Buffalo Mayor Chris Scanlon: A political profile

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Editor’s note: This is the first of three stories on Buffalo’s acting mayor, Chris Scanlon. Today’s political profile will be followed by a story Wednesday on his intentions dealing with the city’s fiscal woes and a piece Thursday on the dilemma he faces with the police and fire departments.

Chris Scanlon’s public service career — from winning the Common Council’s South District seat in 2012 to his ascension to the mayor’s office in October — is a history of political dealmaking.

Little wonder. Public service and political dealmaking have been a family specialty for 50 years.

Buffalo’s acting mayor is the second-youngest of seven children of the late John P. Scanlon, who, like many natives of the city’s Old First Ward, carried a nickname with him his entire life. “Scanoots,” as he was known, ran Jimmy Griffin’s legendary South Buffalo political machine, parceling out patronage jobs and demanding fealty in return.

When Scanoots died in April 2022 at the age of 83, all but one of his children was on the city payroll: Brian and Patrick as firefighters, Michael and John in the Department of Public Works, Kara as a police dispatcher, and Chris in his 10th year on the Council. 

Another son, Mark — who died in a hunting accident in November — was a sergeant in the Erie County Sheriff’s Jail Management Division. Chris Scanlon’s wife, Katie, has been employed as the city’s bingo inspector since 2019. 

That’s just immediate family. The roster doesn’t begin to describe the acting mayor’s extensive network of cousins and in-laws — and their cousins, and their in-laws — many of whom draw public paychecks and are integral to Scanlon’s political base of support.

In that and other regards, Chris Scanlon is a South Buffalo archetype, through and through. He attended St. Thomas Aquinas grade school on Abbott Road and graduated from Bishop Timon High School, just a few blocks from the family’s house on Cumberland Avenue. He got a two-year business degree from Erie Community College. In his 20s, he worked for UPS and a Jeep dealership. He managed bars, including Colter Bay in Allentown.

Scanlon might have continued in the bar and restaurant business or some other private-sector career. But in March 2012, opportunity knocked.

That month then-South District Common Council Member Mickey Kearns won a special election for a state Assembly seat left vacant when Mark Schroeder became Buffalo comptroller. 

With Kearns bound for Albany, the rest of the Council was charged with choosing a successor. There were 11 applicants. Kearns at first tried to engineer the appointment for his legislative aide, Matthew Fisher, but couldn’t wrangle the votes. As the process dragged on into a second month, lawmakers solicited more applications. 

Scanlon, then 30, joined the mix. And a deal was struck.

With the support of Mayor Byron Brown and his allies on the Council, Scanlon won the seat in a 5-to-3 vote. To satisfy Kearns, he agreed to keep Fisher on staff. A week later, then Common Council President Rich Fontana made Scanlon chair of the Finance Committee, stripping the post and its $1,000 stipend from then Delaware District Council Member Mike LoCurto.

David Franczyk, then Fillmore District’s representative, said at the time that Scanlon’s appointment was an effort by the mayor’s allies, including Fontana, to add a sixth vote to their Council majority. Making “a freshman councilman” finance chair was part of the bargain, he said.

“I just have to say that I see this as a pandering, political stunt,” Franczyk said on the Council floor, according to The Buffalo News.

“The nepotism is blinding,” Pat Burke, a rival for the appointment, told the weekly newspaper Artvoice at the time. “When I met with the Council members individually, some in the majority wanted assurance that I would vote in step with them, which I of course refused to do. Makes me wonder what Chris promised to do for them.”

Scanlon that September handily won a Democratic primary against three of his competitors for the vacancy appointment, including Burke, who later became an Erie County legislator and now serves in the state Assembly. That November Scanlon won the general election to finish the balance of Kearns’s term. 

He’s been reelected three times since — in 2015, 2019 and 2023 — with no opposition. In 2014, when Darius Pridgen became Council president, Scanlon was elected president pro tempore — a leadership role he held until he won the Council presidency last January, setting himself up to become acting mayor when Brown resigned in October.

Career in Council

Scanlon, now 43, was often characterized as a reliable vote for whatever the Brown administration wanted. His legislative record suggests that’s largely true, though other loyalties, particularly to the police and fire unions, often took precedence. 

His office provided Investigative Post with a list of bills and resolutions Scanlon sponsored or co-sponsored between 2016 and last year. There were 102 items on the list, covering a broad swath of issues. At least a quarter of them included proposed hikes in fees and fines.

In 2016, he called for uniform, citywide code enforcement for corner delis and increases in fines for violations.

In 2018, he sponsored a resolution seeking state permission for a trial run of the school zone speed camera program, a Brown administration initiative to bolster revenues. The program proved hugely unpopular when rolled out in 2020 and drew litigation. Lawmakers canceled it the following year.

Also in 2018, he introduced a measure that added 13 new fees for the Traffic Violations Agency to impose and collect — another Brown administration effort to raise money. The fees would “add at least $100 to virtually all traffic cases,” Investigative Post reported at the time. Those costs disproportionately affected poor people of color, community advocates argued, and led to license and registration suspensions that cost them even more. The state Legislature in 2020 curtailed the license suspensions. Scanlon and other city lawmakers sponsored a resolution the same year to rescind the new fees and penalties.

He also advocated changes to the city’s code of ethics to unseat board members who were involved in lawsuits against the city. He promoted reforms to policies governing the towing and impoundment of vehicles. 

He supported the creation of a uniform citywide community benefits agreement for developers, with a focus on hiring and wage requirements. The resolution was adopted but never resulted in legislation. Most recently, he called for the city to consider establishing its own ambulance service, in response to complaints about the cost and quality of service provided by the private company the city contracts with.

Throughout, Scanlon has been a reliable ally to the city’s police and fire unions. He advocated for money for new vehicles for both departments, as well as other equipment, including AR-15s for cops “in case of a potential terrorist attack.” 

He supported state legislation that would have bolstered retirement benefits for two Buffalo cops, and a similar measure for a city firefighter. Gov. Andrew Cuomo vetoed both bills.

When demonstrators protested the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Scanlon wrote a column for The Buffalo News defending law enforcement and chiding local elected officials who joined in nationwide calls for disciplinary reforms.

“Exactly when did we begin treating criminals better than our men and women in blue?” he wrote.

In 2020, he and Delaware District Councilman Joel Feroleto urged the state Legislature to reconsider the bail reform laws that had just gone into effect. 

That was for Scanlon a slow year, in which he sponsored 10 pieces of legislation — as opposed to 18 the prior year and 24 the year before that. By then he and Feroleto, along with the North District’s Joe Golombek and Masten’s Ulysees Wingo, had slipped into a de facto minority, frequently outvoted by Pridgen and the other four members, who were frequently at odds with the Brown administration.

In 2021, Brown lost the Democratic primary to India Walton. Scanlon — in concert with his allies in the police and fire unions — was instrumental in organizing and mobilizing donors, organizations and voters in support of the four-term incumbent’s write-in general election campaign. 

South Buffalo carried Brown to victory that November, providing 20 percent of the incumbent’s vote total — more than any other Council district. Scanlon was no longer a back-bencher. He was a political force.

How the Council presidency was won

Pridgen announced in 2022 that he would not seek a fourth term the following year, which opened up the Ellicott District seat and the Council presidency. 

The Council presidency — a powerful position in its own right — became even more critical as it became evident that Brown was looking for another job and might not finish his fifth term. Brown had angled for the presidency of SUNY Buffalo State. He’d floated his name as a candidate to succeed U.S. Rep. Brian Higgins. The rumor mill was churning with jobs, and rumors of jobs, Brown might be seeking.

If Brown resigned, the Council president would become acting mayor, an enviable position from which to run for a full term.

Council elections in 2023 brought two new faces to the Council: Ellicott’s Leah Halton-Pope, a top advisor to Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes, and Masten’s Zeneta Everhart, an aide to then state Sen. Tim Kennedy. Peoples-Stokes and Kennedy were Brown’s political allies, and thus Scanlon’s, and their victories were wins for the mayor. 

Two candidates for Council president emerged from what had been the majority caucus: Niagara’s David Rivera and Fillmore’s Mitch Nowakowski. Rivera believed he had five votes, possibly six, but failed to nail them down. Scanlon scooped up Nowakowski and Lovejoy’s Brian Bollman from the majority coalition, along with Halton-Pope and Everhart, with promises of leadership positions and committee chairs.

When the vote came in early January, even Rivera voted for Scanlon, as a show of unity. Only the University District’s Rasheed Wyatt voted no. 

About the same time, Investigative Post reported that Brown was looking at the besieged Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp. as a possible exit ramp. By summer, the rumor was confirmed — Brown was a candidate for the job, and Scanlon was no longer just Council president. He was the mayor-in-waiting. 

The acting mayor

Brown was offered the OTB job in September and stepped down in October to take it. Scanlon, as Council president, became acting mayor, per the city charter. Because Brown left office too late in the year for a special election to be held in November, Scanlon will continue in the role through the end of this year — 14 months in total. He has not yet declared if he will run for a full term in this year’s elections.

His tenure began with pomp and circumstance. 

His Nov. 19 ceremonial swearing-in at the Buffalo Niagara Convention Center featured a police honor guard, a high school choir and an audience comprising hundreds of city employees, elected officials, business people and union leaders.

The two months since have been trial by fire.

Braymiller Market — a centerpiece of the Brown administration’s efforts to revitalize downtown — closed, leaving Scanlon to clean up the mess. Questions arose about the city water board’s use of $11 million in federal pandemic aid. The city’s already precarious finances grew worse. Scanlon’s administration drew flak for following his predecessor’s lead in diverting federal pandemic relief from community groups to the city’s general fund to address deficits.

Back in August — two months before Brown stepped down to take the job with OTB  — Investigative Post asked Scanlon why he wanted to be mayor, given the city’s seemingly intractable problems. Scanlon said he wanted the job because it was hard. 

In an hour-long interview with Investigative Post last month, Scanlon gave the same answer.

“I love it,” Scanlon said. “I feel like we’re going to be able to go on the offensive as an administration and do the things we need to get done.”

“That’s what’s got me excited about coming in here every day — the sense of urgency I see from the staff, everyone working down here trying to get things done as quickly as possible. That’s what I love about it.”

Tomorrow: Scanlon’s approach to dealing with the city’s fiscal woes.  

Geoff Kelly