Buffalo voters should approve Proposal 8 and make City Hall prove its budget math before it spends

By Walter Pryce

This is an opinion column. It reflects the views of the writer.

Buffalo voters who flip their ballot over this fall will find 11 proposed changes to the city charter. Most deal with housekeeping that should have been fixed years ago. One deals with money, and it deserves a yes.

Proposal 8 would give the city comptroller an early, formal look at the mayor’s budget before it is made public, and it would give the Common Council a way to fix numbers that do not hold up. Early voting began Saturday. Election Day is Nov. 3. As the Chronicle reported this weekend, it is the first charter rewrite Buffalo voters have seen since 1999.

The problem is the estimates

Buffalo does not have a budget problem so much as a forecasting problem that turned into a budget problem.

In May, the state comptroller’s office put the city’s structural deficit at about $103 million. Its reviewers said that happened “in part, because City officials historically have adopted budgets that relied on nonrecurring revenues to fund operations and underestimated expenditures.” The city spent down its surplus covering the gap and, by the state’s count, no longer had any left to help balance this year’s plan. It also used $331 million in federal stimulus money since 2020-21 without finding anything to replace it.

The fix this year leaned on a $46.1 million property tax increase. The state flagged another $56.9 million in the proposed budget as one-time money or money that may never arrive. That included $15.2 million from selling city parking ramps to the Buffalo Municipal Parking Authority and $10.5 million in casino revenue for which there is no current compact with the Seneca Nation. It also counted on $15 million in temporary state aid and $16.2 million in back taxes and fines.

The city’s own comptroller has been saying the same thing for years. “Since 2019, I have consistently highlighted structural imbalances driven by one-time revenues and underbudgeted expenditures,” Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams said in her April response to Mayor Sean Ryan’s budget. “The Budget’s reliance on non-recurring revenues is not a sustainable approach for ensuring the City of Buffalo’s long-term financial stability.”

The trouble is that she says it after the fact, and nobody has to listen. Under the current charter, her review comes late and is advisory.

What Proposal 8 actually does

The text of the proposed local law is short and specific. By April 1, the mayor would hand the comptroller the tentative budget, with estimates for the lines that keep blowing up: “overtime, pension contributions, and health insurance costs.” The comptroller could also examine revenue that is “estimated, speculative, or subject to external approval,” including land sales, back-tax collections and cannabis and occupancy taxes. Property tax estimates would have to show a maximum and minimum levy.

By April 15, the comptroller would tell the Council in writing whether each estimate is “suitable for the upcoming fiscal year.” If one is not, the Council could cut a revenue estimate by a two-thirds vote or raise an expense estimate by a simple majority. It “shall not revise any such revenue estimate upward.”

In plain terms, nobody gets to make the budget look better on paper. The only adjustments allowed are toward realism. The ballot abstract is blunt about today’s rules: the Council “has no power to adjust revenue or expenditure estimates.”

The idea is not partisan, and it is not a power grab by one office. It grew out of recommendations the comptroller sent the charter commission in February. It was formally moved on the commission by Deputy Mayor Maria Whyte and passed with 11 votes and one abstention. If approved, it takes effect Jan. 1, 2027, in time for next spring’s budget.

The best argument against it

The strongest objection deserves a straight answer. The proposal makes it easier to raise spending estimates, which takes a majority, than to cut revenue estimates, which takes two-thirds. A skeptic could fairly ask whether that hands the Council a back door to bigger budgets.

It does not, for two reasons. First, the Council can only act on a line the comptroller has already flagged as unrealistic. Second, raising an expense estimate that was too low does not create new spending. It admits spending the city was going to do anyway, the overtime and health bills that keep landing after the budget is adopted. The higher bar on revenue cuts protects the mayor from a Council that might zero out a revenue line for political reasons.

A fairer criticism is that Proposal 8 is modest. Miller-Williams originally asked for authority to hold a budget in abeyance when it strayed too far from her own numbers, and that did not survive. The Council can still ignore her. But a written finding on the record by April 15 makes ignoring it a choice that voters can see.

Why the rest of the ballot matters, too

Proposal 8 is not the only question worth a yes. Proposals 1, 3 and 5 clean up the succession mess that followed Byron Brown’s departure in October 2024, when Christopher Scanlon served as acting mayor for 14 months. Laurence Rubin, who chaired the charter commission, described the confusion to WKBW: “There were issues like, is he really the acting mayor or just has the powers of a mayor, and what happened to his council seat.”

Voters should read all 11, and the Investigative Post’s guide is a good place to start. But the budget question is the one with the most dollars attached.

“I hope people come out and vote in general, right? That’s our civic duty, and I hope they flip the page and vote for everything,” Rubin told WKBW. On this one, he is right.

What should happen now

Buffalo voters should turn the ballot over and vote yes on Proposal 8, at early voting through Nov. 1 or on Election Day.

Mayor Ryan should commit now to delivering his 2027-28 draft to the comptroller by April 1 and opening every line she asks for. Miller-Williams should publish her April 15 report the day she sends it. And Council President Joel Feroleto and his colleagues should pledge to vote on every flagged estimate in public, rather than letting the findings sit in a drawer.

The city cannot vote its way out of a $103 million hole. It can vote to stop digging a deeper one with numbers nobody believed.

Featured image: Buffalo City Hall. Photo by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.