Investigative Post

In January, good-government activists and elected officials said there should be no public subsidies for a new Buffalo Bills stadium without a community benefits agreement. A memorandum of understanding outlining the deal, involving $1.13 billion in subsidies, was announced in March, with no CBA in place. The Erie County Legislature approved the MOU in May, […]

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter, an excerpt from which you’ll find below. Reinvent Albany has a good rundown of the good and bad of the session’s final flurry.  Among the bad: a $10 billion allocation, negotiated in the dark, to provide huge subsidies to the semiconductor industry. There’s good analysis here and here. New […]

Below is the “What I’m Reading” section of Jim Heaney’s WeeklyPost, which is delivered via email each Sunday morning. The newsletter is free; if you’re not a subscriber, you can sign up here. The Buffalo News reported on the cost of personal seat licenses to purchase season tickets to Bills games at the new stadium. A figure […]

Well, that didn’t take long. A month after Western New York became home to the largest public subsidy in the history of pro sports stadiums, officials in Nashville, Tennessee are preparing to spend even more taxpayer money to build a new riverfront home for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans.  Tennessee state lawmakers last week approved $500 […]

Below is an updated version of the “What I’m Reading” section of the WeeklyPost newsletter that is emailed to subscribers each Sunday morning. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. There’s a lot for Kathy Hochul to fix as governor, including corruption and a lack of transparency in state government. (I think she’s off to a […]

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz didn’t talk about a new Buffalo Bills stadium while county and state officials were still negotiating terms of an agreement with the team.  With the $1.4 billion stadium deal now approved as part of the new state budget, Poloncarz had a lot more to say this week.  Well, he didn’t […]

Below is the latest “What I’m Reading” portion of our email newsletter that publishes every Sunday. You can subscribe for free here. Let’s discuss “opportunity costs” for a few minutes. An opportunity cost is when you spend money on something at the expense of spending it on something else. An example: You’ve got $100 to […]

This week’s reposting of the “What I’m Reading” section of my weekly newsletter is topped by a couple of  fresh items that published in newspapers Sunday. You can subscribe to DailyPost here. It’s free and arrives via email at 6 a.m. every Sunday. I devoted the entire newsletter this week to coverage of the Bills […]