Oct 15
2025
James Gardner: A political profile
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James Gardner, the Republican and Conservative party candidate for Buffalo mayor, knows he’s fighting an uphill battle.
Nearly two-thirds of the city’s registered voters are Democrats. They outnumber Republicans and Conservatives by a 6-to-1 margin. Voters haven’t installed a Republican in the mayor’s office in over 60 years.
Still, Gardner believes the city’s many woes — dire finances, crumbling infrastructure, diminished services — present an opportunity for change.
“My message is a simple one,” Gardner told Investigative Post in an interview last month. “This is what 60 years of one-party rule will get you. You have to change the way you’re voting to expect any kind of change in how City Hall is going to govern itself.”
Gardner is in a three-way race in November’s general election. His opponents are state Sen. Sean Ryan, the Democratic nominee, and East Side businessman and activist Michael Gainer, who is running on the independent Restore Buffalo ballot line.
Ryan is the odds-on favorite, given voter demographics and habits. The state senator spent $1.4 million to win the June Democratic primary. As of last week, his campaign committee had another $60,000 on hand and more money coming in.
Gardner, 41, comes from a wealthy family. His great-great-grandfather, Edward H. Butler, founded The Buffalo News. He self-funded his first bid for elected office last year, spending $500,000 on his unsuccessful race for Erie County District Attorney. As of last week he’d spent more than $100,000 out of his own pocket on the mayor’s race.
James Gardner. Photo by Geoff Kelly.
Born in Florida “but essentially raised in Buffalo” since the age of two, Gardner studied political science and journalism at American University in Washington, D.C., then earned a law degree at the University of Florida.
He moved back to Buffalo in 2009 and took a job promoting charter schools. In 2011, he took a job as an assistant district attorney for Erie County, where he prosecuted everything from violent felonies to white-collar crime. He left that job in 2017 to become a law clerk for Erie County Court Judge Kenneth Case.
After losing the race for district attorney last year, he resigned his job as Case’s clerk. He said that was his choice, not the result of post-election pressure from the victor, Erie County District Attorney Michael Keane. Keane complained in a letter to Case that Gardner’s campaign had breached ethics rules binding judicial employees.
Gardner has since been working in private practice for the law firm headed by Ralph Lorigo, chair of Erie County Conservative Party.
His campaign advertising has leaned on a familiar Republican theme in local and state campaigns: He’s tried to tie Ryan to the state’s bail reform laws, suggesting those reforms have resulted in an increase in crime.
In candidate forums and his interview with Investigative Post, however, Gardner has focused more on matters over which the city’s mayor has some control — chief among them, the city’s upside-down finances.
Fixing the city’s finances
Gardner said he expects the city’s current fiscal year to end in June with a deficit of “at least $50 million,” based on his reading of budgeted vs actual expenditures over the previous three budget cycles.
He noted that the city’s property tax levy in the current year is about $180 million, and that well over a third of that — $70 million — goes to the school district. The rest is effectively eaten up by pension and health insurance obligations for current and retired employees.
His conclusion: Raising property taxes alone is not the answer.
“This is not a problem that you’re taxing your way out of,” he said. “Even if you raise the levy, you’re not raising it 40 percent. Everyone will leave. It’s self-defeating.”
He said this first step would be to trim city spending by $30 million, bringing it back to 2023 levels. He did not specify where those cuts would occur.
On the revenue side, he characterized Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon’s plan to sell city parking ramps to a newly created state authority as “a smoke-and-mirror endeavor.” The current budget, proposed by Scanlon and adopted by the Common Council, relies on $26 million this year from the sale of the ramps.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomIt would be smarter, Gardner said, to keep the ramps and use part of the annual revenue they generate to back a short-term deficit bond for another $30 million to make up the rest of the pending deficit.
“That, with the cuts, is the short-term problem solved,” he said. “The longer-term solution is to look at mismanagement of city resources.”
He offered as an example a plan to change the way garbage crews are deployed so trucks don’t sit idle after completing a route, but rather move onto streets that haven’t yet been serviced.
“What used to be a one-shift garbage collection endeavor has now stretched into two and three shifts,” he said, “and a lot of that is just a total lack of accountability.”
He also allows, like Ryan, that the city will need help, in the short and long term, from the state and federal governments. Also like Ryan, he thinks the pitch for more financial aid is doomed unless City Hall first demonstrates it’s serious about fiscal reform.
“You have to be able to show them that you’re willing to get your own fiscal house in order before you can credibly go to them and say, ‘We need more money.’”
New housing, new revenue
Gardenr said the thousands of city-owned lots, particularly on the East Side, are “probably the largest portfolio of vacant, developable land in Erie County for housing stock.” He believes the city should work with home-builders to develop those parcels into affordable housing and put the properties back on the tax rolls.
“Not just one house here, one house here,” he said. “I mean putting a whole neighborhood back together again.”
He said the city could take a secondary mortgage position on the new houses to mitigate the risk for banks and keep purchase prices in reach for low-income buyers.
“The most sustainable way for us to grow ourselves out of this problem, and at the same time get us out of this woeful statistic of being the third poorest city in America, is providing people with a single family home to call their own,” he said.
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Gardner said the economic development incentives the city controls — grants of city land, zoning variances, tax abatements — should be limited to residential projects. And not just for affordable housing — at least not downtown. He said downtown already has “a large portfolio of affordable housing” and lots of units “on the luxury end.”
“What we’re missing is the middle, and that middle is what drives the economic engine of downtown Buffalo,” he said.
Middle-class residential housing downtown would create a market for commercial development, which he said the city shouldn’t subsidize. He offered the Braymiller Market saga as evidence of that.
Other policy priorities, big and small
Asked his position on the now-stalled Kensington Expressway project, Gardner called coupling “a social justice reparation” with a transportation project “a clumsy fix.” He said $1.2 billion to cap a few city blocks of the roadway is too high, and the alternative goal of restoring Humboldt Parkway to its former glory is impractical.
“There’s this strain in Buffalo’s history where we’re trying to recreate what was lost. Sometimes you just have to acknowledge that isn’t what we need now,” he said. “We need something else. No one loves the Kensington, but it serves a purpose.”
Other policy priorities he would pursue include:
- Requiring police recruits to complete a number of college credit hours before they can enroll in the academy. “That has to be reinstated,” he said. “In my line of work I’ve seen the consequences of waiving those requirements.”
- Making nonprofits that own real estate contribute some sort of payment in lieu of taxes to the city treasury. “If you look at Delaware Avenue, pretty much from Utica on down is all nonprofits. That’s some of the most expensive real estate in the city of Buffalo.”
- Spending more money on road maintenance — “crack and seam filler” — in order to spend less on road replacement. “Because I’d love to be able to go to the federal government or the state government and say, ‘You know what, I need less road money from you. What I do need is help with our pensions.’ ”
- Ending the fire department’s practice of allowing division and battalion chiefs, who already have high salaries, from earning overtime. “If you’re a battalion chief or a division chief, you’re a very expensive employee. You’re driving the cost of overtime in that department.”
On running as a Republican
Gardner said he entered the mayor’s race with his “eyes wide open” to the Democratic advantage over Republicans in the city.
He said his party has “done a bad job, a lackluster job, of fielding candidates in the city of Buffalo.” He attributed that to “a cynical view of politics in Erie County,” whereby Republicans have sought to suppress the Democratic vote in the city in order to increase Republicans’ chance of winning countywide offices.
He thinks city Democrats and independents are ready to break their voting habits. He believes the city’s growing immigrant community are less bound by those habits and have been receptive to his message.
“They’ve never had an opportunity to vote for a Republican, because there hasn’t been a Republican who’s run,” he said. “They’re saying, ‘Our taxes are going up and what are we getting from it?’ And I said, ‘Are you sure you’re not registered Republicans?’”
He’s put $107,209 of his own money into his mayoral campaign so far, according to the latest filing. Buffalo Police Det. Adam Wigdorski ($1,521) and the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association ($1,000) gave big donations. Former Congressman Chris Jacobs pitched in $500. So did Kevin Helfer, once parking commissioner and top advisor to former Mayor Byron Brown, and himself a Republican candidate for mayor in 2005.
Gardner said the combination of 19 years under a single mayor, the city’s fiscal problems, stalled development downtown, and host of other ills present him the opportunity to campaign as “the change agent in this race.”
“It’s often when you’re confronted with these dire outlooks that change is forced upon you, whether you’re prepared for it or not,” he said. “Somebody has to be first.”
