100 Search Results for sewer

Mar 13

2024

Buffalo’s tax auction limbo

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Last September Delaware District Council Member Joel Feroleto held up the city’s sale of a house on Amherst Street because he knew the city had acquired the property through a tax foreclosure. He wanted to be sure the children of the former owner, who died, got any surplus funds generated by the sale. Feroleto had reason for concern. In 2019, the Brown administration changed its process for handling the money generated at tax foreclosure auctions so that the city could keep more of the proceeds. As a result, millions of dollars that in the past might have been returned to[...]

Posted 2 months ago

Dec 27

2023

Geoff Kelly’s reporting on Roswell, City Hall

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Buffalo’s firefighting fleet Last year’s Christmas blizzard, which killed 47 people, exposed weaknesses in governmental capacity to navigate emergencies. The storm compelled the City of Buffalo, in particular, to confront numerous shortcomings, including inadequate investment in equipment for first responders. As it happened, we’d been investigating the condition of the city’s firefighting fleet in the weeks before the storm hit.  We published our findings in January: Over the past dozen years, Mayor Byron Brown and the Common Council failed to invest in new fire trucks as they aged out. The result was a ramshackle fleet that sometimes failed firefighters even[...]

Posted 4 months ago

Dec 8

2023

Vote for iPost’s top story of 2023

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What’s your favorite story published this year by Investigative Post? Editor Jim Heaney has selected a baker’s dozen stories for your consideration. We’re asking readers to vote for their top story in an online poll. Investigative Post has produced 201 pieces of news content for the calendar year through Dec. 8. Broadcast versions were produced for more than 50 of them and aired on WGRZ TV News, our longtime partner. Some stories were deep-dive investigations, others follow-up to those reports, still others analyses, spot news stories and podcasts. All five of our reporters produced stories that made our list. Story[...]

Posted 5 months ago

Oct 24

2023

Mayor’s half-baked paid leave report

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Last month, Mayor Byron Brown promised his administration would begin issuing “a comprehensive report encompassing all employees on paid leave” for each biweekly pay period. Investigative Post obtained a copy of the first such report last Thursday, a week after it was distributed to department heads on Oct. 12.  It is hardly comprehensive. The report indicates more than 1,400 city employees across 15 departments — about half the city workforce — took some sort of paid leave during the pay period covering the last two weeks of September. The report identifies the employees by name and department, and identifies the[...]

Posted 6 months ago

Sep 28

2023

STAMP pipeline drilling goes awry

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The state has cited the developers of the STAMP industrial park for violations involving a spill of drilling fluids in a wetland through which it is constructing a sewage pipeline. Earlier this month, crews conducting horizontal drilling to construct the pipeline through the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge encountered sinkholes, causing 100 gallons of drilling fluid to spill into a half-acre area. The drilling fluid consisted of water and clay slurry, made from Wyoming sodium bentonite clay, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation. It’s the second such spill since mid-August. The DEC, in a notice issued Monday, said the[...]

Posted 7 months ago

Sep 20

2023

Genesee County officials make misleading claims

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Following a state Supreme Court lawsuit over a critical piece of infrastructure for its Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing Park, the Genesee County Economic Development Center has begun a public relations campaign. Beginning last week, just days after Orleans County sued the neighboring agency to block a sewage pipeline that would discharge across county lines, Genesee County EDC placed advertisements and letters to the editor in local news publications in an effort to defend its industrial park. The agency also published a new page on its website defending the wastewater pipeline. The advertisements link to the new webpage. There’s just[...]

Posted 8 months ago

Sep 18

2023

Wastewater from industrial park could violate federal law

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Updated Oct. 4 at 3:02 p.m. Oak Orchard Creek is considered Orleans County’s “lifeblood.” Flowing south to north from Genesee County wetlands to Lake Ontario, it provides trophy salmon and trout a place to feed and spawn. The creek draws fishermen, $30 million in tourist spending and around $100,000 in county revenue each year. “Oak Orchard Creek is a huge — a huge — part of the fishery … it’s gigantic,” Lou Borrelli, captain of a fishing charter boat, told Investigative Post. “Generally speaking, most of the fish are going to be affected by the water quality, because if it does[...]

Posted 8 months 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 8 months ago