Scanlon supports Benderson’s move from Buffalo to Amherst

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Benderson Development wants to move its corporate headquarters — as well as those of Delta Sonic, its car wash company — to an office and warehouse complex the real-estate giant owns in Amherst.

And the company wants $1.4 million in property and sales tax breaks from the Amherst Industrial Development Agency to help underwrite the $26 million relocation.

Benderson’s local operations are currently housed at 570 Delaware Avenue in downtown Buffalo. Delta Sonic has corporate offices there, too, and in the City of Tonawanda.

Surprisingly, the mayors of both cities wrote letters to the Amherst IDA in support of the tax breaks.

Buffalo Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon in an April 16 letter wrote that he’d “recently met with principals” from the companies and understood the “the rationale for consolidating operations to a larger facility.”

“While I don’t often support any business moving their operations out of Buffalo, this move is important to the continued success of both applicants,” he wrote.

Tonawanda Mayor John White wrote a virtually identical letter dated April 24. He even italicized the word any, just as Scanlon did.

You can read the letters and Benderson’s application for the tax breaks here:

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It bears noting that the homegrown company’s real headquarters have been in Sarasota, Fla., for the past 20 years. We’re talking about its regional offices. Benderson’s plan to move those offices from Buffalo to Amherst have been percolating for more than a year, according to The Buffalo News.

This past December, Benderson’s CEO, Randy Benderson, gave Scanlon’s campaign $2,500, which landed him among the acting mayor’s top 100 donors, as of the most recent campaign finance disclosures filed in January.

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Scanlon met in February with Eric Recoon, the company’s vice president for development and leasing, according to the acting mayor’s daily calendar, which Investigative Post acquired last month via a Freedom of Information request.

Before joining Scanlon’s administration, Deputy Mayor Brian Gould was senior vice president of e3 communications, a public relations and lobbying firm. Gould has acknowledged that he still does work for some of his e3 clients — though none, he has said, have any business before the city.

Benderson was among Gould’s former clients at e3, according to Earl Wells, e3’s president. Wells told Investigative Post he and Gould worked with Benderson on the company’s unsuccessful effort to turn a former shooting club on Maple Road in Amherst into some sort of mixed-use retail center.

In an interview Friday, Gould said his work for Benderson involved “education and community engagement.” Basically, he was dispatched to persuade Amherst residents to support the company’s development, which had its critics. Benderson ultimately sold the property for a healthy profit to a developer of student housing, whose plans also went nowhere. The town bought the property last year with the intention of using it for athletic fields for youth sports.

Gould dismissed any suggestion that the administration’s approval of the move constituted a favor to a donor or former client.

“A project-based client 12 years ago is not an old friend,” he said. “There’s no orchestration. I almost forgot that we even worked for Benderson, to be honest.

As for Benderson’s donation, he said that Scanlon’s campaign committee has received “thousands” of contributions.

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The Scanlon administration was content to sign off on Benderson’s move to Amherst because the company promised to find new tenants for 570 Delaware and to expand its footprint in Buffalo, according to Gould. The company is close to acquiring additional property in the city, he said, and is in talks with prospective tenants.

The vacancy rate for high-quality office space in downtown Buffalo was 18.5 percent in February, according to real estate services and investment firm CBRE. That’s up from 16.7 percent the year before.

“We’re confident that they’re going to remain committed to the City of Buffalo with those properties and future properties, and that’s what made us comfortable,” Gould explained.

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