The Buffalo News continues its endorsements in 2021 election campaigns today, focusing on the race for Buffalo mayor. We urge all registered voters to cast their ballots, whomever they support. Next up: Five constitutional amendments.
What’s at stake in November’s mayoral election is the future of a city still finding its feet after decades of decline. What will it take to successfully guide a complex and sprawling city government with more than 3,000 workers and an annual budget of $535 million?
The question answers itself. Whatever criticisms anyone may have of Byron Brown, the Democratic incumbent is the only candidate with the skills, background and temperament to keep the city moving safely forward.
And while his challenger, Democratic nominee India Walton, is a captivating and thought-provoking candidate, those qualities can obscure the essential fact that this citizen activist is far out of her depth and that many of her proposals would set the city back. We have no doubt that she comes to the campaign with honorable intentions, but she lacks the managerial skill set needed to lead a city such as Buffalo. A mayor needs to be better prepared for the job.
People are also reading…
It’s not just her lack of experience, of course. A big part of the problem is where her priorities would take a city whose economic revival remains tentative. That would be true even if she had spent years on the Common Council; it’s even more important given her lack of relevant experience. It would be, in many ways, the municipal version of electing Donald Trump: expecting great things from an inexperienced and unqualified leader who is sometimes driven by grievances.
We came to similar conclusions before June’s Democratic primary, when we endorsed Brown, who had all but ignored Walton and then got steamrolled by her. With Brown running an aggressive write-in campaign, we committed to reconsidering our endorsement. But we came away even more convinced of the need to re-elect Brown, who knows what he is doing, and to turn back Walton, who doesn’t.
If that sounds harsh, consider the revelations of last week, when The News reported on the collapse of a low-income housing project led by Walton. It reveals in expensive microcosm the expanding dangers of putting an unqualified candidate into a powerful office.
In brief, the story documented, through emails sent at the time, that a $20 million plan to bring 50 affordable housing units to Buffalo’s Fruit Belt neighborhood collapsed, specifically because of the inexperience of Walton, then the executive director of the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust, and its former board chair, Zaid B. Islam.
An email from Walton’s successor at the Land Trust, Stephanie Simeon, to the director of Southern Tier Environments for Living in Dunkirk, spells it out.
“I believe it’s clear that the agreement signed by then Executive Director: India Walton and President Zaid Islam was premature due [to] their inexperience with complex housing projects of this scale,” Simeon wrote in the email. “Therefore we are asking to dissolve our agreement.”
It was a costly lesson for Southern Tier Environments for Living. “STEL invested a whole lot of resources,” said Divitta M. Alexander, an attorney and financial consultant who had been working with the organization. “It’s significant for an organization of that size, and to be wasted for those reasons flies in the face of this project being an accomplishment.”
If the lesson was significant for STEL, it would be disastrous for Buffalo. Walton lacked the know-how to manage a $20 million housing project, to the detriment of those who needed the shelter and of STEL, the Land Trust’s partner. What would happen to the city and its partners – read taxpayers – if she was mismanaging a $535 million budget that, in addition to responsibilities for housing, also funded streets, education, fire protection and, among many other complex and expensive responsibilities, policing.
Walton, not without cause, is critical of policing in Buffalo. Brown has been, too, as the reforms he instituted following the murder of George Floyd demonstrated. But Brown came at the task with a professional, managerial approach. Walton’s seems colored by grievance involving confrontations with Buffalo police. She plainly smarts over policing and in a recent meeting with The News editorial board, she reluctantly acknowledged that as mayor, she would seek to respond to some of these personal matters.
Although she has toned down her rhetoric since the June primary and has some worthy ideas about other police reforms (not including her unwise plan to drain $7.5 million from the police budget), the sense of grievance is inescapable. She and those who support her plans surely come by those complaints honestly but the approach is divisive. Buffalo shouldn’t want to go there, especially with Walton – a political rookie and failed manager – leading the charge.
Brown is far more likely to achieve important goals, in part because he knows how to do it. He has already achieved many valuable goals for the city and, just as important, hasn’t taken steps that would impede the city’s growth.
There is every reason to believe that Walton would. Consider her initial hostility to the state 485-a tax break, which is meant to encourage the adaptive reuse of vacant or underused commercial and industrial buildings. The exemption has been sometimes misused and needs to be revised, but it also makes otherwise unattainable projects affordable.
Walton didn’t understand the details of the program she criticized and, while she expressed a welcome willingness to be educated, she should know those nuances already. She showed similar unfamiliarity on the subject of charter schools, which she also criticized. Her lack of knowledge and experience is a threat. This isn’t running a land trust.
Brown has lowered city taxes, instituted a community policing plan, implemented law enforcement reforms, managed the fiscal crises of the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, led the city out from under the state control board and presided over the city’s first population growth in 70 years. There have been missteps, as there are with any mayor, but given the alternative, Buffalo cannot afford to let him go.
WRITE-IN VOTING: To vote for Brown, enter his name in the lower right-hand corner of the ballot, in the mayoral column and in the row designated for write-ins. Write clearly or use a stamp with Brown’s name on it.
• • •
What’s your opinion? Send it to us at lettertoeditor@buffnews.com. Letters should be a maximum of 300 words and must convey an opinion. The column does not print poetry, announcements of community events or thank you letters. A writer or household may appear only once every 30 days. All letters are subject to fact-checking and editing.
