Apr 23
2021
Geoff Kelly reported earlier this week about a petition effort to place a referendum on the city’s November ballot to establish an independent police review panel. He spoke Friday morning with Susan Rose and Brian Mazurowski on NewsRadio 930WBEN.
Apr 21
2021
They’ve lost hope that Buffalo’s elected officials will make the police reforms activists have advocated since last summer. So a coalition of groups and individuals is seeking to bypass City Hall entirely and take one of those reforms directly to voters. The coalition seeks to put a referendum on this November’s general election ballot. The referendum would create a new police review commission with the power to investigate complaints against officers, mete out discipline and review departmental policies and budgets. It’s a recommendation put forth last June by the Buffalo Police Advisory Board, one of three police oversight bodies in[...]
Apr 1
2021
Western New York is saddled with a lot of bad governmental bodies and departments in need of reform. Some cost a lot of money in the form of high taxes, others are simply ineffective, and still more are outright corrupt. There are some 105 units of local government in Erie and Niagara counties — that is, cities, towns, villages and school districts. And countless other departments, authorities, taxing districts and the like. With apologies to David Letterman’s late, great Top Ten list, here’s my take on the worst of the worst, with the list getting progressively worse as you read[...]
Mar 25
2021
Updated on March 26, 9:27am. India Walton, the long-shot challenger to incumbent Byron Brown in the Democratic primary for Buffalo mayor, passed three milestones in the past month: She won the endorsement of the Working Families Party, providing her a ballot line in the general election, should she fail to beat Brown in the June 22 primary. She picked up the endorsement of People’s Action, a national coalition of progressive activists and politicians, which comes with access to phone banks and fundraising. Most importantly, from a pragmatic standpoint, today Walton filed a nominating petition at the Erie County Board of[...]
Dec 19
2020
Since 2005, Mayor Byron Brown has raised and spent more than $5 million to win and hold the mayor’s office. He spent $1.4 million to fend off Bernie Tolbert, his Democratic primary challenger in 2013. Four years later, he spent another $1 million in his primary race against then Comptroller Mark Schroeder. As of July, however, when his campaign committee last filed a disclosure report, Brown had just $115,568 in the bank. That may sound like a lot of money — and for most Buffalonians it is — but for the four-term mayor of a medium-sized city, it is a[...]
Dec 3
2020
The Buffalo Police Department’s budget has grown at three times the pace of other city services since Mayor Byron Brown took office in 2006, an increase fueled largely by the cost of health insurance and pension payments for current and retired cops. The city spends 54 percent more on police than it did 15 years ago. Meanwhile, spending across all other city departments has increased just 17 percent. That’s less than two-thirds the rate of inflation. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the city’s spending on police has effectively defunded other city services. The city spends less today than it used to on[...]
Nov 18
2020
Editor’s note: The original version of this column incorrectly reported on events related to actions by the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority involving the city’s four-year budget plan. The source of the errors: The control board, on its website, incorrectly labeled videos of special meetings held on June 16 and July 20. Investigative Post based its reporting in part on those videos, which resulted in a conflating of events. The text below has been revised accordingly. A control board spokesman said the agency was attempting to correct the errors on its website. Three times in the past five months, the city’s state-imposed[...]
Aug 18
2020
Only one city in the country is suffering more than Buffalo from the financial devastation of the COVID crisis. And that’s Rochester, just an hour down the Thruway. A forthcoming study, the source of a New York Times analysis published Monday, projects Buffalo’s government is staring at a 15 to 20 percent shortfall in revenue in the current fiscal year — more than twice the average in the survey of 150 cities nationwide. Upstate New York’s largest cities — Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse — were ranked the most fiscally distressed municipalities in the nation. New York City ranked fifth, right[...]