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Weaponized Incompetence & Buffalo’s Financial Crisis, by Eri Alvarado
People keep talking about Buffalo’s $70 million deficit like it fell from the sky. As if the city suddenly woke up one morning and realized it was broke, as if deficits appear overnight, as if this is not the result of years of political games, wasteful spending, and a level of weaponized incompetence that should be considered criminal negligence. Deficits grow slowly, quietly, predictably and with the full knowledge of politicians who pretend to be shocked when the truth finally surfaces.
For more than 15 years, state leaders watched Buffalo’s structural problems deepen. Knowing the city was using temporary revenue patches to plug long-term holes. They saw the control board’s warnings, they saw rising personnel costs, declining reserves, insufficient municipal aid, and a city tax base too weak to sustain basic services, and instead of choosing responsibility, they chose optics.
While Buffalo’s financial crisis simmered in the background, New York State approved a $1.4 billion stadium subsidy for the Pegulas, the largest stadium subsidy in American history, to the richest sports owners in the country. With $600 million coming from the state, and $250 million from Erie County, this happened while the city at the heart of that region was already drowning financially.
How do you justify giving nearly a billion dollars in public funds to billionaires while your own city government is running on fumes? You don’t. You can’t. Not honestly, not ethically, and not without political incentives.
Then State Senator Sean Ryan, Governor Kathy Hochul, and every lawmaker who voted for that budget knew exactly what Buffalo’s books looked like, the financial data wasn’t a secret, the decay of the city was not hidden, the deficit didn’t magically appear after the stadium deal was signed. This was a crisis decade in the making, and yet when given the choice between stabilizing a working-class, majority-minority city… or handing a corporate welfare check to the ultra-rich, they chose the Pegulas.
This wasn’t the only time Albany decided to invest everywhere except the actual communities in crisis. They also approved more than $1 billion for the Kensington Expressway project. A massive capital build that looks good on paper and photographs well in campaign mailers but does nothing to address the actual financial survival of Buffalo’s neighborhoods, services, or infrastructure. It is a project now on hold, with $1.2 billion dollars at a standstill because it was a rushed approval.
What are the priorities of these politicians? It has become evident that it is not the welfare of people, communities, or cities. A city struggling to fund police, fire, sanitation, and basic operations, where families are dealing with rising costs, declining services, and decades-old underinvestment; where neighborhoods are still living with food deserts, crumbling sidewalks, aging housing stock, and where schools are under-resourced. In a city with a $70 million deficit, you don’t throw billions at concrete, you don’t subsidize billionaires, and you invest into the people.
But that would require political courage, something that is in short supply.
Politicians don’t avoid solving problems because they’re unaware, they avoid solving them because the problems benefit them. A struggling city gives them leverage, a crisis gives them political oxygen, a collapsing municipal structure gives them the opportunity to swoop in later and present themselves as the hero who “finally fixed it.”
It’s not leadership, it’s manipulation.
Politicians like Sean Ryan sat in Albany for over a decade, voting on budgets that kept Buffalo’s municipal aid flat while approving the largest discretionary capital spending packages in the region’s history. He championed the stadium deal, he supported the Kensington investment, he participated in every budget cycle that ignored Buffalo’s growing fiscal hole. And now, once he became mayor-elect, he suddenly found religion on fiscal responsibility.
Now he is in Albany to warn them that the city is “in dire straits,” that the crisis has been “brewing for 20 years.” NOW he says the city needs emergency intervention.
Where was that urgency before he decided to run the city? Where was that alarm while he was voting for billion-dollar wasteful projects? Where was that “honesty” when his seat was in Albany, not City Hall?
This kind of leadership isn’t accidental incompetence; it is strategic neglect. A pattern from the playbook, and a method of governing where the public is kept struggling, uninformed, and grateful for whatever crumbs they receive. This is what people mean when they talk about wasteful spending and weaponized incompetence. It is how politicians choose optics over obligation, and why our communities stay poor while corporations stay rich.
And until people confront the hypocrisy of leaders who knew the crisis was coming and helped fuel it anyway, nothing will change. Not the deficit, not the services, not the neighborhoods, not the political games. Our city deserved better than this. Our people deserved better than this. Yet we will continue finger pointing and being used as political pawns for those stunted by their thirst for unhinged power.
