Tag: City Hall

May 10

2019

Mayor Brown’s risky budget assumptions

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There is little fat in Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown’s proposed 2019-2020 budget, as befits a city where, despite aspirational talk of a renaissance, population is stagnant and job growth and real wages trail national averages. However, that word aspirational also applies to some projected revenue streams on which Brown’s budget relies. Other words and phrases come to mind, too, such as tentative, maybe, never going to happen, and zombie. Below is a quick look at some of those revenue projections, totaling about $20 million of the $508 million budget. (Today, the office of  interim City Comptroller Barbara Miller Williams released its[...]

Posted 5 years ago

May 9

2019

Legislators propose changes on traffic laws

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In just over two years, New York State issued nearly 1.7 million driver’s license suspensions to more than 620,000 drivers — a disproportionate number of them poor, people of color or both. These suspensions were not the result of reckless or drunken driving, or other dangerous behavior; they were slapped on drivers who failed to pay a traffic ticket fine or show up for a court date over it. These numbers come from an analysis released on Wednesday by Driven By Justice, a statewide coalition that worked with state Sen. Tim Kennedy on a bill to end the practice of[...]

Posted 5 years ago

May 1

2019

Buffalo lags on addressing lead poisoning

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 Hundreds of young children living in Buffalo’s inner-city neighborhoods continue to be diagnosed every year with lead poisoning. And City Hall continues to do next to nothing about it. “Buffalo has not made as much progress as other communities have and not as much progress as perhaps they could,” said Andrew McLellan, president of Environmental Education Associates, which trains contractors and others to recognize and remediate lead hazards. Thirteen months ago, the Center for Governmental Research, a consulting firm in Rochester, developed an action plan with 19 recommendations for the city, county and state to adopt. The county has[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Apr 30

2019

A bad week for female candidates in Buffalo

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State Supreme Court Judge Tracey Bannister on Monday expressed “some regret” in upholding the disqualification of three candidates for Buffalo Common Council, based on what she called a “material” and “substantive” defect in the form of their nominating petitions.   Indeed, there is much to regret in this imbroglio, from its beginning to its conclusion. The case now moves to the 4th Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court. “I’ve done what you’ve done and I know it’s hard,” Bannister told the three women — Melanie McMahan, Bernice Radle and Antoinette Craig — who were knocked from the June 25[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Mar 5

2019

A changing tide on license suspensions

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New York is one of at least 41 states that suspend drivers’ licenses if they fail to pay traffic fines. In 2016, the state Department of Motor Vehicles issued 53,648 suspension or revocation orders to drivers in Erie County, according to data obtained Investigative Post. This captures suspensions issued for any reason, but experts said the vast majority are related to traffic tickets. “Suspending a license is a patently absurd remedy to someone who can’t pay traffic tickets,” Blake Strode, the executive director of ArchCity Defenders, a civil rights law firm based in Missouri, told Investigative Post. New York’s practice[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Feb 27

2019

City Hall cashing in on traffic tickets

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 First, City Hall talked the state into allowing it to keep most of the money from traffic tickets issued by Buffalo police. Police then started handing out tickets in record numbers, jumping from around 32,000 in the year before the Buffalo Traffic Violations Agency was created in 2015 to more than 52,000 the year after. Since then, police have written far more tickets for tinted windows than for speeding or running red lights and stop signs. Revenues soared accordingly—up from around $500,000 in the year before the traffic agency was created, to more than $2.8 million in the fiscal[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Sep 12

2018

Council presses mayor’s staff on fair housing

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 The Common Council has asked the Brown administration to account for its enforcement of – or, failure to enforce – the city’s fair housing law. Last week, the Council asked for a report on the city’s handling of housing discrimination complaints over the past three years. At a brief appearance before a Council committee Tuesday, Harold Cardwell, the city’s fair housing officer, agreed to provide that report within 30 days. The Council’s request, initiated by President Darius Pridgen, came after Investigative Post reported in July that City Hall has largely failed to enforce the fair housing law. The law[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Aug 1

2018

Council considers action on fair housing law

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Buffalo’s fair housing law is supposed to prevent landlords from refusing to rent to someone simply because they rely on government assistance – like a Section 8 voucher – to help pay their rent. But that law, introduced in 2006, has gone largely unenforced, despite the more than two dozen discrimination complaints, most of them substantiated by undercover testing, that have been filed with the city. Last week, members of the Common Council said they would consider taking steps to ensure the law is enforced. “If we find out something is not being enforced or something is not staffed, it[...]

Posted 6 years ago
Investigative Post

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