Jun 4
2025
Sean Ryan: a political profile
- Share on
State Sen. Sean Ryan at a May 30 press conference in Lafayette Square.
This is the first of two stories on mayoral hopeful Sean Ryan. On Thursday we published a story on where he stands on the issues.
State Sen. Sean Ryan has a long history of advancing progressive causes, both in his 14 years as a state legislator and in his prior career as an attorney. He’s championed urban highway removal, affordable housing, living wage ordinances, tax subsidy reforms and a host of other issues that reflect the priorities of the heavily Democratic districts he’s represented in Albany.
Now, Ryan is running for Buffalo mayor. He has the endorsement of the Erie County Democratic Committee. Yesterday Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz — longtime friend and political ally — endorsed him, too.
If Ryan prevails in five-way Democratic primary on June 24 — and then again in November’s general election, which will be equally crowded — he’ll be the fourth state senator in a row to be elected to the office.
He promises to be “the most pro-labor leader in the city’s history.”
Ryan comes by his allegiance to labor honestly. His father was a Buffalo firefighter. His mother was a public school teacher active in Democratic Party politics. He grew up in blue-collar Lackawanna, with the I-90 to the north of his childhood home and Truman Elementary to the south.
That’s a far cry from where he lives now, a block-and-a-half off of Chapin Parkway, in one of Buffalo’s most well-to-do neighborhoods.
In his 10 years in the Assembly and four years in the Senate, Ryan has been a reliable vote for both private and public employee unions. His wife, Cathy Creighton, with whom he has two grown daughters, for many years ran a law firm that specialized in labor law. One of her clients was Buffalo’s police union. She currently serves as director of the Buffalo campus of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Little wonder, then, that Ryan’s campaign for mayor has 21 endorsements from labor organizations. Some are local, like the powerful Buffalo Teachers Federation, and some are regional, like Communications Workers of America District 1, based in New York City.
Those unions aren’t just applauding Ryan’s campaign, they’re sending money — well over $100,000 since last July. Some are providing campaign volunteers, too.
Ryan’s chief rival in this month’s Democratic primary, incumbent Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon, has endorsements, money and foot soldiers from the city’s influential police and fire unions. A handful of labor organizations aren’t choosing sides — at least not in the Democratic primary.
Most, though, have lined up with the state senator.
Ryan, 60, graduated from Lackawanna High School in 1983. He earned a bachelor’s degree from SUNY Fredonia, then a law degree from Brooklyn Law School.
After passing the bar, he worked for Neighborhood Legal Services and the Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo, representing students with disabilities and victims of housing discrimination. In 2001 he was part of a legal team that sued the city for failure to enforce its living wage law. In 2008 he worked with People United for Sustainable Housing Buffalo — PUSH — to form the advocacy organization’s nonprofit development company, which he served as executive director.
Aaron Bartley, PUSH’s cofounder, said he worked with Ryan for about four years.
“When I think of Sean’s skillset, I think of the way he combines strategic vision and ‘big picture’ thinking with attention to the smallest details,” Bartley said.
As an example, Bartley noted that Ryan consulted with a local artist on color schemes for the derelict houses the organization rehabbed.
“The outcomes speak for themselves,” Bartley said. “Beautifully renovated buildings up and down Massachusetts Avenue that were formerly vacant and abandoned eyesores.”
Ryan eventually concluded he could do more good in the halls of government than in the nonprofit world.
He was a member of a West Side political club called the Good Neighbor Democrats, which supported former Assembly Member Sam Hoyt, Niagara District Council Member David Rivera, and others who were frequently at odds with former Mayor Byron Brown and his political machine. He did a stint as chief of staff for the Erie County Legislature in the era immediately following the county’s red-green budget crisis.
“It was a bear,” Ryan said of the county’s financial problems back then, “but we got the county back on sound financial footing, and they’ve been on sound financial footing since then.”
When Hoyt resigned in 2011, after 19 years in the job, Ryan won the seat via a special election. The following year he won a three-way Democratic primary against fellow attorney Kevin Gaughan and then-BMHA Commissioner Joe Mascia, then cruised to victory in the general election. He faced little opposition in the heavily Democratic district in his next three bids for re-election.
In 2020, he was elected to represent the 60th State Senate District, succeeding Republican Chris Jacobs, who vacated the seat to become a member of Congress. After redistricting in 2022, Ryan switched to representing the 61st State Senate District, which covers Buffalo’s West Side — including the Elmwood Village, where he lives — as well as Black Rock, Riverside, Parkside, and North Buffalo. The district also encompasses Grand Island and stretches eastward through the Tonawandas and Amherst. He beat incumbent Republican Ed Rath. Last November he beat Republican Christine Czarnik to win a third term.
By most accounts his peers in Albany respect him. Several — including Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Sen. James Skoufis of Queens — have donated to his campaign.
John Kaehny of Reinvent Albany, a watchdog organization that’s unabashedly critical of state officials, said he rated Ryan “a top-tier legislator in terms of effectiveness and engagement and policy knowledge.”
“He’s one of the more dynamic, energetic legislators, impassioned about issues,” Kaehny said. “There’s maybe a quarter of the legislature that is truly motivated and working for not only their own priorities but for the public good. I would put Sean Ryan in that category.”
Poloncarz, in his endorsement Tuesday, praised Ryan’s “knowledge of budgets, ability to work with others to achieve compromise, and no-nonsense approach to government.”
Ryan has been tight with local Democratic leadership, including Poloncarz, for his entire career in elected office. That gave him a leg up over the other nine Democrats who vied for the party’s endorsement over the winter months.
When the party in February announced it was going with Ryan in the primary, Scanlon called Ryan the party’s “handpicked” and “predetermined” candidate. The Ryan campaign and party leadership insisted he worked harder than Scanlon and the others for the support of the party committee members who voted on the endorsement.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomRyan considers his first major accomplishment as a legislator his 2012 fight against the NFTA’s plan to save money by cutting bus routes. The NFTA relented, though it has reduced service in the years since.
He also pushed reforms to the way the state’s industrial development agencies award subsidies to businesses and real estate developers. He won limits to the subsidy packages the region’s competing IDAs use to lure retail projects from one municipality to another, as well as provisions for clawing back public money when grant recipients fail to deliver the projects and jobs they promise.
Ryan also won reforms to the much-abused 485-a subsidy program, which provides tax exemptions for conversion of non-residential buildings to a mix of residential and commercial uses. The program was made notorious by Benderson Development’s inclusion of one small rental apartment in the law firm Phillips Lytle’s Canalside office building in order to qualify for the subsidy.
At the center of a list of legislative accomplishments provided by Ryan’s campaign is nearly $20 million he’s brought back from Albany for projects, ranging from $100,000 for the Hispanic Veterans Memorial at Naval Park in 2012 to $1 million for improvements to the Buffalo Irish Center announced this past March, in the midst of the city’s St. Patrick’s Day celebrations.
That’s sound political timing, though unlikely to crack Scanlon’s rock-solid support in his native South Buffalo. Ryan also recently announced he’d secured $800,000 for a new splash pad at Riverside Park, situated in a part of town whose voters could swing the election one way or another.
Here’s the list the Ryan campaign provided:
Ryan also brought home $1.6 million for cleanups and restoration of Scajaquada Creek. And he’s been a champion of the long-running effort to reconfigure the Scajaquada Expressway, which bisects Delaware Park and make it an at-grade, two-lane parkway. In 2022 he secured $100 million for the undertaking, though the state Department of Transportation recently announced the project was on hold.
Ryan’s biggest trophy in the past year is a $170 million plan to address the shortage of affordable housing in Buffalo, as well as in Rochester, Syracuse, Albany and Binghamton. Called The City of Good Neighborhoods, the plan provides small, local landlords with grants of $50,000 to $75,000 to bring vacant rental units up to code, in exchange for keeping rents affordable for 10 years. It also provides subsidies for the construction of 1- and 2-family houses on vacant lots. The houses will be sold to eligible buyers with a mortgage based on their income, with the balance of the construction cost subsidized by the state.
The program also provides rental assistance for families in danger of eviction. The initiative was funded as a pilot project last year, despite Buffalo lawmakers’ refusal to endorse it. (The opposition was led by Scanlon, then Council president.) Ryan’s program was funded again this year in the state budget.
“The only consistent housing strategy the City of Buffalo had for a generation was demolitions,” Ryan said, noting that he helped PUSH Buffalo win a moratorium on demolitions on the city’s West Side, which he said helped keep those neighborhoods stable.
“Unfortunately, on the East Side, the city just kept knocking down houses. Now we’re in this housing crunch because we went from having too many houses for not enough people to not enough houses for too many people.”
Thursday: Ryan’s plans for housing, city finances, and other city issues.
