Tag: City Hall

May 5

2022

First impressions of Brown’s budget

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Mayor Byron Brown’s proposed city budget is awash in federal pandemic relief funds. It’s bolstered by the restoration of long withheld Seneca casino money. And, on top of those windfalls, Brown has proposed a property tax hike for only the second time since he took office in 2006. The city needs all the money it can get. Operating costs keep rising. For example, among the spending increases in Brown’s budget proposal for the fiscal year that begins July 1: Police spending would rise $5.4 million, an increase of 6.3 percent. Most of that would pay for 45 new officers. Some[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Mar 22

2022

Lucrative no-bid deal for Brown donor

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For the last three years, Buffalo’s comptroller has been asking Mayor Byron Brown’s administration to justify a $1 million, no-bid contract awarded to developer William Huntress.  Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams’s office has twice audited the current lease for the city’s records storage facility, given to Huntress’s Acquest Development in 2018.  Both times, according to the comptroller, the Brown administration has failed to document its decision to forgo legally required competitive bidding procedures. “Documentation of the transaction should be sufficient to assure compliance with the applicable laws and policies, which require the best value is chosen,” the comptroller reported in its first[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Mar 3

2022

City Hall light on lawyers

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Newly appointed Corporation Counsel Cavette Chambers began her tenure as the city’s chief lawyer by asking for more money to pay outside firms to represent the city in court. On Feb. 17, Chambers emailed a formal request for the law department’s $3.2 million budget to be topped up with an extra $300,000 for “outside counsel, court-ordered judgments, transcripts and other legal costs.”  The money was necessary, she wrote, for the department to handle its bills and its caseload “through the remainder of the fiscal year,” which ends June 30. The budget line Chambers names is for “Legal Services.” In the[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Feb 16

2022

Fire station burning up City Hall budget

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The City of Buffalo plans to build a palace of a new fire station in South Buffalo, judging from its price tag. Over the last several years, the city has approved borrowing about $9 million to replace Station No. 6 at the corner of Seneca Street and Southside Parkway. The station houses two trucks, Engine 25 and Ladder 10, and the department’s 6th Battalion.  The 62-year-old building definitely needs replacing. It’s a wreck. But $9 million (“… and counting,” says a City Hall source) is more than double the cost of the last new fire station the city built in[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jan 31

2022

Councilmen violating campaign finance law

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Three of Buffalo’s Common Council members are behind on filing campaign finance disclosure statements, the latest of which was due Jan. 18. Or, rather, they were behind.  When Investigative Post started asking about their missing filings last week, at least two of them began trying to catch up. When we checked the state election board’s online records shortly after the Jan. 18 deadline, we found two city legislators — Rasheed Wyatt and Ulysees Wingo — hadn’t filed since 2019.  That was the last year Buffalo Council members were on the ballot. A third, David Rivera, hadn’t filed since July 2020.[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Dec 30

2021

One inspection of grain elevator in 28 years

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Since it bought the Great Northern grain elevator in 1993, ADM Milling Co. has told city officials at least three times the iconic Ganson Street structure needs to come down.  Each time, to justify its request for a demolition permit, the company has commissioned and filed with the city — and most recently with the state Supreme Court — engineering reports and affidavits outlining the building’s alleged structural deficiencies and the danger it poses to the public. And yet, city inspectors have never in those 28 years demanded the company repair the problems those reports detail. The city has never[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Oct 25

2021

Buffalo’s beleaguered municipal finances

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 The story of Buffalo’s municipal finances under Mayor Byron Brown is divided into two chapters. Chapter One covers the five years before the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority — the city’s control board, formed in 2003 to keep the city from going bankrupt — relinquished its oversight power. In the beginning of Brown’s tenure, which began in 2006, the control board helped the city balance budgets and build up millions in reserves. Chapter Two covers the decade since the control board went “soft” in 2011. It’s a very different tale. Since 2011, Brown has proposed — and year after year[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Oct 18

2021

911 calls down 5%; traffic stops up 48%

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You might imagine Buffalo police spend their shifts busting drug dealers, foiling burglaries and taking guns off the street. There’s some of that, certainly.  But an analysis by Investigative Post of five years of 911 calls shows that sort of policing accounts for only a sliver of what cops do. More than anything else, they hand out traffic tickets. A lot fewer people have called Buffalo police about crime in recent years, according to our analysis.  The number of 911 calls for high-priority crimes — such as shots fired, domestic violence and assaults in progress — fell almost 21 percent[...]

Posted 4 years ago
Investigative Post