Tag: Mayor Byron Brown

Jul 17

2024

Brown’s raising money as if he’s running for office

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Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown has a fundraiser today at the Diamond Hawk golf course in Cheektowaga, with tickets starting at $100 and sponsorship packages ranging up to $5,000.  Brown also held a fundraiser earlier this month at a Bisons game and another in April at The Atrium @ Rich’s. His Brown for Buffalo campaign committee has raised $58,500 since January, according to campaign finance disclosures filed on Monday.  That’s $22,000 more than Brown raised in the first six months of 2020, as he prepared to run for a fifth term. The mayor’s committee had $192,545 in the bank as of[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Jul 15

2024

Buffalo’s ever-present hole in the ground

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You could have read this, and more, yesterday if you subscribed to our newsletters. Doing so is just a click away. Perhaps nothing symbolizes the inertia that holds Buffalo back more than the site of the now demolished Memorial Auditorium. Portions have been redeveloped, most notably Explore & More, but much of the property remains a hole in the ground – literally – 15 years after the Aud was demolished. The inaction has been under the watch of the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp., a state agency, and Mayor Byron Brown. The lack of action was in the news last[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Jun 17

2024

Buffalo needs a hard control board

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Mayor Byron Brown made it clear last week he has no intention of resolving the city’s pending fiscal crisis. In an interview with Deidre Williams of The Buffalo News, the mayor said rather than cutting spending, he’s looking for increased revenue from the county, state and perhaps federal governments to close a projected deficit of at least $41 million for the budget year starting July 2025.  In fact, the feds have already been bailing him out. In the past three budgets, the city has used $100 million in federal pandemic aid to balance the books. It expects to use at[...]

Posted 2 years ago

May 3

2024

Buffalo’s precarious budget

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Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown struck a pragmatic tone Wednesday as he introduced his budget proposal for the coming year, which is balanced with a 9 percent hike in property taxes and nearly $15 million in reserve funds. The mayor’s $618 million spending proposal, however, suffers from some of the same unrealistic revenue projections that led to shortfalls in the past, before the city’s treasury was bursting with federal pandemic aid to conceal the difference. Consider just three revenue sources the Brown administration has frequently overestimated in past budget cycles: parking meters, parking tickets, and traffic fines. Parking meters are forecast[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Apr 29

2024

Applying a heavy hand in Lockport – and elsewhere

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Lockport Mayor John Lombardi III generated headlines last week when he ordered all city employees to refrain from speaking with reporters. The Lockport Union-Sun & Journal properly chastised Lombardi for the gag order. Unfortunately, Lombardi is far from the only politician employing such heavy handed tactics.  Whether it’s a written policy or not, no one in the sprawling bureaucracy controlled by Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown is permitted to speak with reporters unless authorized to do so. Rather, all press inquiries are funneled through Mike DeGeorge, the mayor’s spokesman, who frequently fails to return phone calls, much less answer questions. Stonewalling[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Feb 6

2024

Brown angling for top job at OTB

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From left: Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, OTB President and CEO Henry Wojtaszek, OTB board member James Wilmot. Mayor Byron Brown, who has pursued at least two jobs outside City Hall in the past six months, has his eyes set on yet another: president and CEO of the Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp., sources tell Investigative Post. And those political insiders say the job’s current occupant, Henry Wojtaszek, is looking for an exit strategy, too.  It’s little wonder that Brown would be interested in the job. Wojtaszek has one of the best-compensated public service posts in the state. The OTB president[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Jan 29

2024

Policing Buffalo’s police

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Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia and Mayor Byron Brown testified last fall that the city’s contract with its police union and the power it bestows on an arbitrator make it too difficult to discipline cops accused of misconduct. “I think any chief executive that’s running the department would like to have the managerial ability to run a department, but that’s not the contractual language that was laid out well before my time,” Gramaglia testified during a recent deposition in a police brutality lawsuit. “The arbitrator’s decision, the independent arbitrator’s decision and finding, is final in a disciplinary matter.” Gramaglia and[...]

Posted 2 years 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 2 years ago
Investigative Post