Oct 14
2025
Michael Gainer: A political profile
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Michael Gainer moved to Buffalo 20 years ago, just as Byron Brown was campaigning for his first term as mayor — the office Gainer is seeking as an independent candidate in next month’s election.
An educator with construction experience, Gainer had picked up a job doing renovations on a house on Chapin Parkway. One day as he was working, listening to public radio, he heard Brown describe his plan to demolish 10,000 derelict houses over the next decade.
Gainer quickly did some math on a napkin.
“It was like half a billion dollars,” he said. “We were going to spend half a billion dollars in the next 10 years to crunch stuff up and throw it in a hole.”
Seeing an opportunity, Gainer started Buffalo ReUse, a nonprofit business that salvaged and resold materials from buildings slated for demolition. Within a year of opening, Buffalo ReUse’s East Side retail store was averaging $10,000 a week in sales, Gainer told Investigative Post in an interview last month, while keeping tons of waste out of area landfills and teaching young people construction trades.
Buffalo ReUse and Gainer went through growing pains — at one point his board of directors fired him, rehired him, then fired him again — leading Gainer in 2011 to launch Buffalo ReUse Action, a for-profit business doing the same work as the nonprofit he founded.
The for-profit company has thrived. Three years ago Buffalo ReUse Action took over operations for Buffalo ReUse.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomBrown, meanwhile, won that fall’s election and four more after that, serving 19 years in office before resigning last fall to become president and CEO of the Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp.
Now Gainer, 52, is competing in the first open election for mayor since he arrived in this city. On November 5, he’ll vie against state Sen. Sean Ryan, the Democratic Party nominee, and James Gardner, a former prosecutor and judicial law clerk running on the Republican and Conservative Party lines.
It’s a quixotic effort with a small team of volunteers and little money. Voter demographics favor Ryan. Nearly two-thirds of city voters are registered Democrats, 22 percent are independents, and a little over 10 percent are Republicans or Conservatives.
Read our political profile of Buffalo mayoral candidate Sean Ryan here.
Gainer’s pitch to voters, in a nutshell, is that as a contractor and business owner, he’s had more first-hand experience with City Hall’s dysfunction than most. He believes the best bet to turn the city around — to fix its finances, improve its housing stock, address lead poisoning, beautify neighborhoods, provide education and career opportunities to its youth — is to elect a political outsider like himself.
The city’s challenges “are beyond the work of one person or one party or one administration,” he said.
“If it’s just about patronage — giving jobs to the people that you like, or the people that helped you get in office, or the party figures that allowed you to have this illustrious 20-year political career — then you’re not thinking about the big picture.”
City Action Corps
Gainer grew up on a farm near Erie, Pa. He graduated from Penn State University, then worked as an educator for almost a decade.
“Mostly in alternative settings, with kids that had been kicked out or dropped out of school,” he said.
Working for the “expedition-based” Shackleton School in Massachusetts, he took his students around the country in a school bus, visiting the Navajo and Hopi in Arizona and factory workers on the U.S.-Mexican border. His students built kayaks and took them down the Hudson River, he said.
“All along the students were learning history and writing and all of that, but also strengthening their own self-concept and their own perspective and vision for their own lives,” he said.
He also traveled and worked with Patch Adams, the physician and social activist, before moving to Buffalo.
Michael Gainer. Photo by Geoff Kelly.
Education is a major plank in Gainer’s platform. He proposes creating City Action Corps, a year-long program that would provide on-the-job training and mentoring “for kids that are out of school or underemployed, to meet them where they’re at in their lives.”
Participants would do a variety of work to improve quality of life around the city, from cleanups to recreational programs. Some would also be trained in construction trades, in concert with union apprenticeship programs and the Northland Workforce Training Center.
That labor force, he said, would help lower the cost of addressing two major challenges facing the city: the shortage of quality, affordable housing and the plague of lead poisoning.
He said one reason the city was compelled last month to return more than $1 million in lead remediation money to the federal government was that the city doesn’t have enough contractors trained, certified, and willing to do the work.
The program’s trainees would also learn the skills needed to renovate existing housing stock in poor neighborhoods, which Gainer believes is the cheapest and most environmentally sustainable way to address the city’s shortage of healthy, affordable housing.
“We have to look at rehabilitation of the existing housing stock first,” he said. “I’m not opposed to new-builds. But we still have to invest in homegrown contractor development.”
Fixing city finances
Gainer, like his opponents Ryan and Gardner, casts blame for the city’s long-simmering financial crisis on the Brown administration’s failure to generate new revenue — including through incremental property tax increases — as the cost of providing basic services steadily rose.
“The second biggest thing is just discipline,” he said. “Like, I’m sorry. I’ve run small businesses, and I’ve created budgets and I’ve managed budgets, and you don’t set a budget for $20 million and then spend $40 million in one year. That’s not acceptable.”
Last year the city spent $43.6 million on overtime. The Brown administration and the Common Council budgeted only half that amount.
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Reining in overtime requires concessions from the city’s police and fire unions, since those departments generate the bulk of overtime costs. Gainer said he’d bring experienced labor negotiators and make use of the city’s state-imposed financial control board to do that.
He did not offer specific ideas on raising new revenues, apart from raising property taxes and more vigorous pursuit of grants from the state and federal governments for capital improvements in residential neighborhoods and commercial strips. The other two candidates support those measures, too.
Removing the Kensington and other policy priorities
Gainer’s current foray into elective politics was spurred in part by his involvement with the East Side Parkways Coalition, the group formed two years ago to promote the removal of the Kensington Expressway and the restoration of Humboldt Parkway.
The group’s activism and lawsuits led the state Department of Transportation last month to scrap its proposal to build a cap over a small section of the highway and “formulate a new plan.”
Ridding the city of the highway, Gainer and East Side Parkways contend, will spare surrounding neighborhoods the air pollution that has poisoned residents for decades and revitalize East Side commercial strips.
That’s a big state project in which the mayor can only be an advocate. But Gainer’s platform is full of initiatives within City Hall’s purview.
- Plow city sidewalks. The city owns thousands of vacant lots, he said, and should take responsibility for clearing the sidewalks in front of them. “Yes, it’s an expense, but you know what also is an expense — $43 million lawsuits when a young kid that’s walking in the street to get to the school bus stop gets hit by an emergency vehicle or a snowplow.”
- Enforce quality-of-life statutes. When there’s illegal dumping, he said, the city might send a payload to pick up the garbage, but there are no consequences for the perpetrators. Instead of enforcing speed limits in residential neighborhoods, the city installs speed bumps. Scofflaws “just race between bumps,” he said.
- Make City Hall more user-friendly. “I’ve been a contractor in the city for 20 years. I know the things that don’t work because they frustrate me on a daily basis,” he said.
- Reserve economic development incentives — tax breaks, zoning changes, city land — for “homegrown developers, homegrown entrepreneurs, homegrown not-for-profits,” rather than “waiting for our knight in shining armor to land in Buffalo.”
Running as an outsider
Gainer hoped to compete in June’s Democratic primary, but didn’t qualify for the ballot due to a technical deficiency in his nominating petition. So he and Betty Jean Grant — a former Erie County legislator running this fall to return to that position — created the Restore Buffalo ballot line.
Ryan, the Democratic primary winner, has been a state legislator for 15 years. He’s favored to win given his name recognition, the campaign resources at his disposal, and voter demographics. To win the Democratic primary, Ryan spent $1.4 million.
Gardner, running on the Republican and Conservative lines, is independently wealthy. His largely self-funded campaign has spent about $115,000 over the past three months.
Gainer’s campaign is self-funded, too, just on a much smaller scale. He has spent about $7,000 so far, nearly half of it out of his own pocket.
“The biggest obstacle is making sure that our message is heard by as many people as possible,” he said.
To do that, he’s turned to “the thing that I hate the most, which is social media.”
Gainer’s Facebook and Instagram pages are populated with videos of the candidate campaigning door-to-door and at community gatherings, discussing his policy proposals, and critiquing the city’s political establishment. Ryan, he said, represents “the same old same old.”
He considers running a shoe-string campaign good practice for tackling the woes of a cash-strapped city.
“When I’m mayor, I will use every tool at my disposal to make sure that this city gets what it deserves. We’re going to do it by screaming from the mountaintops, by bringing people together, by fundraising, by sharing people’s visions, by getting people excited.”
