Four items of interest:

—Byron Brown wins the endorsement of Goin’ South, the South Buffalo political organization stacked with city employees. No surprise there; there was no chance that Ray McGurn and Goin’ South would buck the mayor and his allies Brian Higgins, Mark Schroeder, and Tim Kennedy. Still, it’s a show of force for Brown.

—Mickey Kearns wins the endorsement of the Police Benevolent Association. No surprise there, either: What was Bob Meegan to do, spin around and embrace a mayor who keeps dragging the PBA to court and losing? (It’d be informative to get a breakdown of the City of Buffalo’s legal expenses fighting the PBA over the past three years, including time spent by the Corporation Counsel.) The PBA is Kearns’s first union endorsement, but how much good will it do him? There are 700-odd cops in the BPD, plus support staff, but lot of cops live and vote in the suburbs. Nonetheless, Kearns needed an endoresement like this and now he has it.

—Jim Heaney reported in Sunday’s Buffalo News that the FBI, US Attorney, Erie County DA, and New York State Police are all in some manner or another investigating Buffalo’s City Hall. Some are looking at Brian Davis’s finances, some at BERC and One Sunset, some at the city’s use of HUD money. Heaney did well to confirm these investigations are occurring; it’s hard to get beyond a no comment on these matters. His article also offers a review of the cavalcade of scandals rolling out of City Hall over the past few months.

—Most interesting to me, however, is this story by Susan Schulman, about a Cleveland developer whose East Side housing project was nixed after the Jeremiah Project, a group run by the influential Reverend Richard Stenhouse, failed to win a contract to oversee minority hiring on the project. (For the sake of argument, I’m leaving alone the merits of NRP’s project. In any case, Stenhouse’s objections seem thin, since the Jeremiah Project has been lead agency in similar low/mod rental housing development themselves.) Schulman is admirably careful about what she implies in her story, but it reads to me like a classic Buffalo shakedown: Stenhouse, in a position to stall a project, seeks a part of it. When he doesn’t get the contract, he helps to kill the project.

Why is this much more to me interesting than Heaney’s article? Because, whereas a local developer might take this setback stoically in hopes of working another day, a developer from Cleveland may not fear the consequences of speaking out. This is the sort of thing that raises eyebrows at the FBI.

Got this press release today from the Common Council, concerning a resolution demanding more transparency from the city’s semi-autonomous agencies and boards:

Council Members Kearns and LoCurto and their co-sponsors, Council Members Rivera, Fontana, and Franczyk, are introducing two resolutions for consideration by the Full Common Council, that would increase the transparency of operations of all City Boards, Agencies and Authorities codified in the City of Buffalo Charter and Code as well as any Not-for-Profit organization receiving city taxpayer dollars.

These resolutions would impose new requirements on entities, many of which yield considerable power and have been criticized and referred to as “shadow governments”, to provide city officials and taxpayers with the opportunity to gain greater insight into their operations.

In the first resolution, the governing bodies all City Boards, Agencies and Authorities, are being called upon to hold their meetings in Council Chambers and utilize existing recording equipment and allow for meetings playback on the City’s CATV government channel, for viewing by individuals who are unable to attend such meetings.  This would also enable meetings to be held in a geographically centralized, uniform location that is well serviced by public transportation and which nearly all Buffalonian’s are familiar with.

The second Resolution directs the Acting Corporation Counsel to prepare a Local Law requiring that all Not-for-Profit organizations that contract with the City and receive taxpayer dollars to file on an on-going basis with the City Clerk, their meeting schedules, by-laws/rules of operation, the composition and membership of their governing boards, approved minutes of meetings, and any report, study, review and audit, financial or otherwise, prepared by, performed on or for, the respective organization.

Good idea.

This morning I was sifting through the BERC, BURA, and BNRC financial documents released by the Brown administration to the Common Council last week under threat of Council subpoena, as I expect to be doing for several days, when it occurred to me: I ought to post them online, so that anyone else who wants to pore over hundreds of pages of loan information and salaries and audits can do so at their leisure. Maybe offer me some pointers.

All of these documents were requested at the beginning of February by Council as part of a review of the Brown administration’s community development block grant plan for 2009. The Council was stonewalled by the Brown administration, until two weeks ago, when the Council voted 8-1 to threaten to subpoena the requested documents if the administration would not fork them over. (That resoultion brought ecumenism to a contentious Council. Only Ellicott District Councilmember Brian Davis voted against it.) The Brown administration relented, and the Council received the documents last Wednesday.

Artvoice got them on Monday. Here they are:

Who at BERC and BURA gets cell phones.

BERC loans that have been written off since 2000.

Property BERC owns.

BERC salaries, 2006-2009.

A 2007 audit of BERC.

BNRC financial statements for 2006 and 2007.

Some info on BNRC loans.

Land owned by BURA.

BURA loan information.

More BURA loan information.

BURA salaries.

I hope to have made something of these reports in a few days. If anyone out there wants to help, I’m all ears.

This week I wrote about Delaware District Councilmember Mike LoCurto’s fruitless efforts to obtain financial information from three of the city’s alphabet soup agencies:  BERC, BURA, and BNRC. For more than a month, he’s been seeking the following information:

■ a list of all outstanding loans, including borrower names, dates, and amounts loaned, amounts owed, and whether loans are current or in arrears;

■ a list of all loans that have been written off, as well as a list of collateral used to secure the loan and its disposition;

■ a list of all properties the agencies own;

■ a list by name of all the agencies’ officers, directors, and employees, along with their job titles and salaries for the last three years;

■ a list by name of all those possessing cell phones, Blackberries, beepers, etc., paid for by the agencies, along with providers and cost for the past year;

■ a copy of any audits or reviews of the three agencies, whether by private firms or government agencies.

He’s received nothing, and now the Council is threatening to subpoena the information.

In the article I forgot to mention this great irony: LoCurto is on the board of BURA.

BURA won’t provide basic information to its own board members?

Ellicott District Councilmember Brian Davis is back in City Hall today, after a two-week medical leave that he happened to take just as charges surfaced that he bounced a check for more than $3,500 and skipped out on a private loan of $5,000 more. Brian Meyer of the Buffalo News writes:

When pressed by a reporter today to discuss the controversy, Davis would only say he expects the issue to be “resolved” by the end of the week.

“It’s in the hands of my attorney right now,” he said.

Davis also declined to discuss reports published in ArtVoice that other unidentified store owners on the Lower West Side and East Side have had problems with some of the lawmakers’ checks. Davis would only say the allegations were spread by a “political opponent.”

You can read the story Meyer refers to here. Basically, a bunch of Lower West Side deli owners grudgingly admitted to me that they’d had problems with Davis cashing checks in their stores, and that they were afraid to talk about it because Davis had the power to have their operating licenses pulled.

Brian Davis

I first heard stories about Davis passing bad checks several months ago, from someone who has alternately been an ally of and had run-ins with Davis. It’s true that this particular story, about the deli owners, was brought to me by Bryon McIntyre, who challenged Davis in the 2007 Democratic primary for the Ellicott seat. (I indicated as much in my article.) But I checked the allegations by visiting the delis where McIntyre had heard complaints, plus several more.

So in the end, the allegations come from the deli owners themselves, not from Davis’s political rivals. Last week, neither Davis nor his attorney would respond to these allegations. This doesn’t seem much of a response, either. The deli owners have no political relationship with Davis, for or against, as far as I can tell.

I called Davis’s attorney today to ask him again about these allegations, plus a few more. He hasn’t called back yet. When he does, I plan to ask him a few questions about the accepted narrative of this scandal: What compelled Davis to step in and write a rent check for the failing restaurant One Sunset, when he could not afford to do so? I have a copy of the ethics disclosure form Davis filed with Buffalo’s City Clerk for 2008, and he indicates no business association with One Sunset—no business associations at all, in fact. If Davis was not a partner in the restaurant, why would he make trouble for a failing business and himself by writing that check to Kevin Brinkworth, One Sunset’s landlord?

The other question is how One Sunset managed to fail so quickly and completely, despite $80,000 in loans from BERC (now in default), another $50,000 in loans from ECIDA (possibly in default, too, though I have not been able to confirm this), a $20,000 community development block grant to overhaul the facade, and a lot of good press (including a positive review from this newspaper, for what that’s worth). We’ll continue looking into the story of One Sunset’s failure, its defaulted loans, and Davis’s apparent interest in keeping the place afloat.

Last week I learned that BERC’s John Riccione had been quietly fired.

This morning a source told me that BERC’s Lorrie Abounader, who oversaw the Empire Zone program in Buffalo, has been put on administrative leave.

Abounader apparently is being disciplined for poor performance—specifically for being unresponsive to businesses that called her office.

Riccione’s firing, I’m told, was also “performance-related.”

A poster over at SpeakupWNY says that John Riccione, a finance officer at BERC, has been quietly fired. Peter Cutler, the mayor’s communications director, confirmed that Riccione had been let go and told me it happened about two weeks ago. Because it’s a personnel matter, he won’t say why.

The other day I was speaking to Steve Banko, the head of the regional field office for HUD, which sends money to BERC. Banko has had a team of HUD monitors working full-time in City Hall for the past few months, trying to get a handle on the city’s incredibly poor/corrupt management of the HUD money that flows through its hands to various human service organizations, housing agencies, and economic development projects. (This story by Peter Koch is just the tip of the iceberg.)

The problem predates both the Brown and Masiello administrations, so Banko doesn’t fully trust local HUD monitors to recognize or report problems here when they see them: We’ve been screwing things up in Buffalo for so long, how’s a hometown guy to know right from wrong? (As a contrast, Banko pointed to Rochester, which he says does things aboveboard and makes great use of HUD funds.) And that’s leaving aside political motivations for letting poor accounting slide.

So Banko brought in two HUD employees from DC who he thought might cast an impartial eye on City Hall’s use of federal funds. Banko says the out-of-town guys were floored, especially when they looked at BERC. “They said, ‘Holy shit. What do these people do?’” Banko told me.

Banko said his monitors were told BERC spent $900,000 last year on salaries. That’s BERC’s estimation, not the result of digging through the numbers to find out who else is being paid through its accounts—or whose cell phone bill is paid with BERC funds, or whose car mileage allowance, etc. (This 2006-2007 BERC budget report, which I’m still parsing, suggests it’s typically more than that.)

“They said to me, ‘You were in City Hall, what do these guys do?’ And I said, ‘I was in City Hall, and I haven’t got a clue what they do.’”

He recalled that when the Breckenridge Brew Pub packed up and left town in the middle of the night, defaulting on BERC loans and stealing city-owned equipment, Banko asked then BERC chief Alan DeLisle to give him the contract with Breckenridge so that they might pursue criminal charges against the company. DeLisle refused, arguing that it would be bad for economic development if city government tried to punish an out-of-town company for screwing the city. Eventually, Banko say, he got the contract, only to learn that no charges could be pursued anyway: Under the terms of the contract, BERC had been charged with monitoring Breckenridge’s performance, and they hadn’t bothered to do so.

Technically, only 20 percent of a program’s funding can be used for administrative costs. That $900,000 in salaries can also be chalked up to “program delivery,” but Banko says you’d have to deliver an awful lot of program for that kind of money.

Banko’s in-house monitors are wrapping up the first of a multi-part study of City Hall’s practices regarding the use of HUD money. Hopefully we’ll relate the results of that report soon.