Jun 5
2025
Where Ryan stands on the issues
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State Sen. Sean Ryan at a May 30 press conference in Lafayette Square.
This is the second of two stories on mayoral hopeful Sean Ryan. On Wednesday we published a political profile.
Sean Ryan doesn’t lack for ideas on how to fix what he sees as dysfunction in City Hall and the impact it has had on neighborhoods across Buffalo.
“We can’t do the basics. We’re not delivering basic services for our people. And that’s not even scratching the surface on our systemic problems,” he told Investigative Post.
“The neglect is becoming more and more apparent. Can’t plow our roads, can’t fix our potholes. Sidewalks all over the city that are decrepit. Can’t get our pools open. Can’t get our community centers functioning.”
These have been Ryan’s central themes since he launched his mayoral campaign in November:
- City leadership has “deteriorated to the point of being non-functioning.”
- As a result, city infrastructure is suffering from deferred maintenance, federal pandemic relief money was squandered, and city finances are in shambles.
- Cops, firefighters, snowplow drivers and sanitation workers — “who know how to get the job done,” Ryan said — don’t have the tools they need.
- City Hall does little or no comprehensive planning, which means development projects are driven by developers rather than the desires of the community, and small businesses on the city’s commercial strips don’t get the service they need.
“Buffalo deserves better,” he said — a phrase he uses in nearly all his campaign advertisements and appearances.
Buffalo suffers from some of the highest child poverty and lead poisoning rates in the nation. Ryan called the inequities between poor Black Buffalo and affluent and stable middle-class white neighborhoods “shocking.”
“If you live on the East Side of Buffalo, you will live a shorter life than somebody who was born on the other side of Main Street,” he said. “By every indicator — whether it’s wealth, educational attainment, home ownership — nothing’s gotten better in 20 years. How is that possible?”
The candidates and their issues
Investigative Post in January profiled acting Mayor Chris Scanlon, his plans to deal with the city’s fiscal issues, and the dilemma he faces working with the police and fire unions.
In the coming days we’ll profile the other candidates running in the June 24 Democratic primary, Rasheed Wyatt, Garnell Whitfield and Anthony Tyson Thompson.
Ryan is one of five candidates competing in the June 24 Democratic primary for the party’s ballot line in November. He has the party’s endorsement. He’s also been endorsed by the Working Families Party, 21 labor organizations, and a handful of other elected officials and political advocacy groups.
The other candidates are Scanlon, the acting mayor; University District Council Member Rasheed Wyatt; Garnell Whitfield, the former fire commissioner; and Anthony Tyson Thompson, a former aide to Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes.
His chief rival for the job is Scanlon, who has the city’s police and fire unions behind him. Scanlon has campaign money and endorsements from real-estate developers like the Paladino family and Nick Sinatra, and from businesses that contract with the city. Yards in South Buffalo and north of Hertel Avenue where lots of city workers live are festooned with his campaign signs. As acting mayor, he’s in the news every day.
In short, Scanlon has all the advantages of incumbent, even though he’s held the office for less than eight months. But incumbency has its drawbacks, too, in a city where so many problems have been allowed to fester and worsen.
“We’re at this point where we can turn the page, bring in brand new leadership and really change the trajectory of the city,” Ryan said. “Or we can continue the same-old, and we’ll have the exact same problems, the exact same budget gimmicks, the exact same Buffalo.”
Fixing city finances
In a city where you can pick your crisis — crumbling infrastructure, lead poisoning, lack of affordable housing, racial inequities — City Hall’s financial problems are the most pressing.
“They really dug themselves a very deep hole,” he said, referring to Brown and the Common Council on which Scanlon served for 12 years. “Buffalo’s not going to be able to solve this alone.”
Ryan called the spending plan created by Scanlon and approved last week by the Council “an election-year budget, designed to get them through June.”
He predicted the city would fall into deficit again, because there’s no room for error in expenses and revenues and no money allocated or in reserve to deal with additional costs that are likely to materialize: new contracts for police and fire, for example, or expensive settlements to lawsuits.
His answer:
First, he’d ask the state comptroller to audit the city’s finances to determine how deep it’s in the hole, not just for the coming year but for the next decade.
“No one on the outside is going to trust the city’s internal math, because it’s been shown to be wrong year after year,” he said.
State Sen. Sean Ryan at his November mayoral campaign kickoff.
Second, with that audit in hand, he’d consider two bridge financing plans to keep the city services flowing while slowly bringing the city’s fiscal house in order.
“The debt is too high to balance it quickly off of tax increases, because it would put too much of a burden on low-income homeowners,” he said.
The first bridge is a long-term deficit bond issued by the control board, which can borrow money at better interest rates than the city.
Ryan proposed that plan in April as an alternative to Scanlon’s short-term solution: selling four city parking ramps to a newly formed parking authority. Ryan thinks it’s foolish to sell future revenues — the ramps provide the city more than $4 million annually — in exchange for ready cash to balance the next few budgets.
Scanlon in turn scoffed at Ryan’s proposal, saying that it would add annual debt service costs to an already strained treasury. The control board has described both measures as forms of deficit borrowing.
The second bridge is long-term help from the state government.
That might come in the form of a financial aid package specifically meant to keep the city solvent — as happened two decades ago, when the state rode to the city’s rescue but also imposed the hard control board to oversee city spending. Or it might entail a state-funded infrastructure investment plan that would relieve pressure on the city’s checkbook while addressing years of deferred maintenance of public assets.
Ryan offered as an example the state’s award this year of nearly $400 million for infrastructure investments in downtown Albany. Ryan said it took Albany officials nearly three years to come up with a plan the state was willing to underwrite.
“Each year they came in, their plan got better,” Ryan said, and this year the work paid off. “But that’s because they had a plan that could be vetted and sounded out.”
Buffalo could get that kind of program, too, he said, if city officials would come up with a good plan and ask for the money.
Instead, he said, the Brown administration came to Albany year after year and asked for money to build a new public works campus to replace the Broadway barn.
“And each and every year, my fellow legislators would say to me, ‘Why does your city keep asking for the same funding for something that we don’t fund?’ ” Ryan said.
Scanlon, he said, is no different from Brown in that regard.
“The acting mayor came up this year, and guess what? He asked for money for a public works facility.”
Ryan says the greatest frustration he’s experienced in his 14 years as a state legislator has been dealing with the Buffalo’s leadership.
“They don’t have a working relationship with the state,” he said, referring to both the Scanlon and Brown administrations.
“Every year the city leaves grant opportunities on the table. And even when the state does fund the city for things — like crosswalks or parks — they never seem to get built.”
Connecting the expressways
Ryan secured $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.
As a state legislator, he has been largely quiet on the state’s controversial plan to tunnelize part of the Kensington Expressway, which connects to the Scajaquada but is not part of his district.
Ryan the mayoral candidate has some thoughts on the matter.
“It defies logic to say those are two different projects,” he said. “It’d be like building railroads from two different directions and missing each other.”
First, he said, it’s poor planning to have the Kensington feed highway-volume traffic into a newly configured Scajaquada parkway.
Second, he said, considering the projects separately reiterates the city’s hidebound segregation — east from west, white from Black, rich from poor.
“At the end of this project, if a kid cannot ride their bike on a parkway from MLK Park to Delaware Park, then we’ve failed,” he said.
Both projects are in limbo. The state Department of Transportation recently announced a hold on the Scajaquada reconfiguration. And last year a state judge ordered the DOT to stop preliminary work on the $1 billion Kensington tunnel and perform a full environmental review of the project, which the agency failed to do initially.
The East Side Parkways Coalition, which won the court order pausing the project, advocates complete removal of the expressway and a restoration of Humboldt Parkway. But the DOT’s tunnel has supporters, too, including Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes.
“There’s nothing close to a meeting of the minds on this,” Ryan said. “My job is to make it so the money is preserved — so when the process is done, and the community does coalesce, there’ll be money.”
Revising the city charter
Brown’s resignation in October revealed some fuzziness in the city charter involving mayoral succession. The charter says the Council president — Scanlon, in this case — assumes the duties but not the title of mayor. It doesn’t say whether he should continue to be paid the Council president’s salary or the mayor’s, which is significantly higher. (Scanlon is being paid the mayor’s salary.) It doesn’t say whether or how Scanlon’s South District seat should be represented during his tenure as acting mayor, which will last 14 months — until a duly elected mayor is sworn in next January.
That fuzziness prompted the Council to begin empaneling a charter review commission, the city’s first in a quarter century.
Ryan said the commission should consider reducing the powers vested in the mayor’s office and strengthening the Council.
One way to do that is to restore at-large members, including the Council president, who used to be chosen in citywide elections. The current system — in which nine district members choose one of their number to be president — leads lawmakers to “behave in a very parochial way,” he said, which diminishes their power and makes “cohesive, coherent planning” difficult.
He also floated the idea of a citywide elected public advocate or ombudsman, like New York City.
“This all goes to the effort of modernization,” he said. “We should get together a group of people who understand government and understand what modern charters look like.”
Housing plan
Before entering politics, Ryan was an attorney whose specialty was housing issues. He represented tenants. He worked with PUSH Buffalo — People United for Sustainable Housing — the West Side advocate for quality affordable housing.
“The only consistent housing strategy the City of Buffalo has had for a generation is demolitions,” he said, referring to the Brown administration’s plan to knock down 5,000 vacant houses in five years.
PUSH Buffalo won a moratorium on demolitions on the West Side, arguing derelict houses should be rehabbed and made habitable by neighborhood residents who would learn construction skills while they did the work.
“Unfortunately, on the East Side, the city just kept knocking down houses,” Ryan said. “Now we’re in this housing crunch because we went from having too many houses and not enough people, to not enough houses and too many people.”
That vacant lots weakened neighborhoods and the city’s tax base, he said.
“Every house that we demolished used to pay property taxes a year. Each time we tore our house down, we took money out of our kitty.”
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomRyan said city leaders never came to the state looking for money to fund a housing plan, so he created his own. The plan was adopted last year and funded again in the state budget in May. The $170 million program 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 provides subsidies for building 1- and 2-family houses on vacant lots. It also provides $20 million for rental assistance for families in danger of eviction.
Ryan said Buffalo’s peer city of Rochester has less of an abandonment and vacancy problem than Buffalo because the city “aggressively inspected buildings and held people accountable.” He said that’s why Rochester is far ahead of Buffalo in combating lead poisoning, too. Rochester has been successfully administering federal lead hazard reduction programs for more than 30 years, and pro-actively performs interior inspections of rental units for peeling paint and other code violations.
Buffalo, by contrast, is about to lose federal funding to fight lead poisoning for failure to get the money out the door.
“It’s a value statement. Do you want to stop having kids poisoned? Then you have to come up with resources, and you have to put a plan together to make it happen,” Ryan said.
“No kid should move into an apartment that hasn’t been inspected for lead hazards — period. That’s what Rochester did. That’s what New York City did. And both of those places have significantly reduced their lead poisoning rates.”
Planning for neighborhoods, not developers
Ryan said there are two types of economic development planning: one driven by developers and one driven by the community.
In a community-driven plan, city officials ask residents what they want a neighborhood to look like and offer, then invite developers to help make that happen.
In a developer-driven plan, city officials “sit passively and wait for a developer to come in to say, ‘Here’s this project. Help me fund it.’ ”
“That’s not a comprehensive development plan,” he said. “There’s been no strategy for downtown development for a generation, but there’s also been no strategy for commercial strip redevelopment, whether it’s Ontario Street, Jefferson, Grant, Bailey.”
Ryan said he’d create a program to deliver micro-grants to people starting small businesses and a sales-tax free zone downtown. He said he’d “make Main Street fun again” by bringing back concerts in Lafayette Square and the Gus Macker basketball tournament.
But first and foremost, he said, he’d commission an assessment of city infrastructure, as well as underutilized lots and buildings downtown and along commercial strips, and create a long-term plan to address both.
Last Friday, Ryan held a press conference in Lafayette Square to decry the sorry state of public infrastructure downtown and along commercial strips. He said Main Street between Canalside and the Theater District serves as “a poor introduction” to the city for visitors.
A mayor cannot influence the economic conditions that forestall investment and diminish the city’s tax base, he said.
“But we can build on what we have,” he said. “You just have to have a plan. And the discipline to stick to that plan.”
