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Feb 8

2016

Mayor backtracks on lead pledge

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You don’t have to go as far as Flint, Michigan, to find a serious lead poisoning problem. There’s one right here in Buffalo, one that City Hall continues to downplay. New data obtained by Investigative Post shows there’s an increase, for the first time in four years, in the number of children in Erie County who tested positive for lead in their blood. In 2015, Erie County reported 295 children who tested positive for lead in their blood. That’s a 14 percent increase from the prior year. The real problem is in Buffalo, however, where 273 children – 93 percent[...]

Posted 9 years ago

Feb 8

2016

WNY job growth continues to lag

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The Buffalo and Western New York economy is humming, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and a bevy of local and state politicians. But the numbers tell a different story. Job growth in the Buffalo market grew by an annual average of 0.8 percent between 2010 and last year, half the national average of 1.6 percent. Local job growth last year of 1.1 percent was significantly less than the national average of 1.9 percent of the statewide average of 1.7 percent. Steve Brown and I discuss on this week’s edition of Outrages & Insights.

Posted 9 years ago

Feb 4

2016

Quick Hit: Heaney on Urban League scrum

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Jim Heaney, writing in The Public, sizes up the brouhaha in county government regarding the Buffalo urban League and concludes the agency’s defenders are ignoring a compelling case of wrongdoing. “We’re not talking honest mistakes involving $20,000 in excessive charges,” Heaney writes. “No, the bogus bills involved, among other transgressions, charging for work never performed. And former employees describe a culture where they were encouraged to “bill creatively”—by inflating the number of hours they worked and charging the county for time spent on things only tenuously related to social work.”

Posted 9 years ago

Feb 3

2016

Quick Hit: Urban League fights back

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After an audit by the Erie County Comptroller’s office bore out whistleblowers’ claims of inflated billing and inadequate training, Urban League President Brenda McDuffie and her supporters say it’s a political witch hunt. But there’s little evidence for that, says Jim Heaney in a Quick Hit in The Public.

Posted 9 years ago
Investigative Post