It’s Day 4 since I filed a FOIL request for all records related to budget and expenditures for the Mayor’s Impact Team. The request, filed the afternoon before Channel 7 caught team leader Bill Buyers and two of his team members working on Buyers’ property on city time with city equipment, has been acknowledged but not yet fulfilled.

But at yesterday’s Common Council meeting, the City Comptroller’s office announced that it would audit the Mayor’s Impact Team. My favorite part of the Buffalo News report on the audit:

Peter K. Cutler, Mayor Byron W. Brown’s communications chief, said the administration is aware of a controversy when Buyers worked under a previous administration. He said that there were reports that some city workers might have performed personal tasks for Buyers but that there is no documentation that disciplinary action was taken.

“There is nothing in his personnel file . . . about any suspension or termination,” Cutler said.

I love that Cutler never seems to have any clear memory of the Masiello administration. He talks about it like it’s some foreign country he’s not really convinced exists, rather than an administration in which he served.

In response to all this, a defender of Buyers has posted identical comments both here and at BuffaloPundit. So I’ll share the rumor that drove me to ask a week and a half ago if the City Comptroller had ever audited the Mayor’s Impact Team, and subsequently to FOIL for the team’s financial records: I heard that the Mayor’s Impact Team has used public money to purchase goods for private use.

I don’t know if Buyers is a good guy or not, or how much good work he’s done. I know he’s been in government a long time. If he’s cheating the taxpayer, being a good guy is no defense. And if an audit shows that the Mayor’s Impact Team does this sort of thing regularly and suggests that higher-ups in the administration have turned a blind eye to the practice, then those higher-ups have no defense either.

Want to read the report that the Buffalo News has been writing about for the last four days, without ever quoting from it directly?

Here it is.

Here’s what we know about the origin of the report, which was written by Bill Kresse (pictured left), the well-respected principal of City Honors, the jewel in the Buffalo Public School District’s increasingly tarnished crown:

• Last fall, Kresse felt pressured by senior administrators Will Keresztes, Joseph Melvin, and Folasade Oladele to revert to the school’s former method for calculating GPAs. (Kresse and a task force of secondary school principals had arrived at a district-wide standard for GPA calculations in January 2007.) Keresztes’s daughter benefited from the reversion to the old formula.
• In December, Kresse felt pressured to re-admit the daughter of then deputy county executive (and current AV columnist) Bruce Fisher by Melvin, Oladele, and school board member Chris Jacobs, despite his and his staff’s judgment that Fisher’s daughter would be better served at another school.
• Kresse hastily wrote a report about these incidents in December at the behest of of Melvin and Superintendent James Williams.
• The report lay fallow until two weeks ago, when rumors of its contents began to fly and news outlets—including this one—began hunting it down.
• On Sunday the Buffalo News published a front-page story about the report and its allegations, thus identifying the two children involved—much to the consternation of Fisher and Keresztes, who both deny exercising undue influence in the affairs the report documents. (Fisher’s denial is plausible, though it’s possible influence was exerted on his behalf without his knowing about it; Keresztes’s denial seems a little thin.)
• For his part, Kresse stands by his report, though he has indicated that he never expected it to become public.

We’ll examine what the report indicates about the administration of Buffalo Public Schools generally over the coming weeks.

File this under sour grapes. Read no further if petty squabbling among inkstained wretches makes you tired.

I don’t grouse too much about the Buffalo News, at least not for publication. But this nags at me: When stories in the News use reporting that originated in Artvoice, they never credit us for our work.

Take this example: Here are two articles by Peter Simon of the News on the great expanding McKinley High School scandal: one from Tuesday, April 1, and another from Wednesday, March 12. Both refer to a letter from an anonymous retired teacher, alleging gross misconduct at McKinley, which Buffalo school board member Ralph Hernandez received and forwarded to his fellow board members and to the New York State Department of Education.

Artvoice obtained and published that letter first, right here, on Friday, March 7. (There’s also a link to it in the post below.) We know for a fact that we were the only news outlet that had the letter at that point, and we’re confident that Peter Simon first saw the letter on our Web site. How do we know? Because we sent him a link as soon as we published it. We sent the link to TV and radio stations, and to a bunch of Buffalo News reporters, two of whom (Mark Sommer and Donn Esmonde) wrote back to thank us for sharing. Simon did not, but I’m willing to bet he took a look at what we posted. Maybe he called Hernandez himself to get the letter later on, but he learned about it first from us.

I don’t expect a citation from Donn Esmonde in his column—he’s writing a commentary that draws on reporting by lots of folks. He doesn’t need to credit them all. But Simon, or his editors, should have credited Artvoice for obtaining and publishing the document first.

It’s not the first time the Buffalo News has used Artvoice’s original reporting without attribution. We were the first to write about SEC filings by the Seneca Gaming Corporation that revealed the company’s plan to market its slot machines exclusively to the local market. The News followed, but never credited us for having found and published the information first.

There are lots of examples over the years. What’s galling about it is that we cite the good work that Buffalo News reporters do all the time. We give credit where it’s due. I wish they—whether they are the reporters or the editors who decide what makes it to the page—would be big enough to do the same.

Last Sunday, I traveled to Paris, France. On Monday, thinking I should check on things back home I perused a few local Buffalo Web sites, including Buffalonews.com, where an article about the Buffalo theater community caught my attention. It was from Sunday, March 16, written by Colin Dabkowski, and titled “How much is too much?”

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