Tag: Mayor Byron Brown

Jul 11

2022

City Hall puts off day of financial reckoning

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The COVID pandemic has been very good for the City of Buffalo’s finances. Pandemic relief funds from the federal American Rescue Plan have been a tremendous boon. You can see that money at work right now in city streets and parks. It’s going to help pay for water and sewer projects, as well as micro-loans to small businesses and the expansion of broadband internet access. It helped keep poor city residents in their homes. Most important for city government has been revenue replacement money — cash the federal government sent to make up for revenue the city claims it lost[...]

Posted 2 years ago

May 22

2022

Monday Morning Read

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If you subscribe to WeeklyPost, our newsletter delivered via email Sunday mornings,  you could have read this post – and more – yesterday. Just saying. Subscribe here. Byron Brown told CNN last week that the federal government needs to do more to help cities like Buffalo. Strange words coming from a mayor who has turned his back on the East Side during his 16 years in office, as documented by a study released last fall that detailed how Black neighborhoods have suffered in part because of the neglect of city government. It looks like people in the Black community want to end the neglect,[...]

Posted 2 years ago

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 2 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 2 years ago

Mar 15

2022

Brown cited for election law violations

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Last August, Peter Rizzo sent the state elections board a detailed analysis alleging Mayor Byron Brown had violated a number of campaign finance laws. First, Rizzo wrote, the mayor’s campaign failed to identify the individual owners of limited liability corporations, as required by state law. Rizzo identified “more than 100 campaign contributions from limited liability companies during the current election cycle” which were improperly documented. Second, Rizzo said, the mayor’s campaign accepted more money from several individuals and corporations than the law allowed.  These over-contributions were in some cases obfuscated by other filing failures and violations, Rizzo wrote. His complaint[...]

Posted 2 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 2 years ago

Nov 10

2021

Heaney discusses mayor’s race on ‘Pressroom

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Jim Heaney fielded questions from David Lombardo, host of The Capitol Pressroom, about the race between Byron Brown and India Walton. Heaney offered an assessment on the strengths and shortcomings of each candidate’s campaign. Give a listen.  

Posted 2 years ago

Nov 3

2021

Modest turnout for Buffalo’s mayoral election

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The contest between India Walton and Byron Brown looked like it could be close. It wasn’t.  Though it’ll be a while before the write-in votes for Brown are validated and absentee ballots are counted, the outcome is clear: Brown won a fifth term resoundingly, according to unofficial returns from the Erie County Board of Elections. The first hotly contested general election for Buffalo mayor in 16 years — a showdown between ideologies and personalities, drawing national attention and massive infusions of campaign money to both sides — was predicted to drive massive turnout in the city.  It didn’t. In all[...]

Posted 2 years ago
Investigative Post

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