Competence Costs Extra

Mayor Byron Brown, whose name everyone “wrote down”, has declared that city residents expecting their streets to be plowed sometime within the same decade as a snow event is really expensive. All this sturm und drang over “basic civic competence” and “bare minimum expectations for residency in a snowy climate” is something that Mayor Brown has listened to, taken to heart, and decided he’d treat with something not dissimilar to malicious compliance.

For years, the city’s snow plan consisted of clearing main roads, then secondary routes. After those were cleared, they would start snow removal on residential streets.

“That’s how it always used to be, even before I became mayor,” Brown said. “That was the standard city snow plan. But now, the public is saying, ‘We don’t want that. We want more than that. We don’t just want our main streets and our secondary streets opened up, but we simultaneously want our residential streets opened up.’”

Oh, you want your residential street plowed? LOL

the mayor warned that as extreme storms become more common, providing that level of services will most likely lead to an increase in property taxes – possibly as early as next year.

Basic city services cost extra is the bottom line. I am old enough to remember all of the disingenous clamor from city hacks and suburban Republicans over how Comrade India Walton would turn Buffalo into Pyongyang-on-the-Niagara. Instead, Mayor Brown, now in his wildly unfortunate eighteenth year of office, is basically issuing threats to the people who elected him, demanding that they pay up if they expect the city to do its job.

If the plan had previously been for the city to just ignore residential streets for random and undefined periods of time after a snow event, then it was no plan at all – something a dose of Waltonese socialism would have been good for. Remember in 2005 how Mayor Brown was elected as a fresh face who was going to make the city run like a business, on data and responsiveness? CitiStat and open hearings to improve services and processes? Now that Mayor Brown is in his 18th year of public office – as his tenure reaches the age of majority, FFS, we are instead left with the novelty of plowing side streets and this:

Brown and the Common Council have caught heat for using about half of the city’s $331 million in American Rescue Plan federal dollars for revenue replacement, mostly to fill budget gaps, instead of spending it to expand certain community-based programs, The News previously reported.

Buffalo officials plan to spend $172 million of the Covid-19 pandemic relief funds under the “revenue replacement” category, with about $160 million of that used to plug budget holes.

The mayor said funds to pay the $6.6 million storm tab are included in his most recent adopted budget.

“But going forward, one of the things that’s going to have a budget impact is we want to try to increase our budget for snow-fighting even more,” Brown said. “And so while this year we will absorb this with savings and other areas of the city budget, going forward, we want to increase the amount of money that we put in the budget for snow removal and addressing snowstorms.”

$331 million in free federal money could have been used to great effect to improve the lives of city residents in myriad needed ways. I’m sure any Joe Schmoe reading this could come up with ten ideas as to how to spend a fraction of that money to great civic effect. Instead, the city – known now for letting suspended workers stay on its payroll indefinitely without oversight – used half of it to plug its own budgetary holes, whereas the increased cost about which Mayor Brown is so exorcised represents 2% of that federal windfall.