By Staff Reporter
BUFFALO — Mayor Sean Ryan has declared a certificate of emergency for the Broadway Barns after concrete panels fell from a second-floor roof onto equipment below, putting the city’s winter plow fleet at risk and underscoring how long the aging Department of Public Works complex has been deferred.
The certificate, issued Oct. 5, allows the city to bypass its usual competitive bid process and move quickly to stabilize the roof. Two heavy concrete panels dropped into a room that stores salt spreaders and plow blades. No one was injured, but some equipment was smashed.
Deputy Mayor Benjamin Swanekamp described the complex in unusually stark terms.
“The Broadway Barns are in an almost deplorable state of condition,” Mr. Swanekamp said.
He added that the fallen panels were large enough to have been fatal. “These panels weigh hundreds of pounds. They could have killed someone, frankly.”
Winter readiness hangs on a failing roof
The Broadway Barns house garbage trucks, snow plows and the gear needed to ready that fleet for winter. The second floor sits above repair bays — a layout that turns a structural failure into an operational crisis for the entire city.
“It’s an emergency situation for the entire city – we need to be able to stabilize that roof so we can get the plow equipment and get out so we can get ready for winter,” Mr. Swanekamp said.
In remarks reported by BTPM, he tied the urgency directly to the contents of the damaged room. “That room stores the salt spreaders and plow blades we need to get our fleet ready for winter. So obviously, this is of an imperative nature right now,” he said. “Once those panels get stabilized, we’ll be getting crews in there to pull all the equipment out to get the rigs out, and then we’ll be declaring that room unfit for human occupancy.”
The city has engaged Morris Masonry LLC at a quoted cost of about $10,900 to stabilize the panels, according to materials presented to the Common Council. The emergency declaration is what lets that work proceed without a full public bid.
Reporting by WKBW’s Holly Kirkpatrick and by BTPM on Oct. 14 independently documented the collapse, the emergency certificate and the deputy mayor’s account of the risk to winter operations.
A stopgap while a new DPW campus inches forward
The Broadway Barns emergency lands as the city continues a longer effort to replace the complex entirely. Buffalo purchased a 59-acre site in October 2025 for a new Department of Public Works campus. An interim leased facility is near completion, officials have said, while the permanent project advances through a brownfield redevelopment and local development corporation lease-back structure.
“We’ve been trying to advance it expeditiously all year long. Honestly, it’s a very complicated process,” Mr. Swanekamp said of the new campus.
Asked whether demolition of the Broadway Barns is likely, he was direct. “Speaking bluntly, probably, yeah,” he said. “Historical or not, I don’t know what it would take to make that building stabilized and safe.”
That answer frames the emergency work as triage, not a long-term fix. Stabilizing the roof so crews can retrieve plow gear is the immediate goal. Declaring the damaged room unfit for occupancy afterward is the next. Whether any portion of the barns can be made permanently safe remains an open question the city has not answered with a capital plan for full rehabilitation.
What the emergency power changes
A certificate of emergency short-circuits the normal procurement timeline. For a city that must salt and plow streets across Buffalo’s first winter storms, that speed may be the difference between a contained structural failure and a citywide operations failure.
The Common Council still receives the Masonry quote and the emergency paperwork, but the mayor’s certificate is what authorizes the city to move first and document later. That path is designed for situations in which waiting for sealed bids could leave essential equipment trapped under an unstable roof.
For residents, the stakes are concrete: if salt spreaders and plow blades cannot be pulled out in time, winter readiness slips. For workers who enter those bays, the stakes are sharper still. Hundreds of pounds of concrete falling into an equipment bay is not an abstract deferred-maintenance story.
The Chronicle has requested comment from Mayor Ryan’s office, the deputy mayor’s office, Morris Masonry LLC and the Common Council committee that oversees the Department of Public Works.
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