A Buffalo mayoral poll, plus city budget news

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There was a poll out in the field last week gauging Buffalo voters’ opinions of two Democratic candidates for mayor and the campaign messages they’ve been testing out against one another.

I took the survey on my landline at home last Tuesday evening. I took what felt like an abbreviated version of the same poll by text the next day.

Six Democrats have qualified to run in the June primary, but the poll focused squarely on two of them: Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon and state Sen. Sean Ryan, who has the Democratic endorsement for the June primary.

Two Democrats on the ballot — University District Council Member Rasheed Wyatt and former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield — were named but treated as after-thoughts. Two others, business owner Michael Gainer and former Assembly staffer Anthony Tyson Thompson, were left out entirely.

The poll started with some baseline questions: How likely are you to vote in the mayoral elections this year? How important are politics to you? What do you think of Byron Brown, the former mayor? How about Gov. Kathy Hochul? How about Scanlon and Ryan?

If the Democratic primary were held today, who’s your pick: Ryan, Scanlon, Whitfield or Wyatt?

The survey asked how you to rate the job Scanlon has been doing since he became acting mayor in October, when Brown resigned to take a high-paying job as head of Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp. It asked  you to score your priorities for the next mayor on a scale of 1 to 10: fighting crime, creating affordable housing, resisting the Trump administration, improving quality of life, etc.

And then the message-testing begins.

First, the poll presented statements describing each candidate more or less as they describe themselves in their campaign literature. The statements describing Wyatt and Whitfield were brief; those describing Ryan and Scanlon were twice as long.

Next came a serious of assertions about Scanlon attributed to unnamed supporters and detractors.

Scanlon supporters say he’s crafted a balanced budget and a long-term financial plan to stave off the city’s budget crisis, according to the survey. He’s creating jobs, supporting small businesses, giving police the tools they need to fight crime, taking on absentee slumlords.

All the things Scanlon says about himself, in other words.

Next came the digs from Scanlon’s putative opponents.

They say developer Carl Paladino’s early endorsement of Scanlon is indicative he’s in bed with Republicans and Conservatives, according to the survey. He’s is part of a corrupt political machinery that delivers tax breaks and special favors to rich businesspeople. As a city lawmaker since 2012, Scanlon is complicit in driving the city to the edge of insolvency, and in the its failures to deliver basic services, these detractors claim.

These are the same slings and arrows Ryan’s campaign aims at Scanlon. The survey seemed designed to determine whether they’ve been hitting the target.

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Next, it’s Ryan’s turn, but the senator didn’t get any accolades — just attacks.

Detractors says Ryan is playing politics with the city’s fiscal health by blocking Scanlon’s initiatives in Albany, according to the survey. His campaign is floating on a sea of money from out-of-town special interests. He’s killing new housing development by opposing incentives for developers. He’s an India Walton-supporting, police-defunding, left-wing ideologue.

Or words to that effect.

From time to time, the survey asked again, after hearing these claims, how you felt about the candidates and who you’d vote for if the primary were held today.

It closed by asking your age, your race, and where on the liberal-to-conservative spectrum you’d situate yourself.

The final query: Do you identify yourself as a socialist?

I’m told the poll was commissioned by the Scanlon camp. Its conclusions would be useful to any on the six Democrats currently qualified for the primary. I’d like to see the numbers on that closing question.

Poloncarz, Ryan on Buffalo budget

The Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority — the financial watchdog imposed by the State of New York in the wake of the city’s last big fiscal crisis, more than 20 years ago — has a new member: state Civil Service Commissioner Tim Hogues.

Hogues served one term on the Erie County Legislature, after which he worked for the county’s senior services department, then as commissioner of personnel. Hochul made him civil service commissioner in 2022. She appointed him to the BFSA last week.

That brings the control board to six members. It’s supposed to have nine. It’s scheduled to meet at 1 p.m. today — Monday, April 28 — to review Scanlon’s proposed annual budget and four-year financial plan.

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz, who is an ex officio member of the control board, thinks the city might need to borrow its way out of the current fiscal crisis, in order the spread the pain of necessary tax increases over many years.

On Friday, in anticipation of Monday’s control board meeting, Poloncarz sent the BFSA’s executive director a letter enumerating the “serious issues” he and others see in the acting mayor’s spending plan.

Poloncarz’s concerns are similar to those raised by columnist Ken Kruly (and by me) when the plan was first released three weeks ago: Scanlon’s revenue assumptions are risky, especially his reliance on the tens of millions from the sale of city-owned parking facilities. Overtime costs seem woefully underbudgeted, especially given administration’s “soft hiring freeze.”

There’s much more to chew on in Poloncarz’s letter. It’s worth reading, especially for his analysis of creating a parking authority to take ownership of the city’s ramps, as well as the parallels he draws to county’s budget crises of two decades ago.

Poloncarz concludes by suggesting the city might need to consider deficit borrowing — one-year bonds to plug the gap between revenues and expenses — while it gradually brings its budgets into balance. He also suggests the control board could do some longer-term borrowing on behalf of the city, “to amortize the budget shortfalls while implementing responsible revenue increases with successive property tax increase to make up for the many years of zero or minimal tax levy growth under the previous mayor.”

How “minimal” was the city’s tax levy growth under Byron Brown? Buffalo Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams answers that question in her review of Scanlon’s proposed budget, released on Thursday.

Miller-Williams sees the same issues as Poloncarz: “elements of unsubstantiated fiscal planning, including overreliance on uncertain revenue sources and under-budgeted appropriations ,” she writes.

This data from the comptroller’s analysis jumped out at me: The proposed property tax levy is $41.2 million more than it was in 2012. According to the comptroller, that represents an average annual increase of 2.1 percent — lower than the rate of inflation.

Over that same period, the city’s budgeted expenses increased by nearly $160 million — an average annual increase of 13.5 percent.

Ryan, Scanlon’s rival in the June Democratic primary, agrees with Poloncarz. The state senator over the weekend announced he’d introduce legislation permitting the control board to issue bonds over the next four years to keep the city solvent, while its elected officials work to correct the stubborn structural imbalances between expenses and revenues.

The Common Council will hold a public hearing on the budget at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 29.

What I’m reading

• The Buffalo News’s Justin Sondel reports that Buffalo mayoral candidate Michael Gainer survived a challenge to his nominating petition, though he may also be compelled to defend his signatures in court. Betty Jean Grant, who’d hoped to run in the Democratic primary for the Erie County Legislature seat she used to occupy, is unlikely to make the ballot. Both candidates are collecting signatures to create an independent line on the November ballot — the Restore Buffalo party.
• The News’s Natalie Brophy reports that West Seneca elected officials just filled a vacancy on the town court with an attorney less than three years out of law school. She works for the law firm headed by Ralph Lorigo, chair of the Erie County Conservative Party.
• NPR last week reported customs and immigration officials have detained and held 213 people, including families with children, at Detroit’s Ambassador Bridge to Canada since the beginning of the year. At least 90 percent of the detainees “made a wrong turn and drove onto the bridge by accident,” according to NPR.  We reported at the beginning of the month that detainees are being held in cells at local bridge crossings to Canada, too, some of them for as long as two weeks.
• Women and non-white people really think the country is heading in the wrong direction under Donald Trump, according to a new Siena College/New York Times poll. Two-thirds of respondents agreed “chaotic” is a good word to describe the past four months.
• Trump issued an executive order aimed at blocking states from restricting or penalizing fossil fuel pollution — like the law New York passed last year that would charge big fossil fuel companies $3 billion per year to mitigate damages attributed to climate change. New York Focus talked to a legal expert who says Trump’s order amounts to political posturing with “no legal basis” a less chance of success.
• A reader sent this piece from The Lever, which posits that some Republican elected officials are defecting from the party’s decades-old consensus that all tax cuts are good. Some even argue that the rich should pay more taxes than they do now. The piece cites a Morning Consult report that found 70 percent of GOP voters think so, too.