Dec 2
2025
Buffalo’s indifferent response to opioid overdoses
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Editor’s note: This is the first of two stories on the use of opioid settlement funds by government agencies. Part 2 is here.
The City of Buffalo has spent less than a third of the almost $6 million in state funding it has received over the past three years to fight the opioid epidemic.
During that time, more than 500 people died of overdoses within Buffalo city limits, according to data from the Erie County medical examiner. The victims have been disproportionately Black and Latino.
Of the $1.75 million the city has spent, about $500,000 went for equipment and activities that, at best, indirectly benefit efforts to address overdoses. Those expenses include police and fire vehicles, sponsorship of an event, and lawnmowers for block clubs.
Another $500,000 went to a nonprofit that has yet to launch its promised program.
Some in the treatment field criticized the city’s use of settlement funds.
“That just screams of misappropriation to me,” Chris Harzynski, who founded his own addiction outreach program in 2023, told Investigative Post. “I don’t think this is what this was designed for.”
Rashone Scott-Williams founded an addiction outreach program called Western New York Mobile Ops in 2018. From her Jeep Renegade, she distributes the overdose-reversal drug naloxone to locations around the city — including delis, liquor stores and auto shops — especially near her home in Riverside. She said supplies are usually gone within two or three days.
She told Investigative Post that community organizations like hers could have put the money to good use if they’d known the opportunity existed.
“My SUV is going to break down,” Scott-Williams said. “We have received zero dollars.”
Harzynski founded his nonprofit Creative Restorations in June 2023, the worst year of overdose deaths, after he lost two friends in 24 hours. Harzynski started doing outreach five days a week in the city’s “hardest-hit neighborhoods,” including the Broadway-Fillmore area.
Now, for lack of money, that outreach is limited to one day a week. Harzynski says the lack of funding “makes it harder for small agencies to make their mission a reality.”
He and Scott-Williams said they didn’t know the city controlled millions in opioid-fighting money, or that it had issued a request for proposals for programs in early 2024.
“The city did not promote that at all,” Scott-Williams said.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomGeraldine Ford, director of the city’s Division of Urban Affairs, has overseen the funding since 2023. She said her office isn’t equipped to handle a public-health crisis. Unlike Erie County, the city has no social services or health departments.
“We are the City of Buffalo. We clean streets. We pick up trash,” Ford said.
“Now that we know more, could we have spent it better? Maybe. But again, we collect trash.”
Money first went to fire and police
Overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 44, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control. The likelihood of an American dying of overdose is higher than dying in a car accident or by suicide. Since 2000, more than 1 million people in the U.S. have fatally overdosed from a variety of drugs, with opioids — a category that includes heroin and fentanyl — the cause of most of those deaths.
To date, the attorney general has won $3 billion through litigation against drug manufacturers and distributors for their role in the epidemic. Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family are among the most well-known targets of the lawsuits, accused of overmarketing Oxycontin, leading to an uptick in opioid addiction nationwide.
New York created its opioid settlement fund in 2021. The money will be disbursed over the next two decades. To help to determine how, the state in 2022 created an advisory board — a body of experts appointed by government officials that makes recommendations to the governor and legislature in an annual report.
To date, more than $454 million has been distributed through the state Office of Addiction Services and Supports, according to a spokesperson for the agency.
Tracie Gardner, one of the advisory board members, told Investigative Post that across the state, funding “is not going to where the harm is happening.”
Rashone Scott-Williams delivers the overdose-reversal drug naloxone to a deli on Niagara Street in Riverside. Photo by Adam Smith-Perez.
Buffalo has received $5.9 million from the Office of Addiction Services and Supports since 2023. The city has spent $1.75 million of that money.
Under then-Mayor Byron Brown, the city awarded grants to two addiction service providers: Cazenovia Recovery and Save the Michaels of the World, two larger agencies.
Cazenovia Recovery ultimately rejected awarded funding from the city in order to reapply for a larger grant the following year, a spokesperson told Investigative Post. The spokesperson said they’re still waiting to hear if the application has been approved.
Save the Michaels — flagged two years in a row by auditors for noncompliance with nonprofit law — has yet to develop the program it originally planned to open by winter 2023, according to its grant application. The $500,000 grant was supposed to pay for five workers and renovate an East Side building donated to the organization in 2022. Contractors working on the project told Investigative Post that the work has been delayed because of funding issues.
Ford said the city might have awarded funding to smaller organizations if they had applied. Because there were so few applications, she said, the city instead chose to award much of the money to the police and fire departments.
However, records indicate that city officials decided to spend opioid money on the fire and police departments in July 2023, six months before the city’s RFP went out to providers in January 2024.
In a letter written on July 25, 2023, Ford and then-Finance Commissioner Delano Dowell asked that opioid settlement money be directed to police and fire purchases in fiscal years 2024 and 2025.
“The Buffalo Police Department and Fire Department will be using these funds to supplement and expand programs battling opioid use,” Dowell and Ford wrote.
Half a year later, community groups were asked to apply for the money. By the time the city put out a request for proposals, the fire department had already spent more than $430,000 in opioid settlement money on vehicles.
The police department spent $243,817 of opioid money on mental health related expenses, most of that on a contract with Endeavor Health Services for trained providers to accompany officers on overdose calls. The department in June 2024 also entered a $38,000 contract with Lexipol — a Texas-based company — for a mobile wellness app for officers.
The app, accessible by phone, allows officers and “others in high-stress occupations” to connect with peers in distress, hire therapists, download on-demand content, and participate in an eight-week virtual “weight loss challenge.”
Records also show the police department used the money to buy a $39,345 2025 Ford Explorer in September of this year.
When Investigative Post asked Ford and Delano, now the city’s deputy comptroller, how the vehicle purchase related to opioid abatement, neither had an answer or any documents.
“I don’t have anything attached for the purpose of the purchase,” Dowell said.
In an April 2024 press conference, the fire department said they would use funds to purchase a “needle disposal truck” and fund a behavioral health program for firefighters, among other expenses.
The fire department also spent $9,897 on two ID-card printing machines, $9,747 on an air filtration system, and $56,660 on a washing machine for contaminated firefighting gear.
William Renaldo, the fire commissioner, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Tim Richards, spokesperson for the police department, nor Mike Read, spokesperson for Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon.
Lawnmowers and crime prevention
The Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency has spent $240,000 in opioid settlement funds. That includes $129,000 directed to block clubs and more than $73,000 to nonprofit organizations, including Hamlin Park Community and Taxpayers Association, the Fruit Belt Coalition and ELCON Neighborhood Association.
The agency also used settlement funds to cover catering and other expenses for a “Unity Summit Blueprint” held in May at the Northland Workforce Training Center on the city’s East Side.
Ford said that the summit featured overdose-reversal training and speakers who discussed “Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design” — a theory of mitigating crime through street-level improvements.
To that end, Scanlon spent $11,111 in opioid money at Lowes to buy lawnmowers for block clubs. The lawnmowers were meant to keep neighborhoods “deterred from the petty crime of opioid addiction,” Ford said.
BURA officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Ford said the city followed state agency recommendations and hosted the summit with the aim of getting community feedback. She and her colleagues attended regional meetings to better understand how other cities use the dollars.
“Obviously you learn things in retrospect. But what makes me sad is we did what they asked us to do,” she said.
Blacks and Latinos most victimized
Gardner, a member of the state’s settlement advisory board since 2024, is co-director of the National Black Harm Reduction Network. She says more needs to be done to provide programs in hardest-hit communities, collect and use data to inform decision making, and improve transparency in how money is being spent.
Gardner also believes the funds need to address the disproportionate number of overdose deaths among Blacks in New York.
“The reality is that this is impacting women. It’s a high driver of Black maternal death. It’s a high driver of older Black New Yorkers who are dying of overdoses,” she said.
Overdose deaths, largely opioid-related, in Erie County have steadily declined in recent years: 436 in 2023, 358 in 2024 and 216 as of Nov. 7 of this year. More than half of those deaths occurred in the city.
Research by Investigative Post found at least 560 overdose deaths in the city over the past three years. To put that in context, 101 homicides were committed during the same period.
In 2023, county health department officials said that deaths were largely concentrated on the East Side and to a “lesser degree” sections of the West Side.
The Broadway-Fillmore and Kensington-Bailey neighborhoods remain flagged by county health leaders as areas of “high concern” for overdose deaths according to the health department’s most-recent report.
Black and Hispanic overdose deaths have declined dramatically in the last year, but remain significantly higher than fatalities among whites, according to county data.
As of this month, Hispanics are dying at the highest rates of opioid overdose in Erie County, according to the county health department.
Scott-Williams of Western New York Mobile Ops and Harzynski of Creative Restorations told Investigative Post that they would have put the city’s opioid money to its intended use: increasing access to treatment, prevention and recovery services.
Scott-Williams said she’d have used that money to hire more staff and purchase a new vehicle.
More importantly, she said, the money could have helped families and communities suffering the ravages of the opioid epidemic.
“The funding never went to the parents. It never went to the people who died. It didn’t help pay for funeral costs,” Scott-Williams said.
“And that’s a disservice to the people’s lives that were lost. It’s a disservice to their memory.”
Adam Smith-Perez, who covers urban affairs for Investigative Post, is a Report For America corps member.
Tomorrow: How other governments, both locally and elsewhere, are spending their settlement money.
