Dec 16
2025
Transcript: Buffalo Mayor-elect Sean Ryan interview
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Buffalo Mayor-elect Sean Ryan sat for an interview on Dec. 12 with Investigative Post’s Jim Heaney and Geoff Kelly before a live audience at the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
In the course of the 85-minute interview, Ryan responded to questions about a host of issues:
- Balancing the city’s finances in the short and long term.
- Shaking up the culture of the city’s police department.
- Investing in quality, affordable housing, especially in East Side neighborhoods.
- Revitalizing downtown through event programming and infrastructure improvements.
- Improving educational outcomes by lifting kids out of poverty.
- Taking a lead role in the Kensington and Scajaquada expressway projects.
- Charter revision.
- Transparency in city government.
The following is a transcript of the interview, edited in parts for clarity. The full video is above. You can read takeaways from the interview here.
Jim Heaney: Sean, you’ve kind of been mayor-elect since the primary in June, and I know you’ve done some homework — you and some of your senior people — trying to get a sense of what you’re inheriting in terms of the operations of the city.
So putting the finances aside. I mean, the city is a lot of departments, a lot of services. What have you learned about how functional city government is? What exactly are you stepping into?
Sean Ryan: So after the primary, we started meeting — took 10 days off and started meeting — and we put together what we called strike teams. We took every department in City Hall, assigned a few people to it, and we tried to talk to anyone in the building who would talk to us. Several people with civil service protection did. Talked to retired people, people who do business with the department.
We went through department by department. Not much good news. We kept thinking, “Well, that’ll be the worst evaluation. Let’s do the next one.” And the next one came back pretty bad.
I think what we’re finding is a really hollowed-out City Hall. During the last control board period, which I think ended in 2012, during that time, there was an eight-year hiring freeze. They lopped hundreds and hundreds of positions.
The building’s pretty hollowed out. You know, a lot of road money not spent. Part of the reason was that people who wrote RFPs retired, and they never back-filled positions of the people who wrote the applications so contractors could bid on the work.
A lot of sort of faux departments or faux offices. We discovered the Office of New Americans has no employees. The Office of Diversity has one employee, but there’s no real office there. That person would do several things that someone had to do — but no real strategy of what does it mean to have an Office of Diversity and a chief diversity officer.
We also found that there was a workforce that’s slightly demoralized but also just unhappy with the management they’ve been receiving.
Middle managers report that they discipline people only to be called by the top managers and chastised for disciplining that person because that person was friends with somebody, or cousins to somebody.
Not a lot of real through line of consistent policies in the city, regardless of what department that you’re in.
But the good news is, you know, there are a lot of people who go to work in City Hall every day to try to make it better. They seem to be hungering for an actual vision that we all share, a reason to get out of bed at six in the morning and plow the streets. So I think people will come around to the message that we’re all in it together. We’re here to make the city better. You know, here’s our value statement. Here’s how you fit into making the city better. So that’s what we intend to do after taking office.
Some workers said they’ve never talked to the commissioner of their office. Some commissioners have reported that they never spoke to the mayor.
We’re going to put together a real management structure, but really leading with letting people know they’re appreciated, and let’s go out and do some work.
Geoff Kelly: Wait, rewind — some commissioners had never spoken to the mayor?
[Ryan nods.]
Kelly: Would you care to name those commissioners?
[Ryan shakes his head no.]
Heaney: All right, so … what are the two or three biggest operational problems that you need to tackle? I mean, what’s the worst of the worst operational deficiencies that need to be addressed.
Ryan: So from an operational having to do with finances, the police and the fire department consistently just blow their overtime budgeted numbers by millions and millions of dollars — like, not even close.
So we’re trying to figure out, is that because the overtime projections were wrong, or is there no control on overtimes?
Today we announced a fire commissioner. The fire commissioner understands the financial aspect of this job. He understands the structure of the department. So we’re hoping with that new commissioner — we made it clear that this will be part of his job. It’s not just making sure firefighters are safe and the houses aren’t burning down, but you have to operate under a budget.
And then, you know, the other sort of dispiriting thing we found is, you know, we have a community services division. We announced a commissioner for that.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomThe city provides community services through their community centers, but that all changed during the last control board. During the last control board, all the positions of city employees who did stuff in community centers — they were 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.
They all have leases. Several of the leases have expired, never been renewed. So because of what you call an evergreen contract, if you think your contract is never going to expire, then often your attention to the details starts going down. We’ve got to get the community services department back on its feet.
Then of course there’s the Department of Public Works. We met with the union that represents the snowplow drivers. 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 snowplows don’t work.
So a lot of work to do in all of the departments. But it presents a very good opportunity to really retool how we deliver services in the City of Buffalo.
Kelly: Well, you can’t buy new snowplows until you find some money, right? Last year’s budget ended in a nearly $15 million deficit. But it’s really like a $55 million deficit, because we used $40 million in federal COVID relief money, which is gone now. So if the difference between what it costs to run the city and the revenue you bring in is about $55 million, you’ve got to find some money, right?
Ryan: I was going to make a plea here after Jim.
[Laughter.]
Heaney: You’re not a 501 (c-3), pal, forget it.
Kelly: It’s a not-for-profit, that’s for sure.
How do you generate new recurring revenue? There’s long-term problems and short-term problems. How do you do it?
Ryan: So, you know, let’s — you have to go backwards to understand how we got into these two different financial problems.
One is, for some reason about 15 years ago, the city went on a debt diet. They stopped borrowing. Buffalo can bond up to $1 billion dollars based on state law. And we have always bonded — in the last 15 years — bonded less than $100 million. So we’re at 10 percent of our bonding limit.
Anyone here ever have a mortgage? Did you pay it all at once, or did you take out a long-term loan to spread it over?
So of course, you take out a loan for things like snowplows, roads, bridges, roofs on community centers. That’s all capital [improvement], and you should take money out to pay that over a long term. But Buffalo essentially stopped borrowing when interest rates were 2 percent.
If you need a brand new roof and you say, “You know what, I’m going to put some tar on that. I’m going to give it a few years.” Deferring capital [improvements] doesn’t save you a dime — you’ve got to pay sooner or later. We have this problem with all this deferred maintenance on buildings. We have the money, we have the ability to borrow for that, but you can’t get it on the street fast enough. You can’t go fix every road in the City of Buffalo in one season. So we’re way behind on that.
I give the acting mayor props that he did start borrowing a lot more money. Not what we needed — we’re still not close to what we need. But at least he got that going, so we’re going to be able to start making investments in the city.
That’s financial problem number one — pretending that by not fixing something you’re saving money is financial problem number one.
Financial problem number two is for about an 11-year period, the revenues coming into the city decreased every year.
Revenues not coming in, they compound. So if one budget year you’re $10 million behind, you add a few more to it — it’s not just the $2 million for that year. It’s the $10 million plus the $2 million.
If you look at revenues coming into all the upstate cities, the graph sort of goes like that, slow and incremental [indicates gradually rising line] — 2 percent tax increase, 3 percent tax increase. For 11 years. Buffalo’s [graph] was a sagging belly of revenue.
All that revenue we lost is the $54 million that we’ve been carrying year in and year out. We got away with it because the control board left the City of Buffalo, when they went soft, a massive reserve fund. So every year they chipped into the savings account to pay current expenses.
Then the savings account ran out, and we were about to go bust, and then COVID happened, and the federal government came in with hundreds of millions of dollars.
Other cities took that money and redid their police and fire contracts to get something — to get rid of some of the super expensive provisions. Removed lead pipes from houses.
We took the bulk of that money and just paid our debt. And the last of that went away this current budget year.
So we’ll be going into [the 2026-2027 budget year] with approximately $54 million in debt, with zero money in the unassigned reserve fund. Zero money in the reserve account. There’s nothing to steal, there’s no money under the cushions to get out of this budget. They left me with this [option to] sell the parking ramps, or have $24 million more in deficit. So we’re trying to wrestle with that.
So come January 1, I’m inheriting a budget that’s already about $18 million out of whack, and it’s only January. So by the time May comes around, it’ll be clear how much we’re out. If we sell the parking ramps, if we’re actually able to do that — it’s not a good idea, but when you’re in these situations, you have to accept sometimes you have to do stuff that you shouldn’t do.
But even with that sale, we’re going to need $18 million to close out this year, and we don’t have it. So maybe we’ll look at long-term deficit financing. Can’t raise taxes mid-year either. So this doesn’t go away.
The budget I have to put in April will start with the assumption that we’re $54 million in the hole. So that means revenues. “Revenues” is a euphemism for another three-letter word that begins with a T and ends with an X. But we’ve been living in this unreality in Buffalo for the last decade or so, essentially saying we can get government for free.
If I lived in West Seneca, my property tax, what I paid per year, would be double Buffalo’s. Commercial buildings in Buffalo — think HSBC tower — their commercial tax rate is less than the West Seneca residential tax rate.
So we’ve sort of intentionally impoverished ourselves for over a decade. And now we’re just deep, deep, deep in debt. 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.
We’re gonna have to look at taxes. We have to look at other revenue streams. We only collect 7 percent of the fines and fees that are issued by the city. We stopped collecting those debts since COVID. There’s $25 million arrears and water bills. We make no collection efforts on those.
We haven’t done a tax foreclosure auction in five years.bNobody wants to do tax foreclosure, but a lot of people who own property for business reasons, they don’t pay their taxes until they get a foreclosure notice. So by just putting the notices out, you’re going to get millions in.
So we’re going to try to do all those things as quick as possible. But even with that, we’re going to have a $15 million to $25 million deficit that we can’t get out of.
I’ve already been to the state — talked to the Assembly finance people, the Senate finance people, the governor’s budget director — to say we are going to need a soft landing. That it’ll take us three years to get out of this. 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.
But remember, balance just means we’ll have a balanced budget, and we’ll be able to continue to pay for the subpar services that we get. Balance just means keeping it the way it is. We’ve got to grow out of that.
Kelly: Were the legislators you talked to, and the governor’s office, were they receptive to that? Is that something you think will happen?
Ryan: I don’t have a crystal ball, but nobody thought the numbers that we presented were bad. People understand Buffalo’s situation. They understand it’s self-imposed.
They also understand that Rochester kept their taxes up. Syracuse kept their taxes up. And they’re not in this problem. So they’re going to get pushback from other cities, saying, “Why are we going to dump a bushel basket of money into Buffalo when they didn’t take care of themselves?”
It’s a legitimate pushback. But you know, the pushback to that is: Can’t let Buffalo fail. Can’t let the people fail. So bad leadership made bad decisions. We have new leadership. We’re going to make good decisions. We’re going to need some help.
Heaney: Is it possible at all to reduce expenses? And I’m thinking, first and foremost, police and fire overtime.
Ryan: We’re going to drive down the overtime, but it’s not going to get us $54 million. We’ll make cuts, we’ll seek efficiencies.
But when the city was in this jam, when they went to the control period, they were at 100 percent of their taxing level. They couldn’t tax anymore. They were at 100 percent of their borrowing/bonding level. At that time, the city property values were free-falling downward. People were leaving the city like mad.
The city had a lot of programs back then. The city provided drug counseling programs, youth employment programs. City Hall had a lot more people. When that control board came in, they just hacked all that away. It hasn’t really grown. Our head count in the last six years has gone up and down by 200 people, right? So not a lot.
Kelly: One thing that has been a drain on the city budget has been settlements for police misconduct lawsuits. I did a rough count this afternoon … it’s been about $80 million over the last decade. Half of that came in one big settlement, one big case. But there’s no saying that that won’t happen again, and there are certainly some big cases pending that are going to cost the city money.
I wonder what you are prepared to do to reclaim managerial rights in the police department for the mayor’s office and for the commissioner. The charter says that the commissioner has the power to discipline officers. The previous mayor, Byron Brown, and his commissioner both testified under oath that they didn’t agree that they had that power, that they had essentially bargained it away.
But state law says you can’t. State law says you can’t bargain away something that’s in the charter, and I wonder if you are prepared to test that.
Ryan: Hired a new corporation counsel today.
Kelly: I heard. Are you telling me to ask her?
[Laughter.]
Ryan: You know, let’s start with the claims that had to be paid.
I can’t remember the language of the appellate court, but it was the strongest language ever used against negligence from a police officer. I think in that matter, a police officer is driving on the sidewalk, high rate of speed, ran somebody over, and caused them to be paralyzed.
Kelly: That’s the $43 million settlement, which we had to borrow to pay off. So it actually is more like a $50 million settlement.
Ryan: I’ve hired an outside firm who’s doing a search. We’re going to bring in, or we’re attempting to bring in, a police commissioner from out of town.
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. He went all over America. He was police chief and commissioner in very big departments. He worked under the Obama administration. I’ve been in contact with him.
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 those types of mistakes.
When you get to the managerial rights, you know, this is what happens over years in contracts. If you don’t have enough money to give the workforce a raise, you’ll give them something else — more sick time, more vacation days. Over the years, when you keep bargaining that way, you don’t have anything left in terms of who runs the departments.
Right now, under the current contract, the city agreed to what we call mandatory minimums. So every day of the week, every hour of the week, you have to have a certain number of police officers … So that means if Geoff Kelly calls in sick on a Tuesday, and my data shows that’s the lowest crime rate of the year, I can’t say, “Oh, fine, we’ll go without Geoff today.” That means I have to call in Jim at time-and-a-half pay.
This has led to the city not [having] any flexibility, so that cost is fixed and it can’t change.
And if I don’t call in Jim to replace Geoff, you know, weeks later, a grievance comes down, and I have to send Jim a time-and-a-half paycheck, even though he didn’t come to work that day.
That’s too many bargaining rights given away. It doesn’t allow for any dynamic staffing. But it also allows for, believe it or not, a proliferation of the use of sick time, because maybe Geoff is friends with Jim …
That’s why we have to bring in a commissioner, hopefully from the outside, to take a really good look at the police department, because 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.
If somebody’s out driving impaired and they bang up a bunch of cars on the West Side of Buffalo, they should be held to the same standard, regardless of what they do for a living. If you don’t hold them to the same standard, the public loses trust in the police department, because the laws are only accountable to certain people.
This leads to the second key element in policing, which has gotta be transparency. The public deserves to know what’s going on in every department of city government, including the police department.
Under Commissioner Joe Gramaglia, every time there was a shooting in Buffalo, they put it up on the city’s website. It was all out there. And then that changed when they fired Joe Gramaglia, the new commissioner came in, and they took down all that information that was going out to the public.
But here’s the good news: Crime is down substantially in the City of Buffalo. Crime usually follows national trends. So crime is down. All the crime that went up during COVID, it almost all came back down. So we’re back down to pre-COVID levels in terms of shootings, murders, major crimes.
That’s the good news, right? We’re in a good position in regards to that. When your crime indicators are down, then you focus more on quality-of-life crimes, and that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make sure that people feel safe in Buffalo, that we have a police department that’s trained, that will actively engage with the citizens.
But at the end of the day, the police commissioner reports to the deputy mayor, who reports to the mayor, and we have to manage the police department just like we manage any other department.
Heaney: A little bit of context on the crime rate. You know, you’re right that the crime rate has dropped. But we did some reporting this — would have been prior to the pandemic. We looked at the seven major FBI crime [categories]. And violent crime in Buffalo — among mid-sized cities, quarter to a half million people — we had one of the 10 highest violent crime rates in the entire country. So while rates are down, Buffalo, relatively speaking, is still a pretty violent place, depending on where in the city you live.
And another thing on management rights, which you didn’t touch on, but I’m sure you’re aware of. Another abuse … you talked about the minimum manpower … is seniority dictates who gets overtime. And there’s a practice in the police and probably the fire department as well, where, if you’re getting ready to retire, your retirement pension is based on the average last five years. And what happens is guys getting ready to retire wind up gobbling up all the overtime, and they wind up, you know, in some cases, their pension is larger than their base pay, which inflates the cost that the city. Ultimately, the city has to pay for that through increased pension payments.
The police department, I think, more than any department and city is kind of run by the PBA, more than it is by management, in their labor contract. And the giveaway started under Jimmy Griffin, and have continued over time, and I think you’ve got a I think you’ve got a huge battle ahead of you to try and claw back some of that stuff.
Ryan: Hey, you can’t blame the PBA if we gave them all the power.
Heaney: Well, yeah, it’s much like people used to hate on [former Buffalo Teachers Federation President] Phil Rumore. But Phil’s job wasn’t to look out for taxpayers. His job was to look out for teachers, and he did a better job than the Board of Education did.
One more police question. We reported earlier this week. There are about a half a dozen police agencies in this community — Buffalo not being one of them — that are more than happy to cooperate with ICE and Border Patrol in seizing migrants and taking them off to detention centers. You’ve been on the record talking about this, right? What’s your position on Buffalo police cooperating with ICE and Border Patrol and other Trump agencies when it comes to dealing with immigrants?
Ryan: I mean, I’ll give you a short answer. We’re not going to be cooperating with Donald Trump.
[Applause.]
Now I’ll give you my long answer.
I’m not looking to go pick a fight with the fellow in Washington and end up with thousands of National Guard troops appearing in our city.
So we’re going to continue the way we have been continuing: 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. So there is no law enforcement angle to immigration. It should be kept that way. It’s like a DMV violation, not a criminal violation.
Plus, we’re pretty busy as a police department, and the last thing we’re going to do is divert resources.
And I’ll just say this too. America is in a crazy spot right now. I never thought we would see the judiciary not upholding the rule of law, like we’re seeing it. I read in today’s paper that that poor fellow, that sort of was the first guy who really got wrapped up — and it was the wrong guy, and they sent him here, now he’s back, but as soon as he got back, they actually just threw him in confinement.
And now it took months now, and the courts now say, “Well, no, you can’t hold him.” But you’ve been holding this human being this whole time. It’s this incredible violation of our constitutional principles and what we believe ourselves to be, you know, as Americans.
This idea of looking at birthright citizens. These things have been established in the United States for over a century. If you’re saying that a child born in America to non-citizens isn’t a citizen, that means my wife’s not a citizen, because her parents were not citizens when she was born here.
So we’re in this totally upside-down world. I like to say we’re 11 months done with a 48-month term. The time is clicking out, and really the fourth year is all re-election. So we all have to hold tight during this time period, but we also have to send the message clearly to our new American neighbors and friends: We’re there for you. We’re not going to join in any efforts to vilify you. Got to reach out to people. We got to let them know.
I reached out to friends in the Somali community, and I felt like crying with embarrassment. You know that the president of the United States of America referred to an entire community and a nation of people as garbage. Somalian Americans have been living in Buffalo for 25 years. They’re great neighbors. They have been a great asset to our community. But I feel the need to apologize, and I’m going to continue to apologize. I can’t meet a Canadian without apologizing.
We have a lot of work to do, but we have to put the message out to our friends and our neighbors that Buffalo will remain a welcoming place. It will remain an open place. We’ve complained for 40 years that our population hasn’t grown. Our population hasn’t grown because we’ve never been an attractive place for immigrants because our economy started getting poor.
The last 10 years, we grew. We all did backflips about it. About 90 percent of that growth was from immigrants and refugees. If we want to continue our economic growth, we need population growth. And the only ones who have been really moving into Buffalo are immigrants and refugees.
We’re going to start a secondary migration program where refugees who are from, say, Burma, who may have been in a Thai camp with somebody. [One] got sent to Buffalo. [One] got sent to South Carolina. Facebook keeps everyone together.
There’s people living in those states who are being so vilified. We want to make sure that the welcome mat is out and we can actually affirmatively recruit people to come on into Buffalo. It’s a place where you’re going to be safe. It’s a place where your rights are going to be respected and you’re going to be welcomed into America.
Heaney: All right, let’s talk about economic development.
I think this is going to pose a particular challenge for you, because in the Senate you’ve been a critic of — and I think rightfully a critic of — a lot of the gimmicks that economic development officials at the state and local level have used, tax breaks and other subsidies.
Now you’re in a position and the argument has been, “Well, we need to do those things, or nobody’s going to want to do business in our communities” because of taxes and regulations and whatnot. Now you’re in a position where you need to jump-start the city economy. But philosophically, you’re not on board with the mainstream economic development thinking.
I guess the two questions are, what kind of economic development are you looking for, and to what degree are subsidies a part of that mix?
Ryan: I’ll start with the second one. Almost every study has shown that subsidies don’t work. Company gets a five-year subsidy. Soon as the subsidy is gone, they’re gone.
The better bet for economic development is to invest in your schools, invest in your research institutions, invest in your healthcare institutions — your Roswell Park, your University at Buffalo. That’s really what creates an economy.
M&T Bank’s not here because they got an IDA tax break. They grew here because we had a good environment.
Government’s job is to make sure your infrastructure’s in good shape. So far we’re not doing good on that. Make sure your services are up to par. We’re not doing good on that. Make sure your schools are stable. Not so good on that.
But the other things that we do score high on in relocation guides is, people want to live in an area that is environmentally safe, not chaotic. We don’t have hurricanes, we don’t have wildfires. We have snowstorms, but usually you just dig yourself out.
People also want to live in a place that has access to clean water. We have access to that. They want access to natural resources. You can be in downtown Buffalo and ski within 45 minutes in the wintertime. And people like arts and culturals.
If you want to keep growing your economy, you have to invest in all those other things to create the conditions to encourage small businesses, to encourage entrepreneurial growth, but also to encourage people to come in.
But I’ll just say, this idea that taxes have anything to do with that? If taxes made corporations choose where to go, nobody would be in Toronto. Nobody would be in New York City. No one would be in L.A., no one would be in Chicago. Everyone would be in Mississippi, because that has the lowest tax rate of all the 50 states.
Heaney: So what do you want to see happening here by way of development? Is it services? Is it manufacturing?
Ryan: By development, do you mean building buildings?
Heaney: Well, no — jobs. What kind of jobs would you like to see created in this regional economy, in the city in particular.
Ryan: Look, Brookings Institute did a report on Buffalo’s economy over 10 years ago. They identified four or five economic sectors that are most poised for growth. The top one was advanced manufacturing. We already have a lot of manufacturing facilities here. How do we prime the pump to make it so they continue to grow, but also so that they use local suppliers and local fabricators for their work.
We were on a plan to implement that, until our former governor got really enamored by Elon Musk, and we spent a lot of that money to bring Tesla here. Tesla really is a cautionary tale of these big projects. They often fail until they become too big to fail, but you keep rolling money into them.
Imagine if we had taken this $900 million, and instead of putting it into Tesla, we put it into redeveloping our commercial strips. You know, Jefferson, Fillmore, Ontario Street, Grant Street. And also to prime the pump on innovation. More 43 Norths, more Northland training centers. I think that’s how you grow your economy.
You know, for the beginning part of my life, the whole mantra was: Keep government out of business, and business out of government. That was sort of the Republican talking point. But that has shifted to: Keep government out of business, but give business as much government money as possible.
We gotta get off of thinking that’s going to lead us anywhere. If you look at the 10 largest employers in Western New York, none of them came here because of a tax subsidy.
Heaney: Your vision for downtown? Our offices are at the corner of Main and Mohawk. My office overlooks Main Street, and there are days, in the middle of the day, I can look out my window and not see a person on the street. The train goes by and there’s three people on the train.
Downtown isn’t exactly a ghost town. ButI think the standard number thrown out is since COVID we’ve lost 20,000 downtown workers. A lot of vacant offices. It’s much harder for me to find a place to go buy my lunch every day. I can only go to Jim’s Steak Out so many times in the week.
What would you like to see happen downtown?
And the East Side has been the victim of abandonment and disinvestment for decades, probably for generations. What would you like to see happen to bring the East Side around? We have one of the highest poverty rates in the country, so if we want to change that, what do we have to do?
Let’s start with downtown.
Ryan: You know, if I hear this, “20,000 less people” again, like — I don’t want to hear that. 20,000 people stopped coming to work five years ago. That’s the period, end of question. There’s nothing we can do.
We have to be more nimble.
I mean, this — the “20,000 people” — is starting to sound like, “Well, we, you know, the steel plant closed, so our economy is in bad shape.” In a nimble economy, we get over that, right? So you take your office buildings and you start converting them to residential. If you’re not getting the storefront rents you want, well, charge less rent.
The group that’s supposed to be promoting downtown for their business improvement district, you know, they’ve been flat as heck for [years] … pre-COVID they’ve been flat. We got rid of doing the big events, like Thursday in the Square. It brought so many people downtown. It kept them downtown.
You know, I talk to employers, they’ll say, “Look, people don’t want to come back because there’s not much going on downtown.” It is a bit of a chicken and egg, but we’re never going to return to pre-COVID. So if we keep hoping that’s going to happen, then, you know, [that’s] just kind of hope — and hope is not a strategy.
Downtown needs to be energized with fun. We have to start doing more activities. There should be something going on all summer long downtown. We pay for a group to do it. It hasn’t been doing it very well. Good news is, the president of the organization and the executive director are both stepping down, so we’ll have a new shot at retooling it.
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. In 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.”
We gotta get snappier in terms of working with our assets. Every downtown restaurant that’s within walking distance of the Theater District should be having a fixed price dinner — tickets, dinner, one price. Sit down, we’ll get you out by this time, one place to park so you don’t have to move your car.
There’s a lot of things we can do to sort of make it snappy.
You know, Doug Jemal is having some problems. We all know that. But Doug Jemal came into town and he just bought stuff that every other downtown developer said was unviable. The downtown developer class said, “Knock down the HSBC. It will never be occupied again.” Now it’s a going, vibrant building.
We need to encourage outside investors, outside developers, to come in just to sort of shake it up a little bit. We need people taking more risk in downtown Buffalo. You take a risk on a building that doesn’t work, then someone’s going to come in after you when you go bankrupt, and they’ll get the benefit of that investment. We gotta keep it churning. The 30-year-old Statler project, the AM&A’s that’s been sitting doing nothing, the hotel — you can’t let these things fester, because then you gotta deal with them, right? So, gee, if we had really gone after the AM&A’s owners a decade ago, maybe we wouldn’t be in this problem. But they start owning you when things get in really bad condition.
So that’s my thing with downtown. My whole adult life people have talked about how are we going to get housing downtown. Somebody recently sent me an article where it said, “Business community’s goal for the year: build housing downtown.” It was from 1926.
So, you know, it’s an ongoing thing, but cities have done it. They figured out how to put in downtown communities. But we haven’t had a plan. We’ve been talking about downtown housing. We’ve been saying we succeeded, but never once was there a goal. How many people do we want downtown? So if you don’t set goals, you can’t win.
That’s a long, rambling answer, but we can’t let downtown become the barometer of how the city is doing. The attention we put on downtown has led to lack of attention to our neighborhoods, to our commercial strips, to other areas that we also can grow and improve.
And sometimes things move in cycles. When I lived in New York City, downtown New York was a ghost town. I worked way downtown. After 5:30 nobody was there. Looked just like downtown Buffalo. But they brought in a bunch of housing — tens of thousands of units. It’s turned that around.
But also, as things have quieted downtown, Hertel Avenue is busier and more vibrant than ever. So we can’t only get preoccupied with downtown.
We’re reorganizing the Office of Strategic Planning. One of the departments within that office was called the development office, but “development” means nothing and everything at the same time. So we’re going to be clear that the development office is going to be looking at economic growth and development.
Then we’re starting another office called the office of neighborhood improvements, which will dovetail perfectly into my East Side answer.
Kelly: I was going to say, because if you’re correct that the downtown shouldn’t be used as a barometer for success, surely the East Side should be.
Ryan: There you go. I agree. I’ll vote for you if you run.
Let’s talk frankly. And I’ve spoken frankly throughout the whole campaign, regardless if I was with a white neighborhood and a white audience, a Black neighborhood, a poor audience, a rich neighborhood. We cannot have the success that we want as a city if we allow the East Side to keep living in those conditions. If those conditions don’t change, we’re never going to get better as a city.
But before you fix it, you’ve got to understand how we got here.
I was recently at a lecture down at the Michigan Avenue corridor, by a historian. There was no substantial Black population in Buffalo until after World War Two, with the Great Migration. So tens of thousands of people moved from the South up to Buffalo to work, mostly in industrial jobs. And at first, everyone was met with openness. This is fantastic.
But when the population of Black people started actually growing to be a substantial population, we implemented the North’s version of Jim Crow. We implemented red-lining, where Black people could only buy houses within that red line — if not, you can’t get a mortgage. We implemented insurance redlining, which meant you can’t get insurance on your house unless you’re within the red line. And at the same time, then employers started instituting all sorts of discriminatory employment practices.
Government policy created the system of segregation, disinvestment and poverty that we see now. So if government could create that, we could do the inverse, and we can fix it.
… For the years that Martin Luther King stayed down South, every northern state thought he was a saint. But when Martin Luther King started coming to Chicago and Cleveland and areas of the North to say, in his words, Black people are living in ghettos with rats in bed substandard housing, then the New York Times started calling him a dangerous radical.
His life ended before he could pursue the work of talking about inequity in our Rust Belt and our Northeastern cities. But we gotta understand why we’re here. So drive around the city, you know? If I put a blindfold on you and drove you around, you would be able to guess, based on the potholes, what area of the city you’re in.
This doesn’t just happen because God made it happen. People in charge decided to stop putting money into predominantly Black neighborhoods.
You conquer disinvestment by investing. We’re going to have to double down on investing in East Side communities. For far too long, the only housing strategy on the East Side of Buffalo was demolitions and bulldozers. I wish we had those houses back now. We don’t. Instead, we have 12,000-plus vacant lots.
So we’re going to come up with a multi-pronged plan. Most of it I was able to get funded the last three years from New York State. We think there are 4,000 vacant rental units, primarily on the East Side of Buffalo, owned by African-American women, seniors, people who bought doubles. Families grew up. Husband passed away, sole woman on a single pension. Upstairs the roof went, needed a new boiler, and they locked the doors up.
Housing costs are going up in Buffalo. To conquer that, we need supply. So we’ve got a program right now, this is its first full year of funding. A $70,000 grant that — if you take your substandard unit, get it up to the standard, get it back on the housing market, agree to rent it affordably for 10 years — [it’s a] free $70,000. We already got dozens of units back online, but we are so far behind. [If we’re] going to get through that 4,000 backlog, we gotta keep working.
The second program we got is aimed at affordable home ownership for people making between $50,000 and $90,000. The housing market in Buffalo is so substantially changed. For years, everyone complained, “I don’t know, I bought a house for 100 a decade ago, it’s still worth 100.”
Well, the second biggest complaint is when your $100,000 house becomes a $250,000 house, because then your kid can’t buy a house.
We’re in this situation now where, you know, $60,000 a year is a $30 an hour job. Not many years ago, that got you entry into home ownership in Buffalo. So we got a program for if you make between $50,000 and $90,000 a year, we can put a subsidy of up to $300,000 into a house.
Believe it or not, you cannot build a modest house for less than $350,000. It’s wildly expensive. We’re hopefully going to use state money to do this, but we’ve got to start putting up hundreds of houses a year. I hesitate when I say it, because we build, on average, way less than 100 houses a year right now in Buffalo. Have you seen the housing starts lately? It’s dozens [a year], really. If we were able to put up 1,000 houses a year, we’d have to do it for a decade to break even. We’re going to have to start building a lot of houses.
That’s how you restore the neighborhoods on the East Side of Buffalo. And you don’t start in the green fields near the Central Terminal, where there’s, you know, just acres. You start on blocks where people live, where people have invested and stayed for generations, but they have two or three missing teeth on the streetscape. You start by restoring those neighborhoods. That gives people who live there a long time that what they deserve — an intact neighborhood.
And once you get done with that, then you move on to the next.
We’re going to identify between three and five — I wouldn’t say neighborhoods, because it’s too big. Three to five residential redevelopment areas, but they’re going to be small, 10 blocks. And we’re going to stay there until that 10 blocks is done, then we’re going to move to the next 10 blocks.
We can’t take our scant state resources and spread them over a whole area. Then no one knows it happened.
Heaney: What’s the split between new build versus renovation? Because there’s a lot of vacant lots to build new on, but there’s even more existing housing that needs rehab dollars.
Ryan: You gotta concentrate on renovations, because it’s the quickest, it’s cheapest and it’s fastest. 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. We have to get those units back online.
But if we want our growth to continue, we need houses. Used to be,”Oh, we can take all the refugees they send us because we have all these vacancies.”
Our vacancies are going away, so we have to put more supply, more supply, more supply. And you have to concentrate on the area where the need is most acute. And the need is most acute on the East Side of Buffalo.
Kelly: Let’s talk about charter revision. The charter revision commission was empaneled by the Common Council. It has an ambit to review and revise the central document that describes our city government.
It’s got a very short time frame in which to do this, which overlaps with your first year in office. What are your expectations of it? And be honest here, what do you want it to do?
Ryan: You know, it hasn’t been set up to succeed. It’s the only charter revision panel that I could find that actually would overlap two mayors.
It started with an acting mayor with a vision. I don’t know what that vision is. Now I’m inheriting it. The people are all put in place under my predecessor.
Generally, when charter revisions really work, it’s because people have worked for months to figure out where they want to go with it. Then they empanel the charter revision. You know this charter revision has been sort of, respectfully, throw the darts at the dart board. Anyone come in who’s got an idea.
Usually these need to be more guided to be more successful.
I had hoped to pursue a charter revision, you know, three or four years into my term, so I could have a better idea of what I think needs to be changed. But I’m coming at it, you know, from an outsider.
I would say it’s an unwieldy document. It’s over 400 pages long. It has conflicting such sections, sections that seem to give power to the comptroller and another section that gives the same power to the Common Council. It’s not a very good document. It’s unwieldy. And you know, if I had a year, I would put a few folks on it, and really say, “This is how we should restructure this governance document.”
We don’t have that time. So I imagine what they will do is really go through it, find a lot of redundancies, committees that are in the charter but have never met — or that made sense in 1980 but don’t make sense today.
The last major charter revision was 25 years ago. But you know that was one that was figured out before they put it into effect. That one was made under an austerity mindset — in order to make Buffalo a better place, we should get rid of at-large Council members, get rid of the Council president. It was almost like an anti-government review commission. It was sort of Kevin Gaughan-ish — you know, the problem with Buffalo is too much government.
So, that’s what I think. What do you think?
Kelly: Will you fund it at least, so that it has some chance to achieve even those modest revisions?
Ryan: I don’t know what you mean by fund it.
Kelly: It has no money. It has literally no budget.
Ryan: Well, this goes back to, it was started with not a high [likelihood] of success.
Kelly: And yet it is empaneled, and it’s happening.
Ryan: So I don’t have a budget until June 1, and the charter revision results are due …
Kelly: They probably have to be drafted by then, because they need to be complete by the first week of August in order to make it on the ballot next November for referendum.
Ryan: Yeah. This goes back to why I don’t think it was set up in a way, you know, to really succeed.
Generally, when you put a charter review commission in, you would do it as part of your budget, so you have money for it. Now it’s sort of a vessel, you know, that’s out there, that’s sailing around, but without probably a rudder.
Not to say that the people who are doing the work aren’t trying to do the work — they are. And the people who are coming to meetings, you know, everyone’s giving their input. But it’s a 400-page document that needs substantial revision. A lot of work.
Kelly: Just one follow-up question on this. I believe, and some evidence has been unveiled already, that you have plans to substantially restructure departments within City Hall. Some of that will require revisions to the charter, no doubt.
Ryan: Yeah, but those revisions can be done by Council resolution. You don’t need a referendum. It’s a simple matter of the Council passes a charter revision.
Sometimes we don’t revise the charter because we think it can only be done by referendum. But as long as you’re not taking away power from one branch of government, you could review the charter and change it every day of the week that the Council is in session.
Heaney: Let’s change topics to education.
As mayor, you don’t have any control over city schools, aside from the power of the purse to give the schools a fairly modest amount of money.
Ryan: Modest, flat, stagnant.
Heaney: Yeah, it’s been the same. When I was at The News, I covered Buffalo public schools. This was 20 years ago, and I don’t think the number has gone up since I left a beat.
But yet, the future of the city is really tied, to a significant degree, to education. And we’ve got a school system that spends over a billion dollars a year and about one out of three students can read at grade level.
When Tony Masiello was here as mayor, he made some noises about trying to get some limited input into the schools by way of appointing a couple school board members, which went nowhere. Realistically, what could or should a mayor do to impact education so that we’re not graduating a lot of students who are not prepared to be competitive in the workplace?
Ryan: So I’ll give you an answer on that one.
So urban education, since we started doing publicly funded education, no one’s been happy with it. It’s, you know, it’s a hot potato.
I’ll just say it: 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.
This goes back to the idea, if we want to keep Buffalo just the way it is, we’re never going to get different educational results. There’s not a city in America that has a poverty rate like Buffalo’s that gets any different educational outcomes. So 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.
So that’s the thing. And once in a while, there’ll be big storms about, you know, there should be mayoral control. Get rid of the school board. Well, New York City got rid of their school board 20 years ago, and the mayor controls it. The educational outcomes didn’t change. Yonkers has a system where the mayor appoints four out of the nine school board members. Nothing changed in Yonkers.
You can move those pieces around. But unless you get serious about making it so kids are not poor, you’re going to have a harder time. And that’s why, if we don’t lift up the East Side of Buffalo …
Look, if you took the City of Buffalo’s results and you aggregated out all the disabled kids, all the kids who don’t speak English and all the kids who live in poverty — guess who’s the number one school district in Western New York? Buffalo.
So what’s the difference between us and Grand Island? Those factors. I’m using Grand Island as a metaphor here, so I don’t really know their numbers. But if you look at Grand Island, and pull out only their kids who live in poverty, they have the same results Buffalo does.
Poverty is a killer of education. You don’t get the attention at home that you need when you’re super young. Your parents are under stress, working too many hours. Don’t have the time, you know, to read with you from zero to three. Our attendance rate at Buffalo, we have a lot of problems with attendance, you know, we gotta fix that. Part of the reason we have a poor attendance rate is because if mom’s shift gets shifted earlier, brother’s gotta stay home to get the kids on the school bus before that kid can then go to school.
We have complex urban problems. We have over 45 languages spoken in our schools. I would say the traditional way we measure education is probably unfair to urban districts. We measure how high you achieve, but we don’t ever look at where did you start. So a child who comes to Buffalo at age 15, who’s innumerate and illiterate in their own language — if we can get that kid up a few grade levels, that’s a tremendous educational accomplishment.
But the way the state tests, they would say, “That kid’s a failure and his teacher is a failure.” It’s really easy to say,”Oh, you know these, these four measurements show that urban education is a failure.”
Heaney: It almost sounds like you’re almost advocating for a countywide school district.
Ryan: Even if you did a countywide school district, the poor kids would still underperform, just like they do in the suburban districts.
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. That means they’re not getting paid enough for their effort and their time.
Not meaning to say all is lost, right? We need to continue to endeavor. I’m going to work with the superintendent. The mayor can use the 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, you know, with the economy, and that we’re doing the best we can.
But I would say that our expectations should be tempered … unless we reduce child poverty by a similar amount, we are not going to get the increases of educational outcomes that we so hope for and desire.
Kelly: You mentioned this, and it’s a question I think we meant to ask earlier, so I’m going to ask it now. I will preface it with this cute, depressing little story.
The first cover story I wrote for Artvoice, 26 years ago, was about the city’s disastrous administration of a HUD lead hazard control program. It was a tragic comedy, and they had to return millions of dollars. And HUD basically said, “You know, maybe you could try again in a couple of years,” but we didn’t until just recently, and once again, we’ve had to return over a million dollars —
Ryan: $1.8 million.
Kelly: $1.8 million in HUD money designed to address this lead poisoning problem. What are you going to do? We’ve got to do something, we can’t go another 25 years without trying.
Heaney: Actually, let me add to that. Not only what are you going to do about lead. We reported last week that the city has received nearly $6 million in money to combat the opioid overdose epidemic, and the City of Buffalo has seen fit to spend less than one-third of that, while a couple hundred people a year continue to die. And of the money that they spent, some of it went for lawn mowers to block clubs, and police and fire vehicles that have nothing to do with the epidemic.
So what are you going to do about lead? What are you going to do about spending the money targeted for opioid overdoses?
Ryan: There are two awful things to talk about. Do you want to talk about lead first or opiates?
Let’s talk about lead.
So I’m shifting, right? I have to shift from exposing problems, saying there’s a problem. This is what I’ve been doing for last year. Here’s the problems in the city. Here’s my solutions — now vote for me.
So January 1, I’m going to spend a little less time identifying the problems and have to put my effort into fixing them.
Lead has been something I’ve been working out my entire adult life. My first meeting I went to in City Hall was with the Lead Safe Task Force. Those meetings are still going on today, and I think I went to my first meeting there in 1996.
We have a tragedy when it comes to lead poisoning. It’s like a car wreck that just keeps occurring, but we’ve gotten used to it.
I replugged into this issue a couple years ago, after the Flint water crisis. We all remember that, right? That horrible thing. Buffalo congregations, we shipped water to Flint.
But year in and year out, more kids are poisoned in Buffalo per capita than were poisoned in Flint at the height of their water crisis. And the bulk of the kids poisoned are poisoned by eating lead chips and being exposed to lead.
People say it’s because of old houses. It’s not because of old houses. Lead was in houses up until 1980. I’ll go back to my first-ring suburbs. That means every house in Cheektowaga has lead paint, every house in West Seneca has lead paint. It’s older housing stock that’s not maintained. Kids in those suburbs aren’t being poisoned because it’s encapsulated. The walls are painted. The trim is painted.
I live in a house that was built in 1917. My Census tract, hardly any lead poisoning. One Census tract over from me is the Linwood, Harvard, Oxford neighborhood — numbers way higher. Same housing stock, but it’s the condition of the housing stock.
So that means most of it is in houses owned by landlords. Landlords are allowed to rent houses that kill children in the City of Buffalo, in substandard condition. Because of that, our kids have been lead-poisoned for a generation.
Rochester and New York City have substantially solved this problem 30 years ago. New York City did local law number one. Rochester did something similar. The crux of those laws were, you cannot rent an apartment to a child unless the apartment’s been inspected before. Once they did that, their lead poisoning rates went bloop.
We haven’t had the courage to do that in Buffalo. We passed a law a few years ago saying you had to do it, but we’re still not doing it.
It’ll be on me to figure out a system — to figure out how we go and inspect all these apartments that are way behind. You can’t hire that many building inspectors, because once the inspections are done, then you have a surplus of inspectors. You almost have to look at it like Census takers. You know, we train people to do the initial inspections for a period of time, and then the city can stay on top of it.
But it is simple. If you paint your house, the chances of a kid being poisoned by lead just plummets. Of course, some poisoning will still happen from odd cases or friction from windows. But the bulk of it — the big fat middle of the bell curve — is just peeling paint that probably nobody who owns their house would ever let it exist that way.
So we’re going to make people paint their houses. Imagine if we can do that and a bunch of kids won’t be lead-poisoned.
Heaney: Opioids?
Ryan: You know, the settlement money that transferred down, it should have stopped at counties, because counties do health and safety. Your county has dozens and dozens and dozens of people working on this. Every day they provide drug treatment. But somehow, in the wisdom of the settlement agreement, $8 million of this came to the City of Buffalo.
We’re going to take the remaining money and partner with Erie County, who’s already doing all the drug prevention — that’s what they do. They have a whole office in the Department of Health. We don’t need to replicate that in the City of Buffalo.
[With] a small portion of that grant, you were allowed to make capital investments that were somehow supposed to make people not want to use opioids because — we bought a lawnmower?
We gotta put that money into where the harm reduction programs are taking place, and it’s the county. The city doesn’t run needle exchange programs. The city doesn’t test drugs to make sure there’s not fentanyl in it. That’s what the county already does. We’re gonna take that money, partner with them, and make sure we’re putting those resources into the City of Buffalo.
Kelly: Let’s talk about urban expressways. The Kensington project —
Ryan: Any softballs tonight?
[Laughter.]
Heaney: You’re dealing with Investigative Post, not our competitors.
Kelly: I’ll find something for you at the end.
The Kensington project, thanks to the activism of a swath of Buffalonians organized by the East Side Parkways group, is at least ostensibly back to square one. We’ll see what the Department of Transportation actually does.
The Scajaquada corridor project, which you had a hand in, is also now sort of on ice.
Ryan: Back to square one.
Kelly: Back to square one. What can the office of the mayor do about these issues to help guide them toward a just and desirable conclusion?
Ryan: A lot. 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.
The whole Skyway project that Brian Higgins talked about for years, it didn’t work. It didn’t work because a congressman was trying to do traffic planning in the city. I’ve been working on the 198 for years. It didn’t work because an Assembly member and then senator was trying to do traffic planning.
And, you know, [Assembly Majority Leader] Crystal Peoples-Stokes was really active in the 33. That one’s bogged down.
But I’ll tell you the projects that are moving. The inner loop in Rochester — took down one section already. They’re going on the second section. Guess who led that effort? Not a congressman, a senator, or Assembly member. The City of Rochester led that effort. It was their planning department that led the effort, in conjunction with the DOT.
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 same thing’s happening in Syracuse. They’re trying to take down [Route] 81 — goes right through the middle of Syracuse. That’s being led by the City of Syracuse. Albany is looking at the highway that goes along the Hudson River. That project’s being led by the City of Albany.
So 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? I vote for the mayor of the city taking control of these projects.
And we’re going to figure out what we can do with them. We know that the way we’ve been trying to do big projects in Buffalo, they’ve all failed. You know, we haven’t had a big transportation project in a super long time.
Kelly: What do you think should happen?
Ryan: 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. In order for this to work, we have to divert traffic somewhere before Martin Luther King Park. Everyone’s taking the 33 at 8 a.m., there’s a lot of traffic on it, mostly coming downtown. So we have to figure out how to keep a conduit to downtown Buffalo, at the same time activating our arterial streets. You know, William Clinton, Genesee, Broadway — they’re all empty at 8 a.m.
It’s going to take some complex planning. You know, the thing that gets the applause is to say, “Let’s restore that parkway so kids can ride their bikes.” But to achieve that is really going to take a substantial amount of work, because we built a highway system that a lot of people depend on. Now we’re going to have to figure out how to divert that traffic.
But here’s the good news on that. When the speed limit on the Scajaquada went from 50 to 30, 50 percent of the traffic dissipated from that road. People just found it annoying, so they just took a side street. But there’s been no noticeable increase of traffic on our side streets. Where that traffic went? [He shrugs.] Traffic sort of seeks its own level.
So now people are saying, “Well, I’m just going to drive over Utica as opposed to driving up Delaware, getting on the highway.” If I’m in North Buffalo and I’m just going to Grant Street, I’m just going to drive over Amherst Street.
We don’t really know where that traffic went. We do know that these doomsday predictions are usually almost always wrong.
Heaney: I think the last prepared question we have — and it’s past 8:30 so we won’t hold you for too much longer, folks — and it’s the issue of government transparency. I think I speak for every reporter in Buffalo to say that City Hall has not been a very transparent place for a very long time.
The Brown administration, much like the Cuomo administration, much like many administrations, for example, treat the Freedom of Information Law as something to be thwarted as much as possible. It’s very difficult to get documents out of City Hall. It’s very difficult to get interviews out of City Hall.
And you know, we have our ways, but what are you going to do to make City Hall a transparent place that, among other things, respects the Freedom of Information Law?
Ryan: So you know, we’re going to endeavor to be more transparent. What that exactly means, I don’t know yet. We met with some reporters today informally. We plan on bringing in, you know, station managers and editors early on to say, “What have been your problems, what have been the difficulties?”
A lot of the public information should just go on the website. You know, early on in (Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz’s] administration, he uploaded so much information onto the county’s website, and the FOIA requests went down because you didn’t have to FOIA — it was just, you know, right there. So that’s a start, but we’ll figure it out.
I’ve been blessed. I’m going to a “how to be a mayor” training this week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, at Harvard. They’re sending two graduate students to spend three weeks starting on January 4 in Buffalo, and I’m having one of the graduate students try to look at what are the best practices for other cities. How do they get the information out there seamlessly?
But a lot of the transparency issues are about, once again, trying to play hide the ball. If something bad happens, let’s just try to bury it somewhere.
I’m a fallible human. When I make mistakes, I’m going to tell people we made mistakes, and we’re going to say how we’re going to fix those mistakes. We’re not going to sort of play this, you know, three-card monte, about you go try to find the information, because we’re going to keep moving it around.
I’m going to be the elected official who says, “Oh yeah, yeah, you’re right. That doesn’t look good. Oh, that’s a mistake. Let’s fix it,” not “Let’s try to shield it at all costs.” So it’s on me to try to make less mistakes. But we’re not going to pretend things didn’t happen.
Heaney: You know, they’re going to throw you out of the politicians’ union if you do that.
Ryan: They might.
Heaney: They absolutely will.
Ryan: Hold on, let me tell you this. So I asked Geoff to ask me a question about the transition team, but he refused to. So I’m going to pretend —
Kelly: I was formulating the question in my head.
Heaney: I was just about to say we’ve asked you a bunch of questions. Is there anything we haven’t asked you that you would like to talk about? And that’s probably an opportunity — that’s very unlike me to be that nice.
What’s on your mind that you’d like the audience to hear, that we haven’t asked you about?
Ryan: Well, thanks so much Jim for that question, it was actually on my mind.
So right after the primary, you know, we put groups together to look at City Hall. And after the general, we then re-formed transition teams. We put teams together to mirror every department in City Hall. They took the information that the strike teams had assembled and said, “Here’s what we know about these departments, here’s the type of leaders we think we need.” So we’re able to do a leadership search based on what we think the problems are going to be.
So we put together a team. It’s being shared by the CAO director, Dr. Marie Cannon, who was a former commissioner of the Department of Social Services for Erie County, and Trini Ross, a former U.S. prosecutor for Western New York who prosecuted the perpetrator of the 5/14 shooting. So we got those two co chairs together, got a really good committee and — talking about getting thrown out of the politicians’ club — we posted every job in City Hall that’s going to be available on the website.
It’s all out there. Qualifications are there. We’ve received over 1,700 applications. I announced my first four commissioners today. I announced they’re going to change the structure two weeks ago to go from a one deputy mayor formula to a four deputy mayor formula, and each deputy mayor will have certain city departments under their control.
This goes back to people saying, “I went all this time without ever even talking to the mayor.” Because a choke point in City Hall has been this one deputy mayor. If you ran a company this size, you would not have all your 12 directors reporting to one person. So we’re going to change that. That’s how the state does it.
So we’re continuing to interview. First we put the deputy mayors, they participated in interviews that were starting to pick the commissioners. We picked four commissioners today, and those commissioners are now participating in the interviews to hire the directors that are in their departments.
Over 100 jobs are on the website. We got a lot of great applications from all over Western New York. The people we’re bringing in are not a lot of politicos. The people who ran my campaign don’t want to work for government. They’re passionate volunteers who took some time off to help me. Now they’re going back to their other lives. So I’m going to bring in as many skilled professionals, people who are there for the right reasons, as possible. Everyone who’s currently in the jobs in City Hall will all get an interview, but it’s a competitive process. Doesn’t mean you’re staying because the last mayor put you there.
And I found out a factoid today that you might like. I’m the first mayor since Mayor Sedita was elected in 1956 not to have served on the Common Council.
Heaney: That’s a good thing, people.
Ryan: It leaves me without a lot of knowledge, but it also leaves me without a lot of saying, “Well, this is the way we do it, and this is the guy we got to keep here because of this.”
We’re really going to try to have an open book. We’re putting together a team that looks like the City of Buffalo. You know, you cast a wide net, you’re going to get good candidates. I announced the first Hispanic fire commissioner in the history of the City of Buffalo. Today, the first Hispanic corporation counsel. A lot of talented people out there. You just got to open it up enough for people to come in.
So lot of work to do. That’s what I wanted to say.
Heaney: All right, there we go. By the way, folks, that’s the last softball question you’ll hear from us for a while.
I want to thank everybody for coming. I want to remind you that our ability to continue doing our work depends on people like you supporting us financially. So if you can make a donation before the end of the year and get your money doubled, we would greatly appreciate it.
I’d like to thank the mayor — the mayor-elect, I should say.
Ryan: Thank you.
Heaney: I think, judging by the amount of applause, I think there’s a lot of people hoping you the best, because your success will be our benefit. So best of luck.
Ryan: Thank you. Really appreciate that. I’ll take all the luck.
