Byron Brown is leaving City Hall. What happens now?

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Mayor in waiting: Common Council President Chris Scanlon. Photo by Garrett Looker.

Byron Brown soon will step down as mayor of Buffalo after 18 years and eight months in the office. 

The five-term mayor has been offered the job as president and CEO of Western Regional Off Track Betting Corp., a possibility Investigative Post first reported in February. He is expected to accept the position, pending completion of negotiations for an employment contract and obtaining a license from the state Gaming Commission. The precise date of his exit from City Hall is uncertain; later this month or October is most likely.

So what happens now?

• Common Council President Chris Scanlon becomes acting mayor, assuming all the duties of the office for the remainder of Brown’s term, which expires at the end of next year.

So it’ll be Acting Mayor Scanlon for the next 16 months.

• Voters will choose a new mayor in next year’s regularly scheduled elections — primary elections in June, general election in November. 

Nobody has formally declared a candidacy yet. Scanlon almost certainly will run. State Sen. Sean Ryan is busy pursuing a new term in the state Legislature this fall, but he’s expected to throw his hat in the ring sometime after the November general election. Other candidates likely will reveal themselves in the coming months, too.

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Because the city is dominated by Democrats, the June primary is likely to determine who the city’s next mayor will be. That means Scanlon will have about eight months to show residents why they should drop the “acting” from his new title. In that period he’ll have to craft a budget and four-year financial plan that addresses a predicted shortfall of as much as $50 million next year and more in the years that follow.

The budget process will unfold between mid-April and early June, just before the Democratic primary.

• The South District Council seat might remain empty while Scanlon is acting mayor, according to one interpretation of the charter, which is not crystal clear on whether an acting mayor can continue as a voting member of the Council. 

If Scanlon decides not to run for mayor next year, or if he loses, he’ll return to his district seat and finish the remainder of his term, which runs through the end of 2027. If he wins, he’ll vacate the Council seat when he’s sworn in as mayor on Jan. 1, 2026, at which point the remaining Council members will choose someone to finish his term. 

Either way, the South District may not have a voting representative on the Council for the next 16 months.

• That interpretation of the charter holds that Scanlon can’t be acting mayor and Council president at the same time. But he is acting mayor because he is Council president, so he’s not really vacating that position. 

If that’s the case, the Council’s president pro tempore — Lovejoy District Councilman Bryan Bollman — would run the show until the Council’s next reorganization, which will happen in January 2026.

Bollman has some familiarity with the role. He was chief of staff to his predecessor in the Lovejoy seat, Rich Fontana, who served one two-year term as Council president.

The last Buffalo mayor to leave office midterm was Frank Sedita, who resigned due to deteriorating health in February 1973, with 10 months left in his third term. Sedita was succeeded by his deputy mayor, Stanley Makowski, who was elected that November to a full four-year term. Makowski did not run for reelection in 1977. 

That year state Sen. Jimmy Griffin lost the Democratic primary to Deputy Assembly Speaker Arthur Eve, but beat Eve in the November general election running on the Conservative Party line. 

Geoff Kelly