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Dec 10

2012

Antoine Thompson? Really?

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Antoine Thompson couldn’t find a job when voters fired him from his state Senate job two years ago. So, of course, Mayor Byron Brown has now hired Thompson to help the county’s 37,900 unemployed find jobs. Yeah, right. This is about as blatant – and shameless – as patronage hiring gets. First consider that Thompson and Brown have been joined at the hip, politically speaking, for most of their careers, dating back to their days together in Grassroots, the political club that helped spawn both of their careers. Thompson worked as a legislative aide to Brown when he served on[...]

Posted 11 years ago

Dec 7

2012

EPA moves to ban boat sewage in Lake Erie

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Gross as it is, boaters have been able to pump out their sewage into Lake Erie, but this may soon come to an end. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a statement today “tentatively” determining that there are plenty of pump-out stations around Lake Erie that allow for boats to remove the sewage in a more environmentally friendly way.  The federal agency wants to ban boats from pumping out the sewage into the lake based on a proposal from the state Department of Environmental Conservation. “This proposal will help protect water quality and marine life in Lake Erie for years[...]

Posted 11 years ago

Dec 6

2012

First $1B beneficiary awash in red ink

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The biotech company the state plans to spend $50 million on to lure to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus has lost $112 million the past three years and hasn’t posted an annual profit since 2008. And that’s just the beginning of the financial difficulties confronting Albany Molecular Research, according to a probe by Investigative Post. The company has laid off at least 80 employees since 2010 and shuttered one of its foreign facilities, with plans to close a second operation near Seattle. The Albany-based company’s stock price, meanwhile, sunk from  $61.66 in 2001 to $2.26 in December 2011, although the stock[...]

Posted 11 years ago

Dec 5

2012

Good plan off to bad start

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There’s a lot to like about the blueprint for spending $1 billion in state aid to revitalize the Western New York economy that was released Tuesday. I’d feel better about the plan’s prospects, however, if Gov. Andrew Cuomo hadn’t used its release to announce a heavily subsidized deal to bring 250 jobs here that smacks of the business-as-usual, smokestack-chasing approach that has failed us in the past. Let me get my skepticism out of the way up front. The state has agreed to spend $50 million on a biomedical facility and equipment to accommodate an expansion of Albany Molecular Research to[...]

Posted 11 years ago
Investigative Post

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