Jan 16
2025
Scanlon’s police/fire dilemma
- Share on
Scanlon as a South District Council member before he became acting mayor in October.
Editor’s note: This is the final segment of a three-part series on Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon. Previous stories included a political profile and his approach to dealing with the city’s fiscal problems. Today’s report focuses on on his tight relations with the police and fire departments, whose costs he needs to rein in if the city is to balance its books.
Buffalo’s police and fire departments account for half the city’s workforce and nearly three-quarters of payroll expenses. Reining in their costs — by reducing overtime, cutting jobs, or both — is likely to be an essential part of solving the city’s financial crisis.
Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon has a tight and longstanding rapport with the unions representing the employees of both departments. As a city lawmaker, he was their advocate. They responded with endorsements and campaign donations. Together, they campaigned to help re-elect Byron Brown in 2021.
The members of both departments are “near and dear” to him, Scanlon told Investigative Post in an interview last month. His sister is a dispatcher for the police department. Two of his brothers are firefighters.
But Scanlon has a new job now, and he acknowledged the transition for South District representative to the city’s chief executive may strain those alliances.
“I understand the nature of the roles changing,” he told Investigative Post.
But he hasn’t turned his back on his old friends yet.
On Monday Scanlon accepted the resignation of Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. Multiple City Hall sources told Investigative Post the union pushed for the change. Dawn Kent, Gramaglia’s deputy commissioner for administration, resigned the next day.
Gramaglia was unpopular with union leaders, who groused about his management of the department from the moment then-Mayor Byron Brown appointed him commissioner in March 2022. They complained when Gramaglia disciplined officers for procedural failures, like neglecting to turn on body cameras. They accused him of trying to subvert the seniority system that dictates personnel assignments and promotions. They claimed the commissioner was “crushing morale” among the department’s rank-and-file.
Now, three months into Scanlon’s tenure, Gramaglia is gone.
Scanlon in a statement praised Gramaglia — on whose watch violent crime in the city dropped significantly — but said he wants to take the department “in a different direction.”
Contract talks forthcoming
As a legislator, Scanlon was supportive of the police department, advocating for money for new vehicles and other gear. He defended cops in response to calls for reforms to the way police are disciplined for misconduct. (“Exactly when did we begin treating criminals better than our men and women in blue?” he wrote in a Buffalo News column, after a 2014 police killing in Ferguson, Mo. that sparked nationwide protests.) He pushed Brown to use federal COVID relief funds to provide premium pay to officers who worked through the pandemic.
Now Scanlon — who became acting mayor in October when Brown stepped down to become head of the Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp. — is charged with negotiating a new contract with the police union, whose current agreement expires at the end of June.
“We’re talking 700, 800 people employed over there,” he said. “It’s a monster.”
The current contract, ratified by union members last January, added more than $2 million to the annual cost of the department, on top of $13 million in back pay an arbitration panel ordered the city pay to cops in 2022.
About the same time that contract expires, Scanlon and city lawmakers must finalize a budget for the coming year. The projected gap between revenues and expenses in that spending plan is “tens of millions of dollars,” according to Scanlon. That assessment is echoed by the city comptroller and the city’s state-imposed financial control board, which last summer said the city’s four-year spending plan relied on as much as $150 million in questionable revenue assumptions.
A key to closing those gaps will be reducing the cost of the police and fire departments — especially their overtime expenditures, which ran $22 million over budget in the last fiscal year.
The city paid cops $71.9 million in overtime pay over the past four years, according to the city comptroller. That’s an overrun of nearly 28 percent.
Scanlon said he has “one or two ideas” about reducing the cost of overtime, but — as with his ideas for new revenue streams — he preferred not to discuss them outside negotiations with the union.
“I want to see what we can do working together to make sure we are not harming those men and women, but also being fiscally responsible and not harming the other residents in the City of Buffalo,” Scanlon said.
The costs of misconduct
Settling police misconduct claims also has been a drag on city finances.
The city in 2023 had to borrow to pay a $43 million settlement, adding $10 million annually to the city’s debt service payments for five years.
In November the city agreed to pay another $10 million to settle police-related lawsuits, including $9 million to two men who spent decades in jail for a crime they said they didn’t commit.
Between 2015 and 2020, taxpayers doled out nearly $12 million to settle claims of personal injury and property damage caused by Buffalo cops.
Scanlon’s solution to police misconduct and its cost to taxpayers: more training.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroom“It all comes back to training,” he said. “You get into such certain situations, and human nature takes over. Your heart rate’s elevated, you're worked up a little bit. But you've got to have the training drilled into you to where you don't react that way.”
“The last thing I want to see are members of the Buffalo Police Department out in public, conducting themselves in a manner they shouldn't be,” he added.
Scanlon said one of his goals in negotiating a new contract would be convincing the union to agree to more training — without insisting its members get paid overtime to do it.
As of last July, the union had donated more than $5,000 to his campaign committee over the previous dozen years. Individual officers — including Gramaglia and the man Scanlon named as his successor, Acting Commissioner Alphonso Wright — donated thousands more.
John T. Evans, the union’s recently departed president, contributed $1,400.
Scanlon said he has a good relationship with the union’s new president, John Davidson, but that his past advocacy will carry him “only so far” as he seeks to tamp down costs.
A friend to fire, too
Buffalo’s fire union has been a patron of Scanlon’s political career, too. The union has donated $4,500 to his campaign committee since 2012, and — as with police — individual firefighters have contributed generously to the cause, too.
In turn, Scanlon acted as the union’s surest ally on the Council. He pushed the Brown administration to purchase new fire trucks after years of neglect had left the department’s aging fleet in a dangerous state of disrepair. He advocated successfully to use federal COVID relief funds to buy other apparatus and premium pay for firefighters who worked through the pandemic.
He frequently invited the former fire union president, Vincent Ventresca, to testify before the Council about the fire department’s needs and to air his grievances against Brown’s fire commissioner, William Renaldo.
The fire department accounted for 32 percent of city payroll expenses last year and 31 percent of its overtime costs. The city’s contract with its firefighters, ratified in 2018, expires this year. The current contract provided firefighters a series of raises but included cost-saving concessions, too. Renaldo at the time said it was a contract that provided financial stability, managerial flexibility and labor peace.
That peace was fleeting. In January 2023, in the wake of the December 2022 blizzard that killed dozens, Ventresca testified before the Council that Renaldo was lying when he told lawmakers that the age and condition of the department’s equipment did not prevent them from operating during the storm.
“I wish what the commissioner is telling you was true,” Ventresca told the Council.
There has been speculation for months, even before Scanlon took office in October, that he would fire Renaldo and replace him with Ventresca — a move that would please some of the fire union’s rank-and-file.
In any case, the city’s public safety departments continue to be a thorny budget problem for the city, no matter who’s mayor. Last year the fire department accounted for nearly 15 percent of the city’s overall budget, which is more than $500 million. Police accounted for more than 20 percent of the city’s spending.
More than one-third of the city’s budget went toward fringe benefits for current and retired employees, and fire and police personnel account for the lion’s share of that money, too. Retirement benefits are determined by wages, and wages are driven up by overtime. And over the last four years overtime in the two departments has run $52 million over budget.
“I think during the budget negotiations we have with police, fire, other unions — they’re all coming up soon — there's going to have to be conversations with them about how we can avoid some of the overtime costs,” Scanlon said.
“Listen, you're not going to avoid overtime,” he continued. “It's there. It's going to happen. Most of it's contractual, so there's no avoiding it. But we have to put some protocols in place to reduce that number somehow, because it is out of control.”
