There hasn’t been a whole lot of good news this year, with the economy sinking and the job market shrinking.

Despite the gloom hovering over the Buffalo Niagara region all year, some businesses and executives still managed to emerge as winners, even in a difficult year when most of us felt like losers.

The winners

John Koelmel—The recession, the financial crisis and the stock market’s troubles didn’t get this banker down.

Koelmel, the chief executive of First Niagara Financial Group, was a whirling dervish in 2009, guiding the bank as it raised nearly $1 billion through three stock offerings over the last 14 months. That gave First Niagara the money it needed to buy a network of branches in the Pittsburgh area and a troubled bank in suburban Philadelphia.

All that catapulted what once was a sleepy Niagara County thrift into one of the nation’s 50 biggest banking companies. It’s even moving its headquarters to Buffalo from Pendleton, while pledging to add 300 jobs locally.

That’s quite an act to follow.

National Fuel Gas Co.—The Amherst-based energy company’s executives think they’re sitting on a gold mine in northwestern Pennsylvania.

Not really a gold mine, but natural gas. Lots and lots and lots of it, locked in a geological formation known as the Marcellus Shale. But it wasn’t until recently that new drilling techniques allowed that gas to be tapped.

National Fuel initially took a cautious approach to the potential of the 720,000 acres it controls in the region, but after hitting pay dirt with its first few wells, National Fuel is moving ahead full bore, speeding up its drilling plans in the region by 50 percent for next year.

Homeowners—Not a lot changed for local homeowners this year—and that’s a very good thing.

Home sales locally held up nicely this year, despite the recession and the credit crunch. Home prices keep rising slowly, up about 2 percent over the year.

It’s pretty much the same slow and steady story it’s been for the last decade. Only this time, the rest of the U. S. housing market has changed. No longer are we stuck in the mud while home values soar elsewhere. Those high-fliers now are crashing hard, leaving a nasty wave of foreclosures and financial ruin in their wake.

Meanwhile, our market keeps chugging along, rating as the hottest in the Northeast during the third quarter, with the eighth-biggest jump in home prices among 153 major U. S. metro areas.

The losers

Statler Towers—The fate of downtown’s grand old hotel and office building is as murky as ever.

We were heartened when local buyers, New Buffalo Statler Redevelopment, stepped up to rescue the Statler from bankruptcy, only to see them immediately run into their own financial woes that delayed and delayed their purchase. If the prospective buyers are so strapped they can’t come up with $800,000 to seal the deal, it’s not likely they can raise $100 million to redevelop the Statler.

Greatbatch Inc.—Lawsuits can be really give you an expensive jolt. The Clarence medical device and battery maker learned that firsthand when a competitor won a$34.5 million verdict —more than its profits in 2008 and 2007 combined—in a lawsuit alleging that Greatbatch used product designs from Ion Geophysical Corp.’s batteries to develop its own competing product.

Workers—If they weren’t losing their jobs—and nearly 14,000 in the region did over the last year—there’s a good chance they were forced to swallow a pay cut, a wage freeze, a furlough or a shortened work week.

While there are signs that the wave of job cuts may be easing, it will take years before the job market is back to where it was before the recession.