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INDIA WALTON
Desperate to hold on to power, Buffalo’s business class has one last shot to stop India Walton.
On the outside looking in
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By Justin Sondel Portraits by Libby March
AFEW DAYS before the June 22 Buffalo Democratic mayoral primary, a low-grade panic had set in among the wealthy, the connected and the powerful in Buffalo.
Larry Quinn, who has spent decades working on development projects for billionaires and sports team owners, posted to Facebook a since-deleted, error-laden missive that warned of the looming danger of a potential victory for India Walton, the Working Families Party-backed candidate and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, over the city’s forever mayor, Byron Brown.
“Thé Buffalo election is being run and funded by the Alexandra Occasio Cortez crowd from Queens with an assist from Phil Rumore the diabolical destroyer of our public education system,” Quinn wrote, referring to the member of Congress and Buffalo Teachers Federation president, respectively. “WAKE UP PEOPLE. VOTE FOR BROWN BEFORE OR ON TUESDAY.”
A week before the election Quinn heard rumblings that things were not going well for the mayor, giving him cause to put up the post with the all caps treatment. Brown hadn’t run much of a campaign – despite having a deep war chest and a highly tuned fundraising apparatus. He refused to debate Walton before the primary. He hadn’t even uttered her name in the run up to the election. He held no campaign rallies or events. He went about his business as
Walton defeated the incumbent mayor in the Democratic primary, and thanks to his powerful allies, she’s preparing to face him again.
if there were no election.
The Brown camp commissioned two polls in early June and supporters had been calling around to sound the alarm bells. The mayor might have a problem.
Around the same time, money began to flow into the campaign at a fevered pace. In the final week of the race, a who’s who of Buffalo players began dumping contributions, many at or near the maximum allowed by state law, into Brown’s campaign fund. Quinn gave a grand. At least six members of the Jacobs family, owners of the global food services conglomerate Delaware North, gave $5,000 a piece. Bob Rich Jr., billionaire scion of the global frozen foods giant Rich Products, gave $10,000. In total, he raised nearly $120,000 in the week leading up to the election. The campaign spent more than $140,000 on radio, television and print advertising and campaign literature in a last-minute blitz, according to campaign finance reports.
It was all for naught. India Walton defeated the incumbent by 4.4 percentage points.
In the weeks after her victory, big-money names tried to brush her off with the same hubris that Brown showed during the primary. Rocco Termini, a well-known developer credited with leading the way on renovations of existing buildings around the city, claimed to know almost nothing about her.
“I wouldn’t know her if I saw her,” he told The Buffalo News a few days after her victory. “I’m willing to give everybody a chance, but I’ve never met her. Nobody even knows what she basically stands for.”
The day after Brown’s primary loss, developer Carl Paladino began organizing meetings to rally support for Brown, according to multiple media reports. The meetings never ended up happening, with some fearing being associated with Paladino, a Trump loyalist who has a history of racist and sexist comments.
On June 28, Brown said he would wage a write-in campaign in November’s general election, with some prominent Buffalo figures – former mayor and current lobbyist Anthony Masiello and Common Council Member Joseph Golombek among them – standing by his side. After a controversial ruling from U.S. District Court Judge John Sinatra, the brother of real estate developer and major Brown donor Nick Sinatra, it looked like he would have a line on the ballot under the newly formed Buffalo Party, despite submitting his petitions nearly three months after the deadline set by the state Legislature. Sinatra addressed the appearance of a conflict of interest by saying he considered the guidelines for recusal, spoke to another federal judge about the matter and he saw no reason to recuse himself. He ruled that the deadline was too early to allow for late-emerging candidates to take part and it limited the participation of voters, particularly Republicans and independents who cannot vote in the Democratic primary. However, Brown will not appear on the ballot after a state appellate court overturned that ruling and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay on the Sinatra decision, clearing the way for the Erie County Board of Elections to begin mailing ballots without Brown’s name on them. Walton’s camp cheered the outcomes, taking to Twitter and issuing a press release celebrating the victories.
“As of now, Byron Brown’s frivolous legal actions have failed, and we are calling on him to cease them once and for all, and let us get back to the issues,” Jesse Myerson, a campaign spokesperson, said in the release.
MOST PEOPLE IN the business community don’t want to say much of anything about the mayoral race these days. City & State reached out to 10 people in Buffalo’s business circles. Termini picked up, but quickly ended the conversation upon learning of the nature of the inquiry. There was radio silence from the others.
In fact, only Quinn was willing to speak to City & State.
Quinn has been in the business and development community for decades, helping to oversee the construction of the city’s downtown arena and teaming up with billionaire Tom Golisano to keep the Buffalo Sabres in town after the previous owners went bankrupt in the early 2000s.
Now semi-retired, he works as a consultant on development projects. He is currently helping another of the region’s billionaires, Rich, working in partnership with a media-focused investment group on a major film and television studio complex on the city’s West Side.
To him, the initial reaction from the business community to Walton’s victory is a result of the trust that Brown, who did not respond to requests for an interview, has built with developers and other business leaders throughout his time in office.
“I think what the mayor has shown is that he is a good collaborator in that movement toward reinvestment,” Quinn said.
He also believes that Walton’s lack of ex-
- India Walton
ecutive experience – she was the executive director of a community land trust, a role that Brown attempted to paint as insignificant and oversold by the Walton camp in their only scheduled debate earlier this month – does not make her a good fit as more private investment flows into the city.
“She’s a young person who has a certain amount of idealism,” Quinn said. “If she wants to voice it, that’s OK with me. I just don’t think, by the way, that she’s experienced enough to do this job and that’s a different matter.”
Walton said she has tried to reach out to developers and other business leaders and has met with several people. She stressed that she has no intentions to try to slow down development. But neither will she promote the use of tax breaks for developers while so many regular Buffalonians are struggling.
Under Brown’s watch, Buffalo has begun its transformation. A former federal court building that had become run down, a symbol of disinvestment in the city, is now a Marriott with restaurants and shops on the first floor. The University at Buffalo moved its medical school downtown. The state built the Northland Workforce Training Center on the city’s East Side, a massive job training facility that specializes in preparing people for advanced manufacturing gigs. And what used to be gravel parking lots and an old arena is now a children’s museum and a replica of the old canal system that doubles as a skating rink in the winter.
But high rates of deep poverty persist. Buffalo remains one of the most segregated and poor big cities in the nation. And the Brown administration spent down the city’s reserve fund to cover budget gaps in recent years and was facing a significant budget hole before the American Rescue Plan was passed.
“We are not bringing in enough revenue to support city services as it is,” Walton said. “So why is it that we give tax breaks to folks who don’t really need them and allowing development to continue to happen on the backs of good, hardworking, taxpaying Buffalonians?
SO WHAT in particular has caused so much concern among the business class?
Part of it seems to stem from Walton’s membership in the Democratic Socialists of America. Walton has not shied away from identifying herself as a socialist. But recently, including during the debate, she has tried to emphasize the Democratic portion of the group’s name, likely a reaction to Brown’s scare tactics, repeatedly referring to her as a radical.
In addition, she has made it clear that she will pursue more concessions from developers through community benefits agreements and other means in exchange for any kind of subsidy or benefit on a given project. She would seek to end some tax breaks entirely. She has said she will ask for the Common Council’s support in opting the city out of the lucrative 485-a state tax break, a program that allows developers to avoid property taxes for 12 years on projects that refurbish abandoned buildings.
And her proposal to raise property taxes has raised eyebrows among the city’s largest landholders. Brown, who has kept the tax rate flat throughout his tenure but did initiate a citywide reassessment of property values in 2019, has seen her plan as an opening, concentrating on the proposed tax increase during their recent debate.
Rob Galbraith, a senior researcher with the Public Accountability Initiative, a Buffalo-based nonprofit that analyzes the intersection of money and power in Buffalo and beyond, has been observing and writing about the relationship between Brown and the Buffalo business class for almost 10 years.
He said Walton represents a change in the status quo, and the removal of a mayor who has been more than friendly to business leaders.
“The developers are not going to be dictating the terms anymore,” Galbraith said, in the case of a Walton victory. “I think that is the sort of relationship dynamic that they’re used to.”
But Galbraith, who has donated to the Walton campaign and volunteered time phone-banking, said members of the business community also don’t want to overstep.
“They don’t want to be out there up until the moment of the election with their hair on fire saying that she’s a communist
Byron Brown has gone to work at 65 Niagara Square since being elected Buffalo’s mayor in 2005.
Walton says her policies are about fairness: asking developers to pay for public resources.
demon or something,” he said. “Because there’s a good chance that they’re going to have to work with her.”
There are plenty of ways the mayor can influence how development moves forward in the city. From sitting on the board of the Erie County Industrial Development Agency to putting people in leadership positions overseeing real estate and code enforcement, mayors have some levers to pull when negotiating the terms of real estate deals.
But those pressures are limited and whoever ends up in office next January won’t want to be seen as an executive that is anti-development or anti-progress.
Developers realize there are limits to what she can accomplish through the powers of the office, Galbraith said.
“They know that just because a socialist steps into an elected office, she doesn’t have the power to seize all the productive capital in Buffalo,” he said.
Walton, while maintaining she will be aggressive in her pursuit of better deals for taxpayers on development projects, also acknowledges that developers have a role to play in the city and that she is willing to work with them to try to find common ground.
“I’m not anti-development at all,” Walton said. “What I am is anti-giving away taxpayer dollars to further enrich the wealthy, when we are leaving communities behind.”
Still, Quinn said her aggressiveness in seeking more commitments and tax revenue from the business community has the potential to cool investment in a city that has seen a lot of change under Brown.
“Will people shut down projects because India Walton is elected mayor?” he said. “I don’t think so. I just think you won’t see that creativity and that interest in investing and you’ll never know that it’s not there because you’ll never see it. That’s the real danger.”
AT FIRST GLANCE, Walton’s goals for Buffalo and Brown’s priorities might look pretty similar – expanding housing opportunities and improving public safety. But the devil is in the details, and it often boils down to a difference in philosophy on how to get there. Brown has long been supportive of tax breaks and other incentives for developers in a way that Walton views as too generous and benefiting wealthy people at the expense of the city’s poor and middle classes.
“If folks want to develop private property with private money then go ahead and feel free to do that,” Walton said. “But anytime there is a subsidy expected from taxpayers and anytime there is an attempt to utilize city resources, aka public resources, then we’re going to make sure that the private serves the public good.”
Quinn views that stance as hostile to business. He said Brown had put people in place who would work with the business community to move things forward, a change from what he called the “bad old days” of previous administrations, when a project might be held up if the developer wasn’t in good standing with City Hall.
“What a businessperson, a developer, really wants is a professional, nonpolitical operation,” he said.
But Galbraith said the links between many in Buffalo’s business community and the Brown administration are undeniable.
He pointed to Nick Sinatra letting his real estate company’s property taxes fall more than $1 million behind without the city pursuing foreclosures as a prime example of one way businesspeople who donate to the Brown campaign get preferential treatment, as the city sometimes forecloses on residential properties that are just a few hundred dollars in arrears. The company has since caught up on its tax bills, but was allowed to continue doing business with the city and state.
And Brown has created an environment that, through the levers of power afforded by the office, is more permissive to big landlords than to residential property owners.
“All of that together can create and has created a system that has absolutely favored these larger, corporate landlord-type developers,” Galbraith said.
Walton and many of her supporters also pointed to Judge John Sinatra’s decision to not recuse himself in the case where he ruled that Brown would be allowed on the general election ballot. His brother Nick Sinatra has given at least $11,755 to Brown over the years, including $1,000 during this campaign. Brown has appeared in promotional videos supporting Nick Sinatra’s real estate company. And John Sinatra used to be a partner at Hodgson Russ, a major Buffalo law firm that contracts with and constantly has business before the city, and which has also donated to Brown’s campaign in the past.
Quinn took issue with the idea that wealthy people and developers were inherently corrupt and afforded undue influence in Brown’s City Hall.
“You’re automatically assuming that a guy is corrupt because he’s a developer,” Quinn said about John Sinatra’s ruling. “That’s not healthy.”
NOW, WITH JUST over a month left before the election, Walton will have to sell the idea that developers should be doing more to help alleviate the systemic poverty in some Buffalo neighborhoods to people outside of her base.
She has been constantly out door-knocking, trying to convince people in neighborhoods where Brown lawn signs have sprung up like tulips in April after her shocking victory over the longtime mayor.
As long as she can get in front of people and convince them to hear her out, Walton said she will often be successful at showing them that her ideas aren’t radical.
“When I can speak to people and I can explain to them that I know what the hell I’m talking about, they change their mind,” she said.
So in the coming weeks she will continue on pushing that message: that the city can have development and a better future for residents she said were left behind during Brown’s tenure.
“We’re not talking about Main Street Buffalo, our small businesses that circulate dollars in our communities,” Walton said. “We’re talking about large companies that largely extract from our community and exploit our workers by paying slave wages. And if someone is afraid that I’m going to come in and demand that people are paid a living wage and have a decent standard of living, then that’s their problem.” ■
– Rob Galbraith, a senior researcher with the Public Accountability Initiative
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CityAndStateNY.com The Buffalo Bills have an extremely dedicated fan base that includes elected officials at the very top of state government.
Paying those Buffalo bills
Buffalo loves its NFL team, maybe even enough to help pay for a $1.4 billion new stadium critics say isn’t necessary.
By Zach Williams
IDIBRI/WIKIPEDIA H OW MUCH DO Buffalonians love their professional football team? A lot judging by how fans risk life and limb to show their enthusiasm at Sunday tailgate parties outside Highmark Stadium. One particularly devoted member of the so-called Bills Mafia has even gotten drenched in ketchup and mustard before every game for decades. Many more people have made family traditions of watching games. Some elected officials say the Bills are so important to the Empire State that it is even worth investing somewhere around $1 billion to build them a new stadium in the Buffalo suburbs.
Public support for a proposed $1.4 billion facility could add a lot to the bottom line of the billionaire owners of the team. Terry and Kim Pegula bought the team in 2014 for that same amount after the much-celebrated longtime owner Ralph Wilson Jr. died. The team is now worth $2.27 billion with an 11% increase in value over the past year alone. Yet, a recent Forbes analysis shows the franchise remains the least valuable in the NFL. The Western New York city is much smaller than most other places with NFL teams, which limits how the Pegulas can profit from ticket sales, media deals and other partnerships. One way to even the playing field is for Erie County and New York state to pay as much for the new stadium as possible, the Bills owners argue. Otherwise, the team has reportedly threatened to move somewhere else like Austin, Texas. “Right now, the city of Buffalo and the state are going to have to decide if they want a team,” Jim Wilkinson, a spokesperson for Pegula Sports and Entertainment, which owns the Bills and the Buffalo Sabres of the NHL, said in August.
A professional sports team shaking down taxpayers for public funding for a stadium is nothing new, but the process is playing out a little differently in Buffalo compared to other cities. Arguments about the economic wisdom of investing public money into a private business have been beside the point as negotiations continue over the new stadium. Elected officials like Gov. Kathy Hochul and Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz have said their No. 1 goal is to keep the Bills in Buffalo because of reasons that go beyond optimum returns on pub-
Terry and Kim Pegula bought the Bills for $1.4 billion from Ralph Wilson Jr., the team’s legendary founder.
lic investments. These include an emotional attachment to the team that could ultimately cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
“It is something more than money,” Assembly Member Jonathan Rivera of Buffalo said in an interview. “We have an amazing sports history and sports culture here. And cities the size of Buffalo don’t often have two professional sports teams … it just goes into the story of what Buffalo is and (how) we punch above our weight class.”
Various media outlets like The Buffalo News have reported that the team wants the public to pay around $1.1 billion for a new stadium, though the exact details have not been made public. Wilkinson has denied the team wanted that amount specifically but would not say if its ask was higher or lower than $1.1 billion. Elected officials from the Buffalo area in any case appear willing to pay a significant chunk of that amount. “It certainly should not be 100%,” Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes told The Buffalo News in August.
The exact amount remains a matter of negotiation between the team, county and state, who struck a $130 million deal nearly a decade ago to renovate the current stadium.
The Bills want to build a new stadium on parking lot space they own across the street from the current stadium near the Buffalo suburb of Orchard Park before its lease on the county-owned facility runs out in 2023. A big question surrounding the $1.4 billion project is whether the team even needs a new stadium at all. “The stadium has a lot of problems,” Wilkinson told local TV station WKBW in August. “It’s 50 years old, and an independent engineering study says the upper deck is going to have to be replaced.” He added that repairs to the upper deck, plumbing, electrical systems and other parts of the stadium add up to about $1 billion.
A feasibility report commissioned by the team three years ago assessed conditions at Highmark Stadium and potential options for a new stadium and has guided the team’s approach to negotiations, the Investigative Post reported. The public release of that report could shine light on why or whether a $1.4 billion stadium is necessary. The only problem is that the team has refused to release it publicly, as have elected officials like Hochul who have access to it. They have claimed that is because the report concerns a matter of ongoing negotiations, though some independent experts disagree. “There have been FOIL requests made and the request was denied on the basis that releasing it would impair the ability to get a contract,” said Paul Wolf, an attorney and president of the New York Coalition for Open Government. “I think that’s a misapplication of the law. That exemption only applies if there’s a competitive process, (but) the only negotiations occurring are between Pegula and government officials” over the new stadium. He argues the report could be withheld if the state and county were dealing with multiple teams who were competing to build a single stadium. A Sept. 14 letter from the good-government group to the governor on this point remains unanswered, he added.
The economic arguments against publicly funded football stadiums are well established in academic journals and news reports. They do not create jobs as much as their champions suggest. Their value to economic growth is low compared to the huge amounts of money involved. Then there are the opportunity costs of how Erie County and the state could better invest money for the public good. Every city is different, of course, so what about when it comes to Buffalo? “Every dollar local leaders bet on the Bills rather than investing in core public services comes at a cost to those other long-term opportunities” reads one analysis from the Tax Policy Center. “Putting taxpayer dollars into higher-return public amenities could benefit Buffalo in ways a taxpayer-funded NFL team can’t.”
Having an NFL team (or hockey squad for that matter) does keep the city in the news – especially when it comes as close to winning a Super Bowl as the team did last year, but that does not mean elected officials are expecting any type of economic boom from supporting a new stadium. “There’s very little economic development to be gained by building a stadium of any sort,” state Sen. Sean Ryan of Buffalo, whose district includes the existing stadium, said in an interview. He said a downtown baseball field is a visible reminder of the lackluster economic growth surrounding stadiums. “There was one neighborhood bar across the street before the stadium was
built, and you fast forward two decades and there’s one neighborhood bar across the street,” he added. Supporting the Bills is evidently about more than money to fans who have stuck with the team in good seasons and bad.
Buffalo was once one of the largest and most important cities in the country. While it began losing that status long before the Bills were established in 1959, the presence of professional sports undoubtedly keeps the city in the national conversation, say fans like former Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello, who now works as a lobbyist. “Quality of life: Shea’s theater, a Buffalo zoo, the Buffalo Bills, the Buffalo Sabres, all of that creates a quality of life that makes it an attractive place to employers,” he said in an interview. “And then those people generate economic activity, their families, their disposable income … it’s hard to capture that in one study.” Assembly Member Pat Burke of Buffalo, whose district includes the stadium, has sponsored a bill that would require more transparency in negotiations over a new stadium, but he remains in support of funding one. It is just a matter of how much, he and a half dozen other local leaders told City & State. The team is a source of pride in the long-suffering Rust Belt city. “It’s obviously an emotional investment,” Burke said in an interview. “It’s not an economical one.” That creates an opening for the Pegulas whose love for Buffalo is more about dollars and cents.
The billionaire couple won a lot of goodwill when they bought the Bills and Sabres by vowing to do their best to keep the two teams in Western New York despite the economic disadvantages. Locals began referring to downtown – where the Sabres play – as “Pegulaville” and then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo even quipped that a statue should be erected in honor of the Pegulas. While there have been rumors of their willingness to relocate the team, they have reportedly taken no concrete actions to do so. They would need the approval of fellow NFL owners – who ultimately have to approve any plans for a new stadium – to ditch Buffalo anyway, and the NFL is clearly pushing for the Bills to stay where they are. “It’s time to get a new stadium done,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told reporters in August. “We can make sure the Bills are here and successful for many, many decades going forward.” But that all depends on the team, Erie County and the state hashing out a deal.
A representative for the governor and county executive declined to speak to the points raised by Wolf of the New York Coalition for Open Government about why the two elected officials wouldn’t release the Bills study and why a $1.4 billion stadium is the right way to go with any significant level of public investment. The Giants and Jets did not need that when they built a new facility in New Jersey for example. “The administration’s policy from the beginning has been to not discuss ongoing Bills/stadium negotiations with the media,” Peter Anderson, a spokesperson for Erie County Executive Poloncarz, said in an email. “The ultimate goal is to keep the Bills in Buffalo.” The county executive was in office during the last round of stadium negotiations in 2013 and wrote the book “Beyond the Xs and Os: Keeping the Bills in Buffalo” about his experiences. The details of a stadium deal are complicated, with a range of parties involved that stretch from local businesses to the NFL boardroom, Poloncarz wrote. Whatever he thinks about the economics of the deal, supporting the hometown team is a matter of political preservation. “I knew no matter what I accomplished, my administration would be measured by our ability to successfully complete a new lease transaction with the Buffalo Bills,” he wrote in his book. Representatives of the Buffalo Bills did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
Hochul has deep roots in Western New York as Erie County clerk, a member of Congress and statewide official. She makes a point of showing her loyalty to the team on Sundays. She has also made numerous statements about her support for a new stadium both before and after she became governor in August. Her administration’s refusal to release the report – or directly respond to the issues raised by Wolf in his letter to her – contrasts with recent promises to be fully transparent about the deal, which a spokesperson repeated in an email to City & State. The governor, however, has pushed back at suggestions that her administration was not being fully transparent or that the Bills would not be somehow worth the public investment. How much taxpayer money are the Buffalo Bills really worth? Is it really about something more than money? City & State asked Hochul at a Sept. 15 press conference at the Capitol. “We’re still in the fact-finding phase,” she said. “I will say right now there’s an emotional attachment, but that will not dictate the price tag or any involvement in the state of New York. But it’s real, you know, we love our team.” ■
