BUFFALO, N.Y. -  Election season in the City of Buffalo has officially begun after a prominent Buffalo figure, who wants to be the city's next mayor, launched his campaign Sunday.

Introduced by his mother to a standing ovation, 65-year-old Democrat Bernie Tolbert said he's running for Buffalo Mayor and he's "in it to win it."

The man who once ran Buffalo's FBI Office said he intends to clean up the city schools.

"Forty-four of Buffalo's 57 public schools have been designated as failing," Tolbert said "As your mayor, I will work with all stakeholders to put an end to the shame of our public schools."

Interestingly, Tolbert held his campaign kickoff at the same downtown family center where incumbent Mayor Byron Brown launched his campaign in late March in front of a much bigger crowd.

You take flight. Only feathers, muscle, and air power your movement through the sky. The journey is long and dangerous but your survival, and the survival of your kind, depends on it.  Green, brown, and a vastness of blue give way to concrete human habitats absent of food, water, or shelter. After thousands of miles of evading predation, formidable weather and countless other hazards, you arrive. Your journey has ended this Spring only to begin again in the Fall. This is the way of your species. This is bird migration.

Buffalo, NY - A disabled Buffalo woman is angry and upset over the theft of her motorized wheelchair. That theft occurred sometime Wednesday night and now she's asking for help in finding the thief and the wheelchair.

Andrina Valentin says it happened while she was at her doctor's office. She had used a wheelchair van service to get there and left the heavy motorized wheelchair at her Riverside section home.
 
Valentin says a male intruder apparently took the wheelchair sometime before 8 o'clock Wednesday night from the hallway of her house in the 200 block of Ross Avenue which is right across from Riverside Park. 

She has owned the wheelchair for about a year. Her disability insurance paid for the device with a cost of at least four thousand dollars.