Dec 16

2025

Q&A: Buffalo’s incoming Mayor Sean Ryan

Ryan, who takes office in January, outlined his vision for the city and spoke about municipal finances, police reform, urban expressways and affordable housing, among other issues.

By Geoff Kelly

Sean Ryan, Buffalo’s mayor-elect, said in an interview Friday evening that he’s inheriting a City Hall that’s been “hollowed out” by poor management, with a “demoralized” workforce.

Before a live audience at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Ryan described vacant offices, a lack of communication within and between departments, unspent state grant money, and deferred maintenance of city infrastructure.

And, naturally, the incoming mayor talked about the city’s dire financial straits: a structural budget imbalance of at least $50 million, no savings left to cover shortfalls, and escalating costs — especially overtime — exacerbated by stagnant revenues.

“We’ve sort of intentionally impoverished ourselves for over a decade. And now we’re just deep, deep, deep in debt,” Ryan said in the interview conducted by Investigative Post’s Jim Heaney and Geoff Kelly. “I’m coming in as the CEO of a $640 million company with 3,500 employees that hasn’t turned a profit in 12 years.”

In addition to city finances, Ryan addressed questions about police reform, transparency in government, remaking the Kensington and Scahaquada expressways, economic development, affordable housing, education and poverty, and investing in the East Side.

Here’s a full transcript of the interview. Following are key takeaways from the 85-minute exchange.

Balancing city finances

Ryan said he’ll consider moving ahead with the sale of four city-owned parking ramps, as proposed by Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon, in order to balance the current budget, which runs through June 30 and is already in the red.
“It’s not a good idea,” he said of selling the ramps, which he opposed during the mayoral campaign, arguing the ramps provided much-needed recurring revenue to the city. “But when you’re in these situations, you have to accept sometimes you have to do stuff that you shouldn’t do.”
He said he’d consider “long-term deficit financing” — i.e., borrowing — to make up the rest of the current budget year’s deficit, which he estimated at $18 million. He also said the city should use its borrowing power to invest in city infrastructure — e.g., roads, sidewalks, bridges, parks, street lighting and community centers — which have suffered from years of neglect.
He hoped Albany would provide the city “a soft landing” over the next three years while his administration tries to balance the city’s books. “Year one, we’re going to need a lot of help from the state. Year two, less help. Year three, if everything goes well, we should be balanced,” he said.
“But remember, balance just means … we’ll be able to continue to pay for the subpar services that we get,” he said. “Balance just means keeping it the way it is. So then we’ve got to grow out of that.”
That growth will include gradual increases in city taxes, which he said are currently far lower than those in surrounding communities.

Improving and restoring services

Ryan lamented the diminishment of the city’s community services division, which used to provide programming at community centers before it was gutted by the state-imposed financial control board.
“During the last control board, all the positions of city employees who who did stuff in community centers — they’re all eliminated. So now we contract with nonprofits to run our community centers.
“But we don’t provide them with guidance on what we want them to do. And there’s some nonprofits who just do a terrific job, and those centers are humming. Other ones are super quiet.”

He said his team met with the union that represents city snowplow drivers, who told him they were handcuffed by management and decrepit equipment. “They’ll tell you, ‘We know how to plow the streets, but no one listens to us.’ And on any given day during the winter, one-third of the equipment’s broken. We can’t plow the streets if the snow plows don’t work.”
Ryan said his team, in studying how City Hall works over the past six months, found employees who’d never spoken with their department’s commissioner — and commissioners who’d never spoken with the mayor.

On the Kensington and Scajaquada projects

Ryan said the city should take the lead role, in concert with the state Department of Transportation, in determining the fate of those urban highways. He pointed to transportation projects in Rochester, Syracuse and Albany where city planners didn’t let the DOT run rough-shod over local interests.
“Buffalo’s executives have been sort of like — it’s like hide-and-go-seek. Let’s hide in the corner, and the monster won’t get us,” he said. “We let the DOT come in from Albany and sort of do everything, and the city hides in the bushes to see what’s going to happen. We’re not going to hide in the bushes anymore.”

“The City of Buffalo is going to step into the primary role of planning these projects. After all, who knows better what a city needs? A DOT engineer from Albany, or the mayor of the city?”
Asked how he envisions the remaking of the Kensington and the Scajaquada expressways, Ryan said, “I think if, at the end of all this, that a kid can’t get on their bike at MLK Park and ride a parkway to Delaware Park, then it’s been a failure of a project. Not to say it’s going to be easy. That roadway carries a lot of people … It’s going to take some complex planning.”

Investing in the East Side

Ryan said government policies are at least in part responsible for the redlining, segregation and disinvestment that have plagued the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. “So if government could create that, we could do the inverse, and we can fix it,” he said.
He said in the past the city’s East Side housing policy consisted of “demolitions and bulldozers.” He outlined plans to use state resources to subsidize improvements to existing rentals and build new single-family homes in neighborhoods “where people live, where people have invested and stayed for generations, but they have two or three missing teeth on the streetscape.”
“You gotta concentrate on renovations, because it’s the quickest, it’s cheapest and it’s fastest,” he said. “You can get a unit back on track for $70,000 in three months. It’s gonna take you 18 months to build a house under the best conditions. If you can get a unit back online for $70,000, you should do that all day long rather than spend $350,000 to get a new one.”

He said the resources would be directed to between three and five areas comprising about 10 blocks each.”And we’re going to stay there until that 10 blocks is done, then we’re going to move to the next 10 blocks.”
He called the continuing epidemic of lead poisoning “a tragedy” that plagues East Side neighborhoods. “Landlords are allowed to rent houses that kill children in the City of Buffalo … Because of that, our kids have been lead poisoned for a generation,” he said. “It’ll be on me to figure out a system” to inspect rental units and help landlords remediate the chipped and peeling paint that accounted for most lead poisoning cases.
“We cannot have the success that we want as a city if we allow the East Side to keep living in those conditions,” he said. “If those conditions don’t change, we’re never going to get better as a city.”

Revitalizing downtown

Ryan, who has been a critic of tax breaks and other subsidies for developers, said the key to revitalizing downtown was making it a fun, desirable place to be.
He said Buffalo Place — “the group that’s supposed to be promoting downtown for their business improvement district” — has been “flat” for years. “We got rid of doing the big events, like Thursday in the Square,” he said. “It brought so many people downtown. It kept them downtown.”
“But I’ll always just go back to, what’s the infrastructure? What’s the conditions of the street on the block where Shea’s is? The central block of the Theater District, there’s seven streetlights that don’t work. So let’s start with that, right? There’s sidewalks cracked throughout that area. Lot of vacant storefronts. But there’s been no effort to talk to those owners to say, ‘All right, even if it’s vacant, let’s put a nice display in there. Let’s put lights on during the night time.’ ”

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Changing the police department’s culture

Asked about the cost of settlements to police misconduct lawsuits — at least $80 million over the past decade — Ryan prescribed better training, more transparency, and leadership hired from out of town to “shake up the culture” of the police department.
“The last time the Buffalo Police Department underwent any profound change, it was when Tony Masiello, in his first month in office, he brought in Gil Kerlikowske,” Ryan said, referring to the commissioner who served from 1994 to 1998.
“So right now we’re recruiting to bring someone into Buffalo. We need to shake up the culture. We need to shake up the attitude, and we have to implement training. Trained officers usually don’t commit” the misconduct that erodes public trust and ends in lawsuits.
“People want accountability. They want to know when they call the police department a highly trained officer is going to respond. And that no matter who they are, they’re going to be treated the same.”
He said under his administration, city police would not assist federal agents in detaining and deporting migrants. “We’re not going to be cooperating with Donald Trump,” he said. “Buffalo police do not do civil enforcement. We don’t respond to OSHA calls, we don’t help the IRS collect their liens. That’s all civil, not criminal, and immigration is — it’s civil.”

Improving city schools

The key to improving educational outcomes in city schools is not mayoral control of district governance, he said. It’s alleviating poverty.
“You’re not fixing urban education if you remain a super-segregated city where all the kids live in poverty. You know, teachers could all be Mother Teresa, you’re not going to get good results.”
“There’s not a city in America that has a poverty rate like Buffalo’s that gets any different educational outcomes,” he said. “We can fuss and, you know, change the colors of the curtains, but if we keep kids poor, keep kids lead-poisoned, nothing’s going to change.”

However, Ryan said mayors can and should “use their bully pulpit to make sure that what we’re teaching is aligned to the economy, to make sure there are vocational schools that are aligned with the economy.”
“What I’m really advocating for is to build a just economy. Intentionally build that just economy so parents don’t work 40 hours a week and are still eligible for food stamps — [which] means they’re not getting paid enough for their effort and their time.”

Read the full transcript of Investigative Post’s interview with Mayor-elect Sean Ryan.

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posted 2 months ago - December 16, 2025