Sep 11
2025
Buffalo forfeits more than $1 million in federal lead funds
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Signage in a lead abatement training facility. Photo by I’Jaz Ja’ciel.
The City of Buffalo will return more than half of a $2 million federal grant it received in 2021 for lead hazard remediation.
Investigative Post in May reported that the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency had spent only about a quarter of its Lead Hazard Reduction Program grant funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
BURA officials told Investigative Post in a statement that “the program remains in progress” and that $796,050.71 in grant funds have been earmarked or spent on lead remediation. That’s $300,000 more than the city had spent four months ago, but it leaves $1.2 million the city must return to HUD.
“This is a major failure on behalf of the city,” said Sarah Wooton, director of community research at Partnership for the Public Good. “The city wasted this money, and it’s really concerning to think about how many children could otherwise have been kept healthy in these homes if they had been remediated.”
Partnership for the Public Good, along with community stakeholders and elected officials like state Senator April Baskin and Assemblymember Jon Rivera, in June criticized the city’s poor advertisement of the program to homeowners and its failure to spend the remaining grant money.
Rivera, who advocated for the advancement of state legislation that encourages accountability for both insurers and homeowners in cases of child lead poisoning, told Investigative Post that the $1.2 million loss shows a “level of incompetence” among city leaders in running the lead hazard reduction program.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroom“It’s the job of all of us that represent the city to try to bring resources to Buffalo, and to have the City of Buffalo do nothing with it and waste time and not accomplish what it’s meant to do is an embarrassment,” he said.
HUD last year granted a one-year extension for the remainder of the lead hazard reduction money to be spent. The city applied for another extension this year but was denied, BURA senior director Hope Young-Watkins previously told Investigative Post.
In addition to underspending, the agency also fell short on the number of homes that the funds were intended to remediate. BURA announced plans with the grant’s rollout to remove lead hazard from 110 residences. To date, work has been either completed or contracted in 34 units. Investigative Post asked BURA to confirm how many of those units were fully remediated, but the agency has not responded.
BURA officials previously attributed the program’s poor rollout to a lack of qualified contractors in the city and guidelines for the program that initially made many homeowners ineligible to apply for funding.
Council Member Mitch Nowakowski, whose Fillmore District has some of the highest rates of lead poisoning in the state, decried the city’s mismanagement of the program.
“The loss of federal lead remediation funding is devastating for Buffalo families. While grant guidelines are designed to safeguard taxpayer dollars, requirements like parents handing over their children’s health records make it nearly impossible to get money out the door,” Nowakowski said in a statement to Investigative Post.
Buffalo’s 14212 ZIP code — which encompasses neighborhoods in Nowakowski’s district — had the most confirmed cases of child lead poisoning in the state, according to the most recent publicly accessible data from the state Department of Health released in 2020. A quarter of all children tested in the neighborhood were found to have elevated blood lead levels.
Ayat Nieves, a member of Buffalo’s Lead Safe Task Force, said he contacted BURA about implementing a “lead blitz enhancement plan” in response to the unspent grant money. He said his recommendations fell on deaf ears.
“City Hall is where dreams go to die. If you take a good idea to City Hall, they will find every way to ignore it,” he said. They just can’t get out of their own way.”
City officials previously claimed that Erie County should assume responsibility for lead remediation because the county receives more federal funding. Rivera said that BURA’s handling of the grant speaks more to a lack of direction than a lack of money, considering Erie County receives lead remediation money from the same federal source but has been more effective at disbursing funds and remediating homes than the city.
“This is a prime example of the city receiving funds for a specific thing that everyone acknowledges is needed and requires attention and has cost, and they’re not able to manage it. So the next time the city cries wolf around ‘We don’t have enough money to do this or that,’ do we really know if that’s the case, or is it just more mismanagement?” Rivera said.
State officials have taken some steps to tackle Buffalo’s lead crisis.
State Attorney Letitia James Monday reached a $515,000 settlement agreement with a San Diego-based landlord who rented out properties where 14 children were believed to have been exposed to high levels of lead. This is the fourth lawsuit the attorney general has filed against landlord and property management groups for lead-related charges in Buffalo since 2021.
Gov. Kathy Hochul announced in 2023 an initiative to develop a statewide rental registry and proactive rental inspections program. That program will entail the state awarding $10 million to Erie County over a five-year period beginning this year.
