Recall that when HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan visited Buffalo in October, accompanied by Representative Brian Higgins and Senator Chuck Schumer, Mayor Byron Brown could not be bothered to join the trio on a tour of the city’s abandoned and distressed homes. (“It was just a busy day,” Brown’s spokesman, Peter Cutler, told the Buffalo News.)

Well, today the snub is returned in kind: Representative Louise Slaughter will hold a press conference this afternoon with Ron Sims, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to discuss the City of Buffalo’s “systemic problem of misused HUD funding.” The mayor, though his administration will certainly be the subject of conversation, is not invited.

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.

Here’s the HUD report on Buffalo’s CDBG program I wrote about in this week’s Artvoice. I think that I forgot to mention a key feature of the report: For each of the 19 deficiencies HUD identified in the city’s administration of its community development block grant, it has either 30 or 60 days to respond to HUD and address the problems.

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.