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Sep 12

2023

Many ways to fund a library in Buffalo

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Inglewood, California, Mayor James Butts Jr. has a suggestion for Buffalonians interested in a new public library: use the Bills’ community benefits agreement. Butts would know. The community benefits agreement between his city and the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team – which originated as the Buffalo Braves – included $6 million for improvements to Inglewood’s public libraries.  “We asked for it specifically,” Butts said. Slashed budgets from nearly 20 years ago – in what’s known as the Red-Green Budget – “decimated” the Buffalo and Erie County Library system. Sixteen library branches were closed. As a result, several neighborhoods on the[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 11

2023

A high-stakes battle between WNY counties

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In an unusual move, one Western New York county has sued a neighboring county’s industrial development agency in an effort to stop a key component a major economic development project. Orleans County filed a complaint Monday in state Supreme Court against the Genesee County Economic Development Center, seeking an injunction to stop the construction of a wastewater pipeline that will service the Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing Park, known as STAMP. The Genesee County EDC “started construction without having all their ducks in a row and did so at their own risk,” Jennifer Persico, an attorney representing Orleans County, wrote[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 10

2023

Monday Morning Read

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Subscribe to WeeklyPost and get a leg up on Jim Heaney’s take on what’s in the news. For whatever reason, political reporters at The Buffalo News keep treating Chris Grant of Big Dog Strategies with a lot more respect than he deserves. I mean, Grant and his company employ the type of election tactics that give politics a bad name, often works for toxic candidates, including George Santos, and often spins without regard for the facts. Grant should be treated as a pariah, not a sage. Yet The News based a story Sunday in large part on his analysis that[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 7

2023

What’s news in government and politics

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A digest of noteworthy reporting — some local, some state and some national — from the last week in government and politics:   Campaign finance shenanigans New York Focus reports on a new dodge for candidates who feel constrained by the state’s limits on campaign donations: Accept services from political consultants as loans, then never pay them back.  New York Focus highlights an example from Rochester, but Byron Brown’s 2021 mayoral campaign pulled the same trick. Brown for Buffalo listed more than $38,000 owed to the Atlanta law firm that represented the campaign in court as an “outstanding loan or[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 6

2023

Political domino theories

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This past summer, speculation has run amok regarding exit strategies for longtime elected officials:  Will SUNY Buffalo State hire Mayor Byron Brown, or perhaps Congressman Brian Higgins, as its next president?  How about Erie Community College? That financially beleaguered institution, too, is seeking new leadership, having run through three presidents — one of them carrying the prefix “interim” for two years — since former Congressman Jack Quinn left the post in 2017. Or perhaps Higgins, who began his 10th term in January, will land instead as the head of Shea’s Performing Arts Center, which lost its president last fall, amid[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 4

2023

OTB chief snubs Erie County comptroller

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Last week, the president and CEO of Western Regional Off-Track Betting instructed three of his top executives to ignore inquiries from the Erie County comptroller. Erie County is one of the 17 municipalities that own OTB, an agency beset by allegations that it has misused public money. Since last summer, Erie County Comptroller Kevin Hardwick has made numerous inquiries into the agency’s financial practices, including its provision of expensive health-care coverage to board members, its practice of doling out tickets to sporting events and concerts to friends and family, and the particulars of the development of a new hotel at[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 3

2023

Monday Morning Read

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You could have read this yesterday if you subscribed – for free – to WeeklyPost. Sign up here. Buffalo Business First last week published a list of 60 companies that have received funding over the past eight years through the 43North program, which is intended to promote the growth of start-up businesses in Western New York. (Data could not be located on four others.) The list was accompanied by an in-depth story. I’ve done a lot of reporting in the past on economic development, for both Investigative Post and The Buffalo News, and took a deeper dive into the data. (It was fun to[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Aug 30

2023

Contracts for OTB executives a first

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Six days before being ousted this spring by the state legislature, Western Regional Off-Track Betting’s board of directors voted to give multi-year contracts to 18 of the agency’s top executives. News outlets, including Investigative Post, first reported that the contracts for CEO Henry Wojtaszek and his lieutenants were “extensions” of existing agreements. But they were not extensions, according to OTB’s response to a Freedom of Information request filed by Investigative Post in July, seeking copies of the executives’ previous contracts.  OTB said it had no previous contracts to provide. And a former OTB chief operating officer — who is suing[...]

Posted 2 years ago
Investigative Post