Oct 30
2025
Buffalo to raid “Rainy Day” fund
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The bad news keeps coming for the City of Buffalo’s finances.
Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams informed the Common Council this week that the city would need to dip into its Emergency Stabilization Fund — a.k.a. the Rainy Day Fund — in order to balance the books for the fiscal year that ended June 30.
According to the city’s finance commissioner, the shortfall is due to costly settlements to police misconduct lawsuits that hit the city in May.
Lawmakers were told the city will need to use at least $2 million from the fund and perhaps as much as $10 million, according to Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope. The figure won’t be finalized until an outside auditing firm completes and issues its annual reviews of city finances sometime in November, according to Deputy Comptroller Delano Dowell.
That uncertainty did not sit well with Halton-Pope and other Council members.
“I can’t understand why we would ever vote for something that we can’t share a number on, even if it’s an estimate,” she said during Tuesday’s Council meeting.
Fillmore District Council Member Mitch Nowakowski said approving the comptroller’s request without more information would be like “giving someone a blank check.”
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroom“We cannot vote for something if we don’t have a dollar figure attached to it,” he said. “It’s not only ambiguous, it’s sketchy.”
The Rainy Day Fund is mandated to maintain enough money to keep the city operating for 30 days — currently about $52 million — in the event of a disaster. It’s not meant for closing budget deficits.
However, the city has completely depleted the reserves available to plug budget holes. The last of that money was used to balance the city’s 2023-24 budget, Finance Commissioner Ray Nosworthy told the Council last December.
This week Nosworthy told Council members the shortfall in the 2024-25 budget was the result of costly legal settlements that landed in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year, as well as some revenue streams underperforming budget projections.
In May, a federal appeals court upheld a $6.5 million judgment against the city for the wrongful conviction of Josue Ortiz, a mentally ill man who spent 10 years in prison for two 2004 murders he didn’t commit. That same month, a federal court awarded $1.1 million to James Kistner, an East Side man who sued Buffalo police for misconduct. And Kistner’s lawyer, Anthony Rupp, won a $200,000 settlement for his own, separate run-in with city police.
The comptroller in June estimated those settlements and “lower-than-budgeted revenues” would result in a year-end deficit close to $7.4 million.
The 2024-25 budget was written by former Mayor Byron Brown’s administration and approved by the Common Council, then headed by Council President Chris Scanlon. Scanlon became acting mayor in October 2024, inheriting the management of Brown’s spending plan.
The city’s fund balance policy says the money “shall be used for extraordinary operating or capital needs that could not be anticipated and cannot be funded with current budget resources.”
Appropriate uses, according to the policy, include “weather emergencies, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, unanticipated mid-year reductions in state and or federal aid, or emergency repairs or demolitions of City facilities or infrastructure due to fire, flood, or other catastrophes.”
Inappropriate uses include “utilizing funds to balance the City budget, for recurring operating expenses, or for routine maintenance and repair.”
The Council sent the comptroller’s request to next Wednesday’s Finance Committee meeting for discussion.
Halton-Pope said she wants the Council to obtain a legal opinion on whether Rainy Day money can be used to close a budget gap before that meeting.
The fund balance policy also requires the mayor to provide the Council a plan for replenishing the city’s reserves when they fall below the minimum of 30 days’ operating expenses.
Nowakowski, along with President Pro Tempore Brian Bollman and the University District’s Rasheed Wyatt, noted at Tuesday’s meeting that the Council has yet to see such a plan.
