Braymiller Market closing, but bailouts continue

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Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon, forward, and Braymiller Market owner Stuart Green, to his left. Photo by J. Dale Shoemaker

Braymiller Market, the struggling downtown grocery, is closing its doors, but City Hall will continue to financially assist owner Stuart Green.

Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon said Friday the city will not require Green to repay the $561,000 it loaned to the store last year, a requirement if he failed to keep the store open through the end of 2025.

What’s more, Scanlon said the city will lease the grocery store’s building, paying an unspecified amount to use the 21,600-square-foot space for a “public safety” purpose.

Scanlon said the city and the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency have no plans to call in the loan. He said Green had exceeded his hiring and job retention requirements and the city would not further “penalize” him by forcing him to pay back the money.

“I don’t see a need to do that,” Scanlon told Investigative Post on Friday. 

“The two-year [requirement] is between the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency and Stuart Green, who I believe has done everything within his power to try and make sure this store was successful, so I’m not going to penalize him for that.”

Deputy Mayor Brian Gould said a deal for the city to lease the store should be inked by the end of the year.

Although he has an outstanding mortgage through Evans Bank, Green owns the building his business operated in. It’s not clear how much the city will pay Green to lease the space.

“I can tell you that a public use has been identified and we are working diligently to finalize lease terms and to ensure that this location continues to serve as an essential part of this neighborhood,” Scanlon told reporters.

It is also not clear if Green will have to pay back a $500,000 loan he received last year from developer Ciminelli Real Estate. A spokesperson for the company did not return a request for comment Friday. Ciminelli originally constructed the Braymiller Market store before selling it to Green for $7 million.

The closure, which comes a little more than three years after the store’s 2021 opening, marks an unceremonious end for a business that has struggled since at least the spring of 2022. Records obtained by Investigative Post showed that as early as the spring of 2022 Braymiller Market was losing $32,000 per month on average. 

Additional records showed that as of March, business had improved but the store was still losing $23,000 a month on average.

Those losses resulted in Green falling behind on mortgage payments to Evans Bank, payments to vendors and his city tax payments. In October, the Erie County Industrial Development Agency threatened to revoke his property tax break after he was months late on one of his twice-a-year payments. It was at least the third time Green had been months late on one of those payments.

Green paid the $8,119 bill just hours before IDA officials began preparing documents to revoke the tax break.

Green illustrated his financial struggles last year in an email to city officials while he awaited the bailout loan to hit his bank account.

“How is it going? What can I do?” he wrote in September to Lisa Hicks, the city’s director of development. “My vendors are very upset and I’d like to give them an update. What’s your best estimate on funding?”

The $561,000 bailout did not go very far for the struggling business, records showed. When a BURA official examined Braymiller’s books over the summer, they found that $170,000 had gone to pay off wholesalers and other creditors. Much of the rest of the money went to payroll. Green had $45,000 of the money on hand at the end of March, they reported. 

Scanlon on Friday blamed the pandemic for the failure of Braymiller Market and said, but for that, City Hall’s vision for a downtown grocery store could have worked.

“It’s a perfect storm of circumstances that has led to this,” he said. “It’s nothing that Mr. Green did, nothing the employees did here.”

Scanlon also defended the loan granted to Green, arguing that Common Council members used it to get additional grant funding for other small businesses around the city. Last year, when former Mayor Byron Brown’s administration proposed the bailout, Council members initially rejected it. They only agreed to approve it once Brown made $3.5 million, or $389,000 per Council district, available to other small businesses. 

He said Friday that 236 businesses have benefited from that funding.

The total funding package, Scanlon said, helped “ensure we had a grocery store in downtown Buffalo [and that] we were able to turn that into $3.5 million for other small businesses across the city.”

Scanlon and other officials Friday said they felt badly for the 36 Braymiller Market employees who would lose their jobs.

“I don’t think this is a decision that’s entered into lightly by the city, by BURA, by Mr. Green,” the acting mayor said. “No one wants to have 36 families without a paycheck during the holiday season.”

Other city officials Friday said they were upset to see the store close. 

“I’ll be honest with you, I’m pissed that this is where we are,” Council Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope said. 

Green on Friday refused to answer questions from reporters but gave a brief statement.

“We’ve done our best to provide this amenity to the downtown and the surrounding areas,” he said. “When we began this project, we thought we had the timing right with the growth of the central business district.”

Changes to the “business climate,” he said, namely the COVID-19 pandemic, resulted in fewer residents, workers and shoppers downtown, causing the grocery store and wholesale business to struggle. City officials estimate between 20,000 and 30,000 fewer people step foot in downtown each day compared to before the pandemic. 

As downtown continues to rebound, he said, “the critical mass needed to support a grocery store will become apparent.” 

Gould, the deputy mayor, explained that the city wouldn’t attempt to claw back the money in part because the funds would have to be sent to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Former Common Council President Darius Pridgen, on his weekly radio show Friday, said he wasn’t surprised to see Braymiller Market close. 

“The model failed,” he told his WUFO audience. 

Pridgen last year initially led the charge to block the funding for the store, only backing down — “biting my tongue and my tongue bleeding,” he said — because the deal came with additional small business support. 

He said he didn’t buy arguments made by Brown’s administration that the funding would keep the store open.

“I do respectfully say I thank them for taking a chance on the City of Buffalo,” Pridgen said. “But to me, this was not a good business deal. It wasn’t a good model.”

J. Dale Shoemaker