million per job. That’s far higher than the typical cost per job for a government-subsidized project. What’s more, there are few indications that data centers inspire other new businesses to enter a locale, said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a subsidy watchdog organization that has[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Oct 10

2019

OTB relents, discloses ticket recipients

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 For months now, the Western Regional Off Track Betting Corp. has refused to release the names of people who attended Bills and Sabres games in luxury suites it leases from the teams. Today, the OTB relented and released 201 documents that purports to identify ticket recipients. OTB acted in the face of a threatened lawsuit from the Niagara Gazette, which, along with Investigative Post, filed Freedom of Information requests this spring that were subsequently denied. OTB officials contended that release of names would represent an invasion of privacy of ticket recipients. Officials from the state Committee on Open Government[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Oct 2

2019

Kate Kaye interview on WBFO’s Press Room

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Kate Kaye joined the Investigative Post reporting staff in August. She shared some initial observations about the lack of economic development on the city’s East Side with WBFO’s Jay Moran, who also quizzed Kaye on her previous reporting on technology.  

Posted 6 years ago

Sep 30

2019

Buffalo’s budget woes get real

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A Wall Street bond-rating agency recently delivered bad, if unsurprising, financial news to the City of Buffalo: The agency had downgraded the city’s credit rating. The reasons for the downgrade: a consistent pattern of inflating projected revenues in budget proposals, then raiding reserve funds to balance budgets when those revenue projections proved false. That is to say, exactly the problems — what the agency, Fitch Ratings, described as “the city’s weak operating performance in recent years” — that we’ve been reporting for the past six months: here, here, here, and here. Meet and mingle with Geoff Kelly and our other[...]

Posted 6 years ago
Investigative Post