BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Optimism Bias, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Self-Serving Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 15.3% saturation with 293 hits. Analysis detected 1,654 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,919 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 25% and a BS Rank of 16% (24,012 of 28,281 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 84.90% of the article peer group.
Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan.
Photo: Joshua Thermidor.
Editor’s note: This is the first of two stories based on an in-depth interview with Mayor Sean Ryan.
Sean Ryan’s seven-month tenure as mayor of Buffalo has been, at turns, refreshing and frustrating, hopeful and bewildering, celebratory and contentious.
To hear Ryan tell it, he and his staff — or any person paying attention to city affairs — might run that gamut in a single afternoon.
“There’s going to be good days where you want to celebrate, but there’s going to be bad days where you can’t go hide,” Ryan told Investigate Post in a recent interview.
Let’s start with some of the rough patches:
Since January, Ryan has weathered criticism for installing four deputy mayors, each making $200,000 per year, where previously there were two making three-quarters that salary.
He also raised salaries for key personnel, including the police commissioner.
Critics considered those moves extravagant for a city in fiscal crisis.
The administration has insisted the costs are balanced by the elimination of politically appointed job titles that proliferated under 19 years of Byron Brown’s stewardship, but the optics have given detractors an evergreen line of attack.
Ryan’s relationship with the police union, which last year endorsed his opponents in both the Democratic primary and the general election, has grown even more sour in recent months.
A rash of violence over the July 4 weekend gave the union ammunition in its efforts to leverage public opinion against the administration and force the city to the bargaining table for a new contract.
Ryan, as he seeks to restructure city government, at times has failed to communicate his intentions clearly.
The Buffalo Arts Commission was essentially disbanded , for example, with little explanation beforehand about the administration’s plans to maintain and support public arts initiatives going forward.
Common Council members — particularly those at political odds with Ryan — have griped about the mayor’s failures to share information, as well.
There’s good to balance the negative as well:
The administration right away, in January, pleased progressive groups that endorsed his candidacy by signing an executive order banning cooperation between police and other city departments with federal immigration authorities.
While the administration suffered some self-inflicted communications failures — Ryan prematurely announcing the scope of the tax increase he was contemplating, for example, or promising a July 4 fireworks display that didn’t materialize — city government has become far more transparent than it was previously.
Freedom of Information requests are, with rare exceptions, acknowledged and fulfilled.
City officials, high-ranking and low, have far more latitude to speak to reporters and the public.
Most critically, according to Ryan, his administration has taken big, difficult steps toward correcting the city’s structural budget imbalances.
Over the last 15 years the city used nearly $300 million in savings and federal pandemic relief funds used to plug deficits — to say nothing of the costs of deferred maintenance on roadways, bridges, parks and community centers, and the elimination of programs to benefit youth and senior citizens.
The biggest, most difficult step was a 19 percent increase in the property tax levy.
Ryan last week counted the adoption of the 2026-2027 budget as his administration’s biggest victory so far.
“People are reporting back that they have a real sense of optimism in the city that we’re no longer digging ourselves into a hole,” he said.
“That we’re going to come out of this and we’re going to be stronger.”
Biggest win: “an honest budget”
Ryan got most of what he wanted from budget negotiations with the Common Council in the spring.
He proposed a 25 percent increase in the property tax levy, arguing that the city’s chronic budget deficits were largely the result of Brown’s failure to raise taxes to keep pace with inflation and the rising costs of retirement and health insurance benefits.
That position has been endorsed by the city’s control board and the state comptroller.
But city lawmakers, including some of his allies on the Common Council, felt sandbagged by the size of the increase.
Three members — Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope of the Ellicott District, Masten District’s Zeneta Everhart, and the North District’s Joe Golombek — tried to slash the increase to 9 percent with a package of spending cuts so drastic and hastily assembled that they drove other lawmakers toward Ryan’s proposal.
Ryan settled for a 19 percent increase in the tax levy without any big cuts to the spending plan he proposed.
That was a big victory, though it created ill will among the Council members who’d been politically outmaneuvered.
Ryan last week said the budget will lead to “generational improvements” in infrastructure, as well as better services.
He ticked off a list of meat-and-potato investments included in the budget:
Hot-patch equipment for street repairs, which he said would be arriving and out in neighborhoods this month.
New streetlights to replace hundreds of fallen or dysfunctional poles .
Six new snowplows and 10 new garbage trucks.
Materials and equipment city workers have lacked, ranging from vehicles to work clothing and safety gear.
Open city pools, with swimming instruction programs for youth and water aerobics for the elderly.
Soon, he said, pools will have furniture so parents have a place to sit while their kids swim.
Those investments are possible because the state provided substantial resources to balance both the current year’s budget, which began July 1, and the budget that ended June 30 — in total, a $70 million cash infusion.
The state also sent Western New York an extra $1 million last month for gun violence prevention programs, in response to shootings that plagued Buffalo and other cities over the July 4 weekend.
Most of that money will be spent in the city.
All that extra state cash represents a victory, too, according to Ryan.
“As I said throughout the campaign, Buffalo can’t go it alone,” he said.
Collaboration with Erie County government has greatly improved, too, he said, compared to previous administrations.
He noted that city crews this spring learned to use hot-patch machinery to fill potholes under the tutelage of county workers, using county equipment, on a stretch of Bailey Avenue, so that they could hit the ground running when the city’s own hot-patch equipment arrived.
County crews helped the city with plowing last winter, he said, and will do so again next winter.
The county helped identify and open a Code Blue shelter in the city, has advised the city on human resource policies, and provided a blueprint for trimming the cost of health insurance benefits for employees.
“I can’t thank [Erie County Executive] Mark Poloncarz enough,” Ryan said.
“They are there — waiting, ready, willing, and able to help us.”
Ryan’s four-year financial plan calls for further increases in the tax levy — nine percent next year, and five percent in each of the two years after that.
He said he’s confident that residents will recognize the value for their money.
“This budget sets us up to deliver basic deliverables to the people of the City of Buffalo,” he said.
“Snow-plowing that’s rational and works.
Pothole plans.
We got our pools opened this summer.
That’s because of our budget.”
Biggest frustration: a ghost ship of a government
Ryan frequently talks about his astonishment at the dysfunctions he and his transition team discovered last winter while preparing to take the reins.
In a December interview with Investigative Post , Ryan described City Hall as “hollowed out” by hiring freezes, lack of investment and a demoralized workforce.
The unpleasant revelations continue.
He noted last week — as he has done before — that the city collects only about 7 percent of the fines and fees it issues.
In the case of traffic and parking fines, that’s in part because the city agency that processes those tickets uses software that’s been obsolete for a dozen years.
Those computers can’t communicate with the state DMV’s computers, which prevents the state from suspending registrations for unpaid tickets issued by the city.
Without the threat of consequences, Ryan said, people don’t pay.
He said the same holds true for property taxes.
The city hasn’t held a tax foreclosure auction since 2019.
As a result, out-of-town owners of rental properties know they can skip payment with no repercussions.
The remedies are simple, he said: Update the city’s computer systems and restore the annual tax foreclosure auctions.
Ryan said his administration is doing both and expects new revenue to flow as a result.
Last week, he had a new complaint to share: a lack of written policies governing working conditions and requirements for city employees.
“There’s no employee handbook,” he said.
“We have 3,000 people in the workforce, and there’s no employee manual.”
As a result, he said, the city had no policy in place to determine when it was too cold last winter to send sanitation workers out to collect garbage.
When smoke from Canadian wildfires turned the skies orange in July, there was no policy governing whether city employees should be permitted to work outdoors.
There’s no policy on closing pools in the event of lightning.
“The only policy we had written was you have to be 48 inches high to enter a pool,” he said.
“Every time we see a problem like this, it’s almost like we’re addressing something that’s never been addressed before.
There’s just nothing left behind that you can build off of.”
On the other hand, he’s been encouraged by the capability and willingness of city employees to do their jobs when given the green light to do so.
“You had a culture here where if you took an affirmative action and it went bad, that was on you, and you were punished.
If you took no action, then you would never be punished,” he said.
“So we’ve been really going out of our way to listen to the folks who have been around, listen to their frustrations about how their departments could work better.”
Missteps: learning the ways of City Hall
Relations frequently have been tense between the administration and the Council.
Golombek, the North District Council member, accused Ryan of lying to him about how the salaries of the four deputy mayors would be funded.
Halton-Pope has criticized administration officials for failing to share and discuss their plans with lawmakers before rolling them out publicly.
Ryan, who spent 14 years as a state legislator before he was elected mayor, said some of those rifts are the result of being new to City Hall.
“Every government has its own culture.
I’m still learning the culture of this building,” he said.
“You know, there’s a whole set of rules, and we’re following all the rules.
But there’s also a way of doing things, and we’re still learning the better way of doing things to conform with the culture.”
Many of his top staffers came from his state Senate office.
Three of the four deputy mayors are versed primarily in the workings of Erie County government.
The fourth has no experience in city government, either.
“So in some of my earlier communications with the Council, I was following the rules, but I didn’t really understand the culture.
The culture is to have more informal conversations, to give people a heads-up on things, you know, before they happen,” Ryan said.
“I’m getting a better handle on that culture.”
Tomorrow: Ryan talks about plans to improve policing, reactivate downtown and address the shortage of quality affordable housing.
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