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Housing Chief Takes Revenge on Mouthy
Do-gooder
 Local
officials just don’t seem to get the fact that they
are under increased scrutiny since the majority of local residents
have finally figured out that they’ve been getting royally
screwed for a long, long time. Old-style, heavy-handed political
retribution and maintenance of the status quo makes good copy
around here these days, but many of the more lunk-headed politicians
are still out of the loop on that.
Take
Raymond K. McGurn, Buffalo’s Commissioner of the Department
of Permit and Inspection Services. McGurn is the head housing
honcho in Buffalo, and has been determinedly dragging his
feet rather than doing much about a growing backlog, over
500 so far, of housing violations. He attributes this to the
fact that a clerical position in his office was vacant, but
housing activists had offered to help with the paperwork for
free.
One
of those housing activists is named Harvey Garrett. Garrett
also acts as a volunteer ‘community liaison’ for
housing court judge Henry Nowak. When Garrett finally got
fed up and complained in the Buffalo News about McGurn’s
inertia, he suddenly found himself—a day later—with
a city housing inspector at his door. Garrett was cited for
violations stemming from his efforts to restore his own house,
‘missing’ items which had been removed so that
they could be replaced, or the house could be worked on. The
case was sent to housing court immediately—‘fast-tracked’
ahead of all of those other 500-plus violations. Apparently,
McGurn quickly found a way around that clerical problem for
Garrett’s case.
McGurn
said the action was taken in response to a ‘complaint’
his office received immediately following Garrett’s
comments to the News. The department inspected Garrett's house
the very day it received this complaint—nothing fishy
there, right? But the best part about the complaint letter
is that it is an obvious fraud—unsigned, from “Washington
Clinton,” a nonexistent person whose address turns out
to be ECMC.
Ray
McGurn is not just an obvious asshole; he is a stupid, incompetent
asshole. How he thought he could pull something like this
off and not do tremendous damage to his own reputation only
shows how bad things have been for how long in this wretchedly
corrupt city. Why he has so much invested in impeding the
prosecution of local housing violations is anyone’s
guess, but if we were slimy, greedy out-of-town slumlords,
we imagine our first move would be to grease the head housing
inspector’s palms. We can only hope that, now that McGurn
has so publicly embarrassed himself, and angered a lot of
community-minded locals in the process, that his work, his
office, and his finances receive the intense scrutiny they
so richly deserve.
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